it
in his manhood, once when, upon the request of his mother, he brought
a German manager with whom he went over the affairs of the estate. So
that he knew its condition and the relations the peasants sustained
toward the office, i. e., the landowner. Their relations toward the
office were such that they have always been in absolute dependence
upon it. Nekhludoff had already known it when as a student he
professed and preached the doctrines of Henry George, and in carrying
out which he had distributed his father's estate among the peasants.
True, after his military career, when he was spending twenty thousand
rubles a year, those doctrines ceased to be necessary to the life he
was leading, were forgotten, and not only did he not ask himself where
the money came from, but tried not to think of it. But the death of
his mother, the inheritance, and the necessity of taking care of his
property, i. e., his lands, again raised the question in his mind of
his relation to private ownership of land. A month before Nekhludoff
would have argued that he was powerless to change the existing order
of things; that he was not managing the estate, and living and
receiving his income far away from the estate, would feel more or less
at ease. But now he resolved that, although there was before him a
trip to Siberia and complex and difficult relations to the prison
world, for which social standing, and especially money, were
necessary, he could not, nevertheless, leave his affairs in their
former condition, but must, to his own detriment, change them. For
this purpose he had decided not to work the land himself, but, by
renting it at a low price to the peasants, to make it possible for
them to live independent of the landlord. Often, while comparing the
position of the landlord with that of the owner of serfs, Nekhludoff
found a parallel in the renting of the land to the peasants, instead
of working it by hired labor, to what the slave-owners did when they
substituted tenancy for serfdom. That did not solve the question, but
it was a step toward its solution; it was a transition from a grosser
to a less gross form of ownership of man. He also intended to act
thus.

Nekhludoff arrived at Kusminskoie about noon. In everything
simplifying his life, he did not wire from the station of his arrival,
but hired a two-horse country coach. The driver was a young fellow in
a nankeen regulation coat, belted below the waist, sitting sidewise on
the