One of the principal causes of the impoverishment of the agricultural peasants in Russia is the insufficiency of their farm allotments. When the serfs were emancipated about forty-five years ago, they were not given land enough to make them completely independent of the landed proprietors, for the reason that the latter had to have laborers to cultivate their estates, and it was only in the emancipated class that such laborers could be found. Since that time the peasant population has nearly doubled, and an allotment that was originally too small adequately to support one family now has to support two. This increasing pressure of the growing population upon the land might have been met, perhaps, as it has been met in Japan, by intensive cultivation; but such cultivation presupposes education, intelligence, and adoption of improved agricultural methods; and the Russian government never has been willing to give its peasant class even the elementary instruction that would enable it to read and thus to acquire modern agricultural knowledge. In 1897, more than thirty years after the emancipation, the Russian percentage of illiteracy was still seventy-nine, and on January 1, 1905, only forty-two per cent. of the children of school age were attending school, as compared with ninety-five per cent, in Japan.[37] Intensive cultivation, moreover, involves high fertilization and the use of modern agricultural implements. The Russian peasants do not own live stock enough to supply them with the quantity of manure that intensive cultivation would require,--millions of them have no farm-animals at all,--and, with their earning capacity of only $31.50 a year per capita, they cannot afford to buy modern plows and improved agricultural machinery. If there were diversified industries in Russia, the agricultural peasants who are unable to maintain themselves on their insufficient allotments might find work to do in mills or factories; but Russia is not a manufacturing country, and her industrial establishments furnish only two per cent. of her population with employment. [Illustration: P. A. STOLYPIN PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL AND MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR] Unable to get a living from their small and comparatively unproductive farms, and equally unable to find work elsewhere, the peasants clamor loudly for more land; and when, as the result of a bad harvest, their situation becomes intolerable, they are seized with a sort of berserker madness and break out into fierce bread riots, which frequently end in regular campaigns of pillage and arson. In 1905 they attacked and plundered the estates of more than two thousand landed proprietors and inflicted upon the latter a loss of more than $15,000,000. The disorder extended to one hundred and sixty-one districts and covered thirty-seven per cent. of the area of European Russia.