The medals to which so much virtue is ascribed are merely the medals struck to commemorate the Emancipation of the Serfs; but the "medalmen," who are generally men that have parted with their land, sold their houses, and settled at the mines, pay very high prices for one of these medals, wear it constantly about their necks, and think it will secure them a genuine respite from the burden of taxation they have to bear. The nihilist propagandists think--and the idea seems very remarkable--that this childish and ignorant confidence in the Czar will not be able to stand much longer the strain of the increasing difficulties of the rural situation. The propagandists make it their business to keep alive the idea of the black division in the hearts of the _moujiks_, and make use of every successive disappointment at its continued delay as an instrument of alienating the affections of the people from the throne. A peasantry are very slow to throw over old sentiments, and will suffer long before breaking with the past, but they take a sure grip of their own interest, and they will turn sometimes very decisively and very gregariously to new deliverers. The Russian peasants see themselves settled on plots of ground too small to work with profit, and overburdened with taxes; they have to pay sixty per cent. of all their earnings in dues of all kinds on their land; and they cast their eyes abroad and see two-thirds of the country still unpossessed by the people, one-half still owned by the State, and one-sixth by the greater landowners; and with the communistic ideas in which they have been nursed, they feel that it is time for a new division of the greater order to take place. A gigantic crofter question is impending, and this agrarian agitation for more land is likely enough to make nihilism a more formidable thing in the future than it has been in the past. Hitherto it has taken little hold of the peasantry. At first it was a movement of educated young Russia merely, and might be counted with the ordinary intellectual excesses of youth. It only became a serious political force after the Emancipation Act; but it was still a movement of the upper classes, and in spite of immense exertions it has remained so. The situation, however, is rapidly changing, and with the rise--so remarkable in many ways--of a numerous rural proletariat in the country that was supposed to enjoy special protection against it, with the growing distress and discontent of the peasantry, with the louder and more persistent cries for the black division, which their hereditary conception of agrarian justice suggests to them as the only solution of their troubles, who will say what to-morrow may bring forth?