In the wake of famine is pain, disease, and death. The results reach down through years, and ever and always innocents are the victims. The most terrible part of it all, to me, is that famine in Russia is largely unnecessary and preventable. There is land enough in the country for all of the people--if it were only differently divided, and even a part of that which is now lying idle were placed at the disposal of the people who could and would cultivate it. There is water enough in Russia to defy any drought,--if it were only conserved and guided through channels and ditches where it would reach the now dry and parched dessiatines of starving peasants. But so long as the government persists in staving off this vital issue, famine will be recurrent. The attitude of the government toward this great question is, perhaps, more directly responsible for forcing the country toward civil war than any other one thing. The measures suggested thus far by the government do not relieve the situation materially. The only possible solution to this agrarian difficulty is to allow the peasants more land, and to teach them intensive methods of farming. Hundreds of thousands of acres lie unused, untilled; the peasants can not _buy_ it for they have nothing to buy with. They never _will_ have anything to buy with until they get a wider opportunity to earn more and to produce more--which can only come with more land. Thousands of them are already bound body and soul for years to come to big landowners and usurers (who are frequently the village priests). The land, in the fulness of time, must be given to them. And if the government will not consent to this the Duma will “expropriate” it as the first Duma set out to do--and was speedily dissolved for the effort! If there is no Duma (as there will not be if Nicholas II has his way), then sooner or later the peasants will have to _take_ the land. And that may well mean the French Revolution, or worse, over again. One Sunday I started for the western part of Samara province, taking with me a Russian-American for a traveling companion and interpreter. Just beyond the railroad station called Tolkai we left the train and started across country engaging a local _yamschik_ [driver] and a rough, springless wagon. We had not traveled more than an hour before we were stopped by a village gendarme, who demanded our passports and letters of permission to travel there. We really had an imposing array of credentials, but none of them seemed to impress our captor. Finally I produced a letter written and signed by Prime Minister Stolypin. This extraordinary high chief (of gendarmes) of the village stared blankly at the letter and said: “Stolypin? Stolypin? Who is he?” Turning away from us for a moment he signaled up the street, and six other gendarmes appeared, to whom the first man addressed himself as follows: