natural right of every man to the land is thus, in the principal country where any attempt is made to realize it, nothing but a harassing pecuniary debt. Now this class of worse than landless emigrants--men who carry their land as a perpetual burden on their back from which they can get no respite--is already very numerous in Russia. Thun says there are millions of them. As far back as 1872, nearly half the town population of Moscow and more than a fifth of the population of the landward district were strangers, who were inscribed members of rural communes elsewhere; and in many purely country districts some 14 per cent. of the people have no houses because they are not living in the villages they belong to. Sir Robert Morier says in his report to the Foreign Office in September, 1887, on Pauperism in Russia (p. 2): "It is officially stated that in each of the larger provinces, such as Kursk, Tambow, Kostroma, etc., over 100,000 peasants have abandoned the plot of ground granted to them (8 acres) on one pretext or another in order to seek means of subsistence elsewhere. (This probably means flocking to the larger towns.) The number of beggars in 71 Governments was stated to be 300,000, of which 182,000 were peasant proprietors. This number is, however, far below the mark." But, as we learn from Stepniak, the bulk of the landless peasants, _i.e._ those who no longer cultivate their holdings, do not leave their native villages, but seek employment as hirelings in the village itself or in its neighbourhood, and wander as day labourers from one master to another. Their families continue to live in their old cottage in the village, and the father returns to it when out of employment.