nent. Every married peasant strives to have a house of his own,
and many of them, in order to defray the necessary expenses, have been
obliged to contract debts. This is a very serious matter. Even if the
peasants could obtain money at five or six per cent., the position of
the debtors would be bad enough, but it is in reality much worse, for
the village usurers consider twenty or twenty-five per cent. a by no
means exorbitant rate of interest. A laudable attempt has been made
to remedy this state of things by village banks, but these have proved
successful only in certain exceptional localities. As a rule the peasant
who contracts debts has a hard struggle to pay the interest in ordinary
times, and when some misfortune overtakes him--when, for instance, the
harvest is bad or his horse is stolen--he probably falls hopelessly into
pecuniary embarrassments. I have seen peasants not specially addicted
to drunkenness or other ruinous habits sink to a helpless state of
insolvency. Fortunately for such insolvent debtors, they are treated by
the law with extreme leniency. Their house, their share of the common
land, their agricultural implements, their horse--in a word, all that
is necessary for their subsistence, is exempt from sequestration. The
Commune, however, may bring strong pressure to bear on those who do
not pay their taxes. When I lived among the peasantry in the seventies,
corporal punishment inflicted by order of the Commune was among the
means usually employed; and though the custom was recently prohibited
by an Imperial decree of Nicholas II, I am not at all sure that it has
entirely disappeared.

CHAPTER VII

THE PEASANTRY OF THE NORTH

Communal Land--System of Agriculture--Parish Fetes--Fasting--Winter
Occupations--Yearly Migrations--Domestic Industries--Influence
of Capital and Wholesale Enterprise--The State
Peasants--Serf-dues--Buckle's "History of Civilisation"--A precocious
Yamstchik--"People Who Play Pranks"--A Midnight Alarm--The Far North.

Ivanofka may be taken as a fair specimen of the villages in the northern
half of the country, and a brief description of its inhabitants will
convey a tolerably correct notion of the northern peasantry in general.

Nearly the whole of the female population, and about one-half of the
male inhabitants, are habitually engaged in cultivating the Communal
land, which comprises about two thousand acres of a light sandy soil.
The arable part of this land is di