pect the most striking example. It is worked out in great detail
and is aimed at a betterment of the condition of peasants without deep
injury to the present landowners. It recognizes the right of the peasant
to more land, it provides for future state ownership of land to prevent
it from falling into wrong hands, but does not condemn the principle
of landownership, nor the injustice of present ownership, and for that
reason elaborates a method of compensation for compulsorily alienated
land through universal taxation.

To avoid excessive burden to the impoverished peasant the compensation
is to be in the shape of bonds representing the average value of the
land in each particular case, only the interest on these bonds to be
paid yearly from universal taxes--a topsy-turvy mortgage system, as it
were, in which the state becomes the proprietor and mortgagor of the
land, while its present owners are turned into forced mortgagees. Under
this system the peasants will get all land available, but 90 per cent
will have to pay for what is owned by a small fraction of even the
remaining 10 per cent of the entire population. The proposed scheme
proved to be too radical for the tsar's government in 1906 and caused
the downfall of the first Duma. It provoked at the time bitter comment
in Germany also, where the conservative and national-liberal press
accused the Russian Constitutional Democratic party of putting forward
impossible demands and of attacking the very principle of property
ownership. Yet the principle underlying the proposed reform is
unquestionably capitalistic and is the chief cause of the hatred and
contempt which the party enjoys on the part of Social-Democrats.

In the beginning of the sixties the conservative land committee
appointed by Alexander II, composed of hereditary landowners, avowed
enemies of any economic liberation of peasants, out of fear that private
ownership of land might enrich the peasants and make them dangerous to
the established order, devised a scheme of communal ownership of land
and unconsciously taught the peasants the principles of socialism. In
1907 Constitutional Democrats opposed the bill of the Government for the
dissolution of land communities and substitution of private for communal
land ownership at the request of individual peasants. The objection
raised was on the ground that peasants suddenly possessed of a chance
to get ready money would sell their land to a few exploiters and be