The measure which under existing land-conditions would most directly raise the standard of life is the improvement of the mediæval agricultural system, and this depends upon the intelligence of the people at large. Scientific farming needs technical knowledge, yet of the great sums collected, a very small portion goes to education. The Nation spends for it but forty-three million roubles, the Semstvos but twenty million roubles, or together one eighth of the military budget. A tedious, inefficient course in Slavonic, with the prayer-books as text, a smattering of modern Russian, sometimes mathematics as far as multiplication and division,--this is the state education of the privileged few of the peasants’ children. Whatever small amount of real knowledge is gained is quickly submerged in the ocean of ignorance at home. The percentage of illiteracy is very great. The record gives Switzerland five, Germany seven, Great Britain ten, France fifteen, Russia eighty-four. It is argued that for the bulk of the population, under existing material conditions, schools are of small use. The lack, in the general poverty, of the very primary materials,--paper, pencils, books; of proper shoes and clothes; the unsuitableness of the houses of the peasants as places for the children to prepare their lessons in, with no spot to put their books or to do their tasks and with no available light--all these things strike at the very root of education. The population must be raised economically to the point where the elementals of existence are assured, before the incidental costs of schools can be met by the peasantry. However, there has been coming to Russia during the last generation, in a great wave, the kind of education that made the American West--the education of expansion, of the founding of towns, the planting of new industries, the building of new railroads, the opening of better navigation-routes, the enlistment of foreign capital; all the intelligence and enlightenment that attends a real industrial, commercial, and material quickening. Beyond these social and economic factors a large count is set against the bureaucratic system for the conduct of administration. The suppression of personal liberty, of freedom of speech, the abuse of power by arbitrary officials, remorseless repression, ruthlessly carried out, racial oppression, frightful cruelty in the prisons and exile stations;--it is a terrible indictment that has been drawn. The close of the Japanese War opened a new “Smutnoe Vremya,” or time of trouble. Industrial wars, riots in Baku, uprisings in the Caucasus, seizure of cities by Social Democrats,--so went the disturbances throughout Russia, the white terror above grappling with the red terror beneath.