in the Russian capital or in European health or pleasure resorts; for life is so dreary, solitude is so oppressive, winters are so long that nothing except a high sense of duty could induce the magnate to reside. If he is poor, and compelled to remain on his estate, he will vegetate in the most lamentable intellectual isolation. The clergy are demoralized by their bureaucratic subjection, by their ignorance and poverty, and have very little moral influence over the peasants. There is no middle class, for either trade does not exist or is in the hands of the Jews and the Germans. The peasantry, absolutely abandoned to themselves, are without any contact with civilization. Isolated from the city, riveted to the soil, nearly all illiterate, the din and turmoil of life only reaches them as a distant murmur. I do not mean to say that these peasants are by any means dead to political life. On the contrary, the Russians have a much healthier political and democratic instinct than the Germans, they possess a very active local government, and that local government, represented by the "Mir," or village community, and the "Zemstvo," or County Council, may even be said to be by far the most original and interesting of Russian institutions.
