and improvised himself a primary schoolmaster. But Tolstoi was driven by his pedagogical experiment to see the futility of all the theories and reforms propounded by doctrinaire publicists. The doctrinaire publicists imagine that universal compulsory education could be introduced into Russia by a stroke of the autocratic pen, and they blame a reactionary bureaucracy and an obscurantist church for keeping the people in darkness. But the bureaucracy is really much less responsible than theorists imagine for the backwardness of Russian education. In a country where winter lasts for seven months, where for those interminable winter months the plains are covered with a thick shroud of snow, where roads are few and bad, in a country which is further sparsely inhabited and where the izbas of the moujik are as scattered as the farms of the Dutchmen on the South African veld—you cannot possibly have primary schools as in Great Britain or France. Even the most progressive Russian Government could not afford a schoolmaster for every twelve families. It could not even establish itinerant schoolmasters as is done in the Scottish Highlands. For the Highlands are much better provided with roads, and they are more thickly inhabited than many
