d two more, Messrs. Bashkevich and Pereleshin, were
removed from their positions in the zemstvo and forbidden thenceforth
to hold any office of trust in connection with public affairs.[34]

If the janitor of a tenement-house should notify the owner of the
existence of a smoldering fire in the basement, and if the owner,
instead of taking measures to extinguish the fire, should have the
janitor locked up for giving information that might alarm the tenants
and "unsettle their minds," we should regard such owner as an
extremely irrational person, if not an out-and-out lunatic; and yet,
this is the course that the Russian government has been pursuing for
the past quarter of a century. Again and again it has closed
statistical bureaus of the zemstvos, and in some cases has burned
their statistics, simply because the carefully collected material
showed the existence of a smoldering fire of popular distress and
discontent in the basement of the Russian state. Now that the
long-hidden fire has burst into a blaze of agrarian disorder, the
government is trying to smother it with bureaucratic measures of
relief, or to stamp it out with troops, military courts, and punitive
expeditions; but the action comes too late. The economic distress
which a quarter of a century ago was mainly confined to a few
districts or provinces has now become almost universal. Long before
the beginning of the recent agrarian disorders in the central
provinces, a prominent Russian senator, who made an official tour of
inspection and investigation in that part of the empire, described the
condition of the peasants as follows:

"Among the indisputable evidences of progressive impoverishment among
the peasants are the decreasing stocks of grain in the village
storehouses, the deterioration of buildings, the exhaustion of the
soil, the destruction of forests, the arrears of taxes, and the
struggle of the people to migrate. In almost every village the
penniless class is constantly growing, and, at the same time, there is
a frightfully rapid increase in the number of families that are
passing from comparative prosperity to poverty, and from poverty to a
condition in which they have no assured means of support."

Scores if not hundreds of statements like this were made by the
liberal provincial press, or by the district and provincial committees
on agricultural needs; but, when the government paid any attention to
them at all, it merely suspended or suppresse