But the activities of the "Mir" and of the "Zemstvo" are above all of an economic and administrative order. They do not extend beyond the border of the village. They do not free the peasant from his intellectual isolation.
IV
To imagine that those one hundred and twenty millions of Russian peasants, thus riveted to the soil, thus living under the pressure of poverty, in ignorance and isolation, should be mature for revolutionary utopias, seems to me to be the wildest of dreams. However prodigiously fertile the Russian soil may be, and however gifted the Russian people, political discipline does not grow in a day like the grass of the steppe, it is not a plant without roots in the past, in the traditions and the manners of the people. No doubt the peasantry may be got to rise in some bloody "jacquerie." They might be drawn into some agrarian revolution—like the Pougatchef revolt in the eighteenth century—which would satisfy their craving for possessing and extending the soil they cultivate. But the hunger for land once satisfied, the peasantry would again become conservative, like the French peasant proprietor
