comes to the
attention of Russia, or even of the world, as during the dearth in 1891,
because of scarcity of food, or even famine, which is no novelty in the
government. In a district where the average of rain is twenty inches,
there is not much margin of superfluity which can be spared without
peril. Wheat grows here better than in the government just north of it,
and many peasants are attracted from the "black-bread governments" to
Samara by the white bread which is there given them as rations when they
hire out for the harvest.

But such a singular combination of conditions prevails there, as
elsewhere in Russia, that an abundant harvest is often more disastrous
than a scanty harvest. The price of grain falls so low that the cost of
gathering it is greater than the market value, and it is often left to
fall unreaped in the fields. When the price falls very low, complaints
arise that there is no place to send it, since, when the ruble stands
high, as it invariably does at the prospect of large crops, the demand
from abroad is stopped. The result is that those people who are situated
near a market sell as much grain and leave as little at home as possible
in order to meet their bills. The price rises; the unreaped surplus of
the districts lying far from markets cannot fill the ensuing demand. The
income from estates falls, and the discouraged owners who have nothing
to live on resolve to plant a smaller area thereafter. Estates are
mortgaged and sold by auction; prices are very low, and often there are
no buyers.

The immediate result of an over-abundant harvest in far-off Samara is
that the peasants who have come hither to earn a little money at reaping
return home penniless, or worse, to their suffering families. Some of
them are legitimate seekers after work; that is to say, they have no
grain of their own to attend to, or they reap their own a little earlier
or a little later, and go away to earn the ready money to meet taxes and
indispensable expenditures of the household, such as oil, and so on.
"_Pri khlyeby bez khlyeby_" is their own way of expressing the
situation, which we may translate freely as "starvation in the midst of
plenty." Thus the extremes of famine-harvest and the harvest which is an
embarrassment of riches are equally disastrous to the poor peasant.

Samara offers a curious illustration of several agricultural problems,
and a proof of some peculiar paradoxes. The peasants of the neighboring
g