d afford them no appreciable
relief. In order to give them the same per capita allowance of land
that they had at the time of the emancipation, it would be necessary
to add about 121,000,000 acres to their present holdings, and no such
amount of arable state or crown land is available.[38]

From the operations of the Peasants' Bank little more is to be
expected. In the twenty years of its history it has bought about
17,000,000 acres from landed proprietors, but has disposed of only
3,600,000 acres to peasant communes. The rest it has sold to
associations or land-speculating companies. The extreme need of the
people, moreover, has so forced up the price of land in the black-soil
belt as to make acquisition of it by the poorer class of peasants
almost impossible. Between November 16, 1905, and August 31, 1906, the
bank bought about 5,000,000 acres from landed proprietors, at an
average price of $23.30 per acre, and resold it on bond and mortgage
to individuals, companies, or peasant communes at an average rate of
$24.44 per acre. Comparatively little of this land, however, went into
the possession of the class that needed it most. The 4,997 peasant
families in the district of Voronezh, who can make both ends meet only
by limiting themselves to a per capita allowance of a pound and a
third of rye flour a day, are not financially able to buy land at
$24.44 per acre, and this is the economic condition of hundreds of
thousands of families in the central provinces.[39]

Emigration to Siberia might have lessened the pressure of the growing
population upon the land if it had been resorted to in time; but the
government repeatedly put restrictions upon it, through fear that, if
unchecked, it might result in depriving the landed proprietors of
cheap labor. Count Dmitri Tolstoi, while Minister of the Interior,
openly opposed it, and at one time the Russian periodical press was
not allowed even to discuss it. When at last it was permitted, the
bureaucracy managed it so badly, and paid so little attention to the
distribution and proper settlement of the emigrants in Siberia, that
nearly nineteen per cent. of them returned, practically ruined, to
their old homes in European Russia. In the ten years from 1894 to
1903, 52,000 out of 304,000 emigrants came back from the crown lands
in the Altai, one of the best parts of Siberia; and in the years 1901
and 1902 the percentages of returning emigrants were 53.9 and 68.1. In
other words, mo