Two hours out from Saratoff houses became fewer. As far as the eye could reach to west and north was the boundless, lone steppe. Now and then we passed a miserable village with ugly houses of stone and mud and crumbling, thatched roofs. Twice during the ride we passed the ruins of a landlord’s house, reduced to ashes by infuriated peasantry. Telegraph poles lay felled along the roadside. Saratoff government borders on the majestic Volga. No mightier or lovelier river winds through the dominions of the Czar. Fields which might be fertile, and dessiatines with wonderful possibilities for rich production, roll backward from its banks many miles. Yet here men faint from hunger; women sink beneath the burden of days, and little children waste to shadows, and die. The ugliest of diseases root among the people and flourish like weeds in a pasture--not because nature has been scant in her provision of resources, but because all development of agricultural lands is still unknown. “Dry farming” has never been heard of; and irrigation projects which could so easily be carried out have never been thought of. But more than all the rest, perhaps, is the iniquitous system of landholding that still continues. Where one man owns one hundred thousand dessiatines,[7] two thousand men possess _one_ dessiatine each! The man with the hundred thousand is rich and lives in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, or Paris, and only occasionally visits his “estates” here in the interior. The two thousand are born, fret through their weary lives, and die on the little patch of once good, but now exhausted, land which originally their fathers held when serfdom was abolished, or their fathers’ fathers of many generations ago bought when colonization was encouraged by Catharine, or Elizabeth, or Peter. And as the demands of life to-day have multiplied since the time of Catharine, or even Alexander I, while the peasant holdings have remained the same, the impossible condition which so extensively prevails throughout central and eastern Russia is easy to understand. When serfdom was abolished in 1861 a certain patch of land was given to each village, and the village council, called the _mir_, parceled out this land to the individual villagers, re-allotting the parcels every three, five, or seven years according to the vote of each village. Since 1861 the population of many villages has doubled, and some have trebled, but the aggregate landholdings have remained what they were at the beginning. A tract of land that was barely enough for the maintenance of, say, two thousand souls in 1861 is entirely inadequate in 1907 for four or five thousand. Hence, throughout this vast district of central and eastern Russia, life has death for neighbor. The pall of famine descends upon the region in years when the crops are yielding most plentifully. Years when a frost comes, or a drought, or a blight, the situation attains the proportions of a calamity.