In spite of the deplorable condition of the people living in the twenty-seven famine provinces, and in spite of the marvelously long way a ruble will go in alleviating starvation, of charity in Russia there is little, save among the hungry peasants themselves. The starving are always ready to share their last half pound of bread
Famine
with any one else in distress. Nowhere in the world are Maurice Hewlett’s lines truer than in the midst of Russia’s “hungry country”:
Only the poor love the poor;
Only those who have little
Give to those who have less.
The less poor gave their mites, and the government distributes the taxes gathered in provinces which are still able to pay, and money borrowed from abroad, that some of the starving population may be supplied with scanty meals. The rich landlords in the midst of these districts seldom contribute anything to relieve the sufferings of their own peasants. Many of them live out of Russia altogether, some, perhaps, because they find the constant distress and unquiet disagreeable. The grand dukes and connections of the reigning house prefer Ostend, Paris, and the Riviera, to Russia; abroad they escape the unpleasant sight of half a nation going hungry. The Emperor is one of the richest men in Europe, yet it is very rarely that he donates anything to charity, so far as is known.
The administration insists that it is endeavoring to solve the so-called land problem. And how? Large tracts of land belonging to the royal family were placed at the disposal of the peasants—for a consideration. A certain amount of land was available in many governments for fifty and one hundred dollars a dessiatine. One prominent landowner proposed selling one million dessiatines to the peasants at the rate of one hundred dollars per dessiatine! One hundred dollars a dessiatine! Peasants that were reduced to eating grass cut for their horses, buying land at one hundred dollars a dessiatine is an obvious absurdity. And even if some of the peasants did venture to mortgage themselves to these great landowners for years to come by buying a small strip of land, which they could not succeed in paying for in a lifetime, the land problem would still be no nearer solution than before.