It may, therefore, reasonably be assumed that economic conditions in middle Russia about 1881 were essentially the same as in the region here described, allowance being made for numerical fluctuations. It was at this date that revolutionary peasantism had reached its climax, and to cope with it, a new era of “national policy” was inaugurated by Count Ignatieff. The question now arises as to whether counter-influences had arisen which exercised a neutralizing effect upon the economic tendencies that developed during the reign of Alexander II. A full discussion of the economic policy of the present Russian government would carry us beyond the limits of the present treatise.[177] I shall confine myself, therefore, to a few remarks relative to the two state institutions created for the encouragement of agriculture, viz: The Nobility’s Crédit Foncier, and the Peasant’s Crédit Foncier. Hundreds of millions were appropriated in the course of a few years to prevent the complete ruin of the landholding nobility. No such liberality was allowed in the conduct of the Peasant’s Bank, which was founded with the express object of providing the money needed by the peasant for the purchase of land.[178] Amidst the jubilations with which the peasantist press greeted the birth of this still-born child, Mr. Lobachevsky (pseudonym), one of the broadest minded of the Russian statisticians, raised the sole dissenting voice. He advanced the opinion[179] that to establish a Bank with a stock of a few millions for tens of millions of peasants, was to create a small peasant _bourgeoisie_ that would inevitably take advantage of the poverty of the more helpless members of its class, and that the poor householder would infallibly succumb if he accepted the services of the Peasant’s Bank. This opinion received a speedy confirmation in the actual practice of the Bank, which soon proved itself to be merely a supplementary department of the Nobility’s Bank. Says Mr. Herzenstein, a Russian Catheder-Sozialist, “It is universally known that the peasants’ purchases enabled the landlords to get rid, at a high price, of those tracts which yielded them no income, and that, taking it all in all, the peasants paid more for their land than it was worth.”[180] It was again the same truly Russian system which had been tried with such splendid success on the occasion of the emancipation of the serfs. Furthermore, the interest levied by the Bank, viz: 7½ per cent., exceeds that charged by any of the private mortgage banks (6 per cent.), whereas, with the Nobility’s Bank, the interest is less than that charged by private banks.[181]