As every person familiar with Russia knows, the black-earth region is one of the richest and most productive in the world. It ought to be inhabited by one of the wealthiest and happiest of peoples. Yet such is not the case. According to Count Tolstoi, who contributed recently a letter to the London Times on the subject, the inhabitants are among the poorest and most miserable in the world. They are in a state of chronic starvation. They are obliged to content themselves with nearly a third less food than is sufficient to maintain normal health. The physical effect of this insufficiency of food is a decrease in vitality, a diminished stature, and a check to the growth of population. It is proved, first, by the failure of the peasants of the region to meet the requirements for military service, and, second, by the statistics of population, which show that the increase of births over deaths has fallen from the maximum reached twenty years ago to zero. But the mental effects of the destitution wrought by the robberies of the Government are more distressing even than the physical. It gives birth to a stolidity and despair that tend to paralyze all effort toward betterment. The people subjected to it come to feel that there is no use of making any struggle beyond the maintenance of mere existence. Whatever they get in excess of this requirement will be taken from them. "A peasant," says Tolstoi, illustrating this fact, "feels that his position as an agriculturalist is bad, but he believes that it can not be improved; and, consequently, adapting himself to this hopeless position, he no longer fights against it, but lives and acts only in so far as he is stirred by the instinct of self-preservation. Moreover, the very wretchedness of his condition increases still more his depression of spirit. The lower the economic condition of a population sinks, like a weight on a lever, the more difficult it becomes to raise it again; the peasants feel this, and, as it were, throw away the helve after the hatchet. 'Why should we trouble ourselves?' they say. 'We sha'n't get fat. If we can only keep alive.'"