Beyond the range of the village communes, no people show a more eager zeal for knowledge and study. In the cities almost all of the younger generation can read and write. The school-boys, with their big black ear-covering caps, smart blue coats, brightened with rows of brass buttons, and knapsacks of books, are one’s regular morning sight. “Realistic” and “Materialistic” schools are established in many towns. The apathy of the rural element is to be laid at the door of the system which hinders those within the confines of the communes from reaping the fruits of special sacrifice and effort. No one attempts to raise himself in the Mir, where the dead weight of those bound to him is so hopeless. If any boy, brighter than the rest, follow some lodestar, it must be to a city. The aspirant must bury ambition, or leave the drudging Mir with its toll of taxes and recruits. He will not study law before the wood-fire as did Lincoln in his log cabin. The cloud of deadening communism over their lives utters itself in the words continuously on the peasants’ tongues. It is the northern equivalent for that buttress of despotism--“_mañana_.” The possibility of the Russian condition is “_nietchevo!_” If the red cock (_krasnai petuk_) has crowed and has left the forty householders with charred embers where stood their homes, “_nietchevo!_” They build it up of wood and straw, with the oven chimney passing through as before. Does a raging toothache torture, “It is the will of God,--_nietchevo_!” If the weary day’s climb sees a gameless evening, “_nietchevo!_” If the son is frozen in the troop-train, “_nietchevo!_” If the Little Father send to Yakutsk the other one who has gone to the city, “_nietchevo!_” Is the unrevised tax for a family of ten men pressing down upon three, “It has got to be borne,--_nietchevo!_” It is this bowing to fate as a thing begotten of the gods, when it is a force to be fought here on earth; the long-taught submission to evil, when evil is to be conquered, to limitation when opportunity is to be won,--it is this spirit which is holding rural Russia still in her Dark Ages.