Usury is the great nightmare of rural Russia, at present, an evil which seems to dog the peasant proprietor in all countries alike. The "Gombeen Man" is fast getting possession of the little Irish owners. A man who hires land cannot borrow on it; the little owner is tempted always to mortgage it at a pinch. In Russia he borrows to the outside of its value to pay the taxes and get in his crop. "The bondage labourers," _i. e._, men bound to work on their creditor's land as interest for money lent, receive no wages and are in fact a sort of slaves. They repay their extortioners by working as badly as they can--a "level worst," far inferior to that of the serfs of old, they harvest three and a half or four stacks of corn where the other peasants get five. The Koulaks and Mir-eaters, and other usurers, often of peasant origin, exhaust the peasant in every way; they then foreclose the mortgages, unite the small pieces of land once more, and reconstitute large estates. A Koulak is not to be trifled with; he finds a thousand occasions for revenge; the peasant cannot cheat the Jew as he does the landlord, and is being starved out--the mortality is enormous. The peasant class comprises five-sixths of the whole population--a stolid, ignorant, utterly unprogressive mass of human beings. They have received in gift nearly half the empire for their own use, and cling to the soil as their only chance of existence. They consequently dread all change, fearing that it should endanger this valuable possession. A dense solid stratum of unreasoning conservatism thus constitutes the whole basis of Russian society backed by the most corrupt set of officials to be found in the whole world. The middle and upper classes are often full of ardent wishes for the advancement of society and projects for the reform of the State. These are generally of the wildest and most terrible description, but their objects are anything but unreasonable. They desire to share in political power and the government of their country, as is the privilege of every other nation in Europe, and they hope to do something for the seething mass of ignorance and misery around them. The Nihilists have an ideal at least of good, and the open air of practical politics would probably get rid of the unhealthy absurdities and wickedness of their creeds. But the Russian peasant cares neither for liberty nor politics, neither for education, nor cleanliness, nor civilization of any kind. His only interest is to squeeze just enough out of his plot of ground to live upon and get drunk as many days in the year as possible.[1] With such a base to the pyramid as is constituted by the peasant proprietors of Russia, aided by the enormous army, recruited almost to any extent from among their ranks, whose chief religion is a superstitious reverence for the "great father," the Tsar is safe in refusing all concessions, all improvements; and the hopeless nature of Russian reform hitherto, mainly hangs upon the conviction