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Mr. Postnikov employs the following method. From the total crop area of the farm, he separates the following: the food area (which provides sustenance for the family and the farm labourers), the fodder area (which provides fodder for the cattle) and the farm-service area (seed-plot, land occupied by buildings, etc.), and thus arrives at the size of the market or commercial area, the produce of which goes for sale. It is shown that in the group with 5 to 10 dess. under crops, only 11.8% of the cultivated area yields produce for the market, whereas this percentage grows with the increase in the area under crops (by groups) as follows: 36.5% -- 52% -- 61%. Consequently, the well-to-do peasants (the top two groups) engage in what is commercial cultivation, and secure a gross money income ranging from 574 to 1,500 rubles per annum. This commercial cultivation then becomes capitalist farming, for the areas cultivated by the well-to-do peasants exceed the family labour norm (i.e., the amount of land that a family can cultivate by its own labour), and compel them to resort to the hiring of workers : in the three northern uyezds of Taurida Gubernia, the author estimates, the well-to-do peasants hire over 14,000 rural workers. The poor peasants, on the contrary, "provide workers" (over 5,000), that is, resort to the sale of their labour-power, since the income from cultivating the land amounts, in the 5 to 10 dess. group, for example, to only about 30 rubles in cash per household.* We observe here, consequently, the very process of the creation of a home market that is dealt with by the theory of capitalist production -- the "home market" grows as a result of the conversion into a commodity of the product of commercial, entrepreneur farming, on the one hand, and of the conversion into a commodity of the labour-power sold by the badly-off peasants, on the other.

    In order to acquaint ourselves more closely with this phenomenon, let us examine the position of each separate group of the peasantry. Let us start with the top group. Here are the data for the amount of land it owns and uses:

 
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that the "kulak" and the "usurer" have nothing in common with the "enterprising muzhik." On the contrary, the threads both of merchant's capital (the loaning of money on the security of land, the buying-up of various products, etc.) and of industrial capital (commercial agriculture with the aid of wage-workers, etc,.) merge in the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie. It depends on surrounding circumstances, on the greater or lesser degree to which the Asiatic way of life is eliminated and culture is widespread in our countryside as to which of these forms of capital will develop at the expense of the other.

 
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    It would be a great mistake to imagine that the concentration of rented land in the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie is limited to individual renting and does not apply to renting by the village community. Nothing of the kind. The rented land is always distributed "according to where the money lies," and the relation between the groups of the peasantry does not change in the least where land is rented by the community. Hence, the argument of Mr. Karyshev, for example, that the relation between community renting and individual renting expresses a "conflict between two principles (!?),the communal and the individual" (p.159, loc. cit.), that community renting "is characterised by the labour principle and the principle of even distribution of rented land among the community members" (ibid., 230) -- this argument belongs entirely to the sphere of Narodnik prejudices. Not withstanding the task he set himself of summing up the "results of Zemstvo statistical investigation," Mr. Karyshev carefully avoided all the abundant Zemstvo statistical material about the concentration of rented land in the hands of small groups of well-to-do peasants. Let us quote an example. In the three indicated uyezds of Taurida Gubernia, state lands rented by peasant communities are distributed among the groups as follows:

 
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of the Germans and the farmsteaders would considerably heighten the picture of differentiation).

 
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    Thus, in the bottom group there are very few independent peasant farmers; the poor peasants have no improved implements at all, while the middle peasantry have them in insignificant numbers. The concentration of animals is still greater than the concentration of area under crops; the well-to-do peasants evidently combine capitalist livestock raising with their large-scale capitalist cropping. At the opposite pole we have "peasants" who ought to be classed as allotment-holding farm labourers and day labourers, for their main source of livelihood is the sale of their labour-power (as we shall see in a moment), and the landowners sometimes give one or two animals to their labourers to tie them down to their farms and to reduce wages.

    It goes without saying that the peasant groups differ not only as to the size of their farms, but also in their methods of farming: firstly, in the top group a very large proportion of the peasant farmers (40 to 60%) are supplied with improved implements (mainly iron ploughs, and also horse and steam threshers, winnowing machines, reapers, etc.). In the hands of 24.7% of the households, the top group, are concentrated 82.9% of the total improved implements; 38.2% of the households, the middle group, possess 17% of the improved implements; 37.1%, the poor, possess 0.1% (7 implements out of 5,724).* Secondly, the peasants with few horses are compelled by necessity to carry on "a different system of farming, a system of economic activity" entirely different from that of the peasants with many horses, as the compiler of Returns for Novouzensk Uyezd says (pp. 44-46). The well-to-do peasants "let their land rest . . . plough in the autumn

 
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. . . plough it again in the spring and sow after harrowing . . . roll the ploughed land when the soil has aired . . . plough twice for rye," whereas the badly-off peasants "do not let their land rest but sow Russian wheat year after year . . . for wheat they plough in the spring once . . . for rye they provide neither fallow nor ploughed land, but merely break the surface before sowing . . . for wheat they plough in the late spring, and as a result the corn often does not come up . . . for rye they plough once, or merely break the surface and not at the proper time . . . they plough the same plot of land unwisely year after year, without allowing it to rest." "And so on and so forth without end," the compiler concludes this list. "The facts enumerated concerning the radical difference between the farming systems of the better- and the badly-off peasants result in grain of poor quality and bad harvests for the latter and comparatively better harvests for the former" (ibid.).

    But how could such a big bourgeoisie arise under the agricultural community system? The answer is supplied by the figures for land possessed and in use according to groups. The peasants in the section taken by us (76 households) have a total of 57,128 dess. of purchased land and 304,514 dess. of rented land, of which 177,789 dess. are non-allotment land rented by 5,602 households; 47,494 dess. of the allotment land rented from other village communities are held by 3,129 households, and 79,231 dess. of the allotment land rented in their own village communities are held by 7,092 households. The distribution of this enormous area of land, constituting more than 2/3 of the peasants' total area under crops, is as follows (see Table on p. 89).

    We see here an enormous concentration of purchased and rented land. More than 9/10 of the total purchased land is in the hands of 1.8% of the households, the very richest. Of all the rented land, 69.7% is concentrated in the hands of peasant capitalists, and 86.6% is in the hands of the top group of the peasantry. A comparison of the figures on the renting and the leasing-out of allotment land clearly reveals the passage of the land into the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie. Here, too, the conversion of the land into a commodity leads to the cheapening of the wholesale purchase price of land (and, consequently, to profiteering in land). If we determine the price of one dessiatine of rented non-allotment land

 
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we get the following figures, counting from the bottom group to the top: 3.94; 3.20; 2.90; 2.75; 2.57; 2.08; 1.78 rubles. To show what mistakes the Narodniks fall into by thus ignoring the concentration of rented ]and, let us quote by way of example the arguments of Mr. Karyshev in the well-known symposium The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices on Certain Aspects of the Russian National Economy (St. Petersburg,1897). When grain prices fall, with an improvement of the harvest, and renting prices rise, the entrepreneur renters, concludes Mr. Karyshev, have to reduce demand and hence the renting prices had been raised by the representatives of consumers' economy (I, 288). The conclusion is absolutely arbitrary: it is quite possible that the peasant bourgeoisie raise renting prices in spite of a drop in grain prices, for an improvement in the harvest may compensate for the drop in prices. It is quite possible that the well-to-do peasants raise renting prices even when there is no such compensation, reducing the cost of production of grain by introducing machinery. We know that the employment of machines in agriculture is growing and that these machines are concentrated in the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie. Instead of studying the differentiation of the peasantry, Mr. Karyshev introduces arbitrary and incorrect premises about an average peasantry. That is why all the conclusions and deductions similarly arrived at by him in the publication quoted are of no value whatever.

    Having ascertained that diverse elements exist among the peasantry, we can now easily get clarity on the question of the home market. If the well-to-do peasants control about 2/3 of the total agricultural production, it is obvious that they must account for an incomparably larger share of the grain on sale. They produce grain for sale, whereas the badly-off peasants have to buy additional grain and sell their labour-power. Here are the data:*

 
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to the complete adaptation of the notorious "communal ties" to the farms of big crop growers that employ labourers.

    The relationship between the peasant groups proves to be absolutely analogous in Nikolayevsk Uyezd (cited statistical returns, p. 826 and foll.; we leave out those living away from home and the landless). For example, 7.4%, the rich households (having 10 and more draught animals), comprising 13.7% of the population, concentrate in their hands 27.6% of the total livestock and 42.6% of the rented land, whereas 29%, the poor households (horseless and one-horse), comprising 19.7% of the population, have only 7.2% of the livestock and 3% of the rented land. Unfortunately, the tables for Nikolayevsk Uyezd, we repeat, are too scanty. To finish with Samara Gubernia, let us quote the following highly instructive description of the position of the peasantry from the Combined Returns for Samara Gubernia.

    ". . . The natural increase in the population, augmented by the Immigration of land-poor peasants from the western gubernias, in connection with the appearance in the sphere of agricultural production of money-grubbing speculators in land, has with every passing year complicated the forms of the renting of land, raised its worth and converted the land into a commodity which has so quickly and immensely enriched some and ruined many others. To illustrate the latter point, let us indicate the area cultivated by some of the southern merchant- and peasant-owned farms, where the tillage of 3,000 to 6,000 dessiatines is no rarity, while some practise the cultivation of 8-10-15 thousand dessiatines of land, renting several tens of thousands of state-owned land.

    "The existence and the growth of the agricultural (rural) proletariat in Samara Gubernia are to a considerable extent the product of recent times, with their increasing production of grain for sale, rise in renting prices, ploughing up of virgin and pasture land, clearing of forests, and so forth. The landless households throughout the gubernia number 21,624 in all, whereas the non-farming ones number 33,772 (of those households that have allotments), while the horseless and one-horse households together number 110,604 families, with a total of 600,000 persons of both sexes, counting five and a fraction persons per family. We take the liberty of counting these, too, as proletarians, although legally they

 
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have a share of communal land; actually, these are day labourers, ploughmen, shepherds, reapers and similar workers on big farms who cultivate 1/2 to 1 dessiatine of their own allotments so as to feed their families who remain at home" (pp. 57-58).

    Thus, the investigators regard as proletarians not only the horseless peasants, but also those who have one horse. We note this important conclusion, which fully coincides with that of Mr. Postnikov (and with the data in the classified tables) and points to the real social-economic significance of the bottom group of the peasantry.

 
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labour-power in the bottom groups and its purchase in the top ones.

 
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the distribution of rented land in Kamyshin Uyezd; imagine that we have singled out the peasants with "an equal number of draught animals" and, dividing them into categories according to allotment and into subdivisions according to the number of persons working, we declare that the less land a peasant has, the more he rents, etc. Does such a method result in the disappearance of the group of well-to-do peasants? Yet Mr. N.-on, with his empty phrases, has succeeded in bringing about its disappearance and has been enabled to repeat the old prejudices of Narodism.

    Mr. N.-on's absolutely useless method of computing the land rented by peasants per household according to groups with 0, 1, 2, etc., persons working is repeated by Mr. L. Maress in the book The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices, etc. (I, 34). Here is a little example of the "averages" boldly employed by Mr. Maress (as by the other contributors to this book, written from a biassed Narodnik point of view). In Melitopol Uyezd, he argues, the amount of rented land per renting household is 1.6 dess. in households having no working males, 4.4 dess. in households having one working male, 8.3 in households having two, and 14.0 in households having three (p. 34). And the conclusion is that there is an "approximately equal per-capita distribution of rented land"!! Mr. Maress did not think it necessary to examine the actual distribution of rented land according to groups of households of different economic strength, although he was in a position to learn this both from Mr. V. Postnikov's book and from the Zemstvo abstracts. The "average" figure of 4.4 dess. of rented land per renting household in the group of households having one working male was obtained by adding together such figures as 4 dess. in the group of households cultivating 5 to 10 dess. and with 2 to 3 draught animals, and 38 dess. in the group of households cultivating over 50 dess. of land and with 4 and more draught animals. (See Returns for Melitopol Uyezd, p. D.10-11.) It is not surprising that by adding together the rich and the poor and dividing the total by the number of items added, one can obtain "equal distribution" wherever desired!

    Actually, however, in Melitopol Uyezd 21% of the households, the rich ones (those with 25 dess. and more under crops), comprising 29.5% of the peasant population, account -- despite the fact that they are best provided with

 
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allotment and purchased land -- for 66.3% of the total rented arable (Returns for Melitopol Uyezd, p. B. 190-194). On the other hand, 40% of the households, the poor ones (those with up to 10 dess. under crops), comprising 30.1 % of the peasant population, account -- despite the fact that they are worst provided with allotment and purchased land -- for 5.6% of the total rented arable. As can be seen, this closely resembles "equal per-capita distribution"!

    Mr. Maress bases all his calculations of peasant land-renting on the "assumption" that "the renting households are mainly in the two groups worst provided" (provided with allotment land ); that "among the renting population there is equal per capita (sic!) distribution of rented land"; and that "the renting of land enables the peasants to pass from the groups worst provided to those best provided" (34-35). We have already shown that all these "assumptions" of Mr. Maress directly contradict the facts. Actually, the very contrary is the case, as Mr. Maress could not but have noted, had he -- in dealing with inequalities in economic life (p. 35) -- taken the data for the classification of households according to economic indices (instead of according to alloment tenure ), and not limited himself to the unfounded "assumption" of Narodnik prejudices.

    Let us now compare Kamyshin Uyezd with other uyezds in Saratov Gubernia. The ratios between the peasant groups are everywhere the same, as is shown by the following data for the four uyezds (Volsk, Kuznetsk, Balashov and Serdobsk) in which, as we have said, the middle and the well-to-do peasants are combined;

 
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    Hence, we see everywhere the ousting of the poor by the prosperous peasants. But in Kamyshin Uyezd the well-to-do peasantry are more numerous and richer than in the other uyezds. Thus, in five uyezds of the gubernia (including the Kamyshin Uyezd) the households are distributed according to draught animals held as follows: with no draught animals -- 25.3%; with 1 animal -- 25.5%; with 2 -- 20%; with 3 -- 10.8%; and with 4 and more -- 18.4%, whereas in Kamyshin Uyezd, as we have seen, the well-to-do group is larger, and the badly-off group somewhat smaller. Further, if we combine the middle and well-to-do peasantry, i.e., if we take the households with 2 draught animals and more, we get the following data for the respective uyezds:

 
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tov statisticians described above enable us to demonstrate clearly the uselessness of classification according to allotment. Take, for example, the category of non-allotment peasants in Kamyshin Uyezd (see Combined Returns, p. 450 and foll., the Returns for Kamyshin Uyezd, Vol. XI, p. 174 and foll.). The compiler of the Combined Returns, in describing this category, says that the area under crops is "very negligible" ("Introduction", p. 45), i.e., he assigns it to the category of the poor. Let us take the tables. The "average" area under crops in this category is 2.9 dess. per household. But see how this "average" was reached: by adding together the big crop growers (18 dess. per household in the group with 5 and more draught animals; the households in this group constitute about 1/8 of the whole category, but they possess about half of this category's area under crops) and the poor, the horseless peasants, with 0.2 dess. per household! Take the households employing farm labourers. There are very few of them in this category -- 77 in all, or 2.5%. But of these 77 there are 60 in the top group, in which the area cultivated is 18 dess. per household; and in this group the households employing farm labourers constitute 24.5%. Clearly, we obscure the differentiation of the peasantry, depict the propertyless peasants in a better light than they actually are (by adding the rich to them and striking averages), while, on the contrary, we depict the well-to-do peasants as being of lesser strength, because the category of peasants with large allotments includes, in addition to the majority, the well-off, also the badly-off (it is a known fact that even the large-allotment village communities always include indigent peasants). We are now clear, too, as to the incorrectness of the second argument in defence of classification according to allotment. It is argued that by such classification the indices of economic strength (number of animals, area under crops, etc.) always show a regular increase according to the increase in the size of the allotment. That is an undoubted fact, for the allotment is one of the major factors of well-being. Where, consequently, the peasants are large-allotment holders there are always more members of the peasant bourgeoisie and, as a result, the "average" allotment figures for the whole category are raised. All this, however, gives no grounds whatever for

 
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inferring that a method combining the rural bourgeoisie with the rural proletariat is correct.

    We conclude: in systematising peasant household statistics one should not limit oneself to classification according to allotment. Economic statistics must necessarily take the scale and type of farm as the basis of classification. The indices lor distinguishing these types should be taken in conformity with local conditions and forms of agriculture, while in dealing with extensive grain farming, one can limit oneself to classifying according to area under crops (or to the number of draught animals); under other conditions one must take account of the area under industrial crops, the technical processing of agricultural produce, the cultivation of root crops or of fodder grasses, dairy farming, vegetable growing, etc. When the peasantry combine agricultural and industrial occupations on a large scale, a combination of the two systems of classification is necessary, i.e., of classification according to the scale and type of agriculture, and of classification according to the scale and type of "industries." The methods of summarising peasant household returns are not such a narrowly specific and second-rate problem as one might imagine at first sight. On the contrary, it will be no exaggeration to say that at the present time it is the basic problem of Zemstvo statistics. The completeness of household returns and the technique of collecting them* have reached a high degree of perfection, but owing to unsatisfactory summarising, a vast amount of most valuable information is simply lost, and the investigator has at his disposal merely "average" figures (for village communities, volosts, categories of peasants, size of allotment, etc.). But these "averages," as we have seen already, and shall see later, are often absolutely fictitious.

 
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    Let us pass to the data on hired labour, which are particularly valuable as regards this uyezd owing to their completeness (specifically, data have been added on the hiring of day labourers):

 
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peasant groups from 2 to 6 and 9 tenths of the total number of proprietors employ farm labourers, the direct conclusion is the following. The majority of the well-to-do peasant households employ hired labour in one form or another. The formation of a body of regular farm labourers and day labourers is an essential condition for the existence of the well-to-do peasantry. Lastly, it is extremely interesting to note that the ratio between the number of farms hiring day labourers and the number employing regular farm labourers diminishes from the bottom peasant groups to the top. In the bottom groups the number of farms hiring day labourers always exceeds, many times over, the number employing regular farm labourers. In the top groups, on the contrary, the number of farms employing regular farm labourers is sometimes even larger than the number hiring day labourers. This fact clearly points to the formation in the top groups of the peasantry of farms employing labourers, farms based on the regular employment of wage-labour; wage-labour is more evenly distributed over the seasons of the year, and it becomes possible to dispense with the more costly and more troublesome hiring of day labourers. Let us quote, incidentally, the returns on hired labour for Elabuga Uyezd, Vyatka Gubernia (the well-to-do peasants are here merged with the middle peasants).

 
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between the groups as regards both the hiring of workers and the renting and leasing of land.

    Very interesting are the household data on the use of manure, cited by the Perm statisticians. Here is the result of an analysis of these data:

    Thus, here too, we see a profound difference in the systems and methods of farming employed by the poor and the affluent peasants. And this difference must exist everywhere, since the well-to-do peasants everywhere concentrate in their hands the greater part of the peasant-owned animals, and have more opportunities for expending-their labour on farm improvements. Therefore, if we learn, for example, that the post-Reform "peasantry" have at one and the same time created a group of horseless and cattleless households and "raised agricultural efficiency" by adopting the practice of manuring the soil (described in detail by Mr. V. V. in his Progressive Trends in Peasant Farming, pp. 123-160 and foll.), this quite clearly shows us that the "progressive trends" simply indicate the progress of the rural bourgeoisie. This is seen even more distinctly in the distribution of improved agricultural implements, data regarding which are also available in the Perm statistics. These data, however, have been collected not for the whole of the agricultural part of the uyezd, but only for its 3rd, 5th and 4th districts, comprising 15,076 households out of 23,574. The following improved implements are registered: winnowers 1,049, seed-sorters 225, threshers 354, totalling 1,628. They are distributed among the groups as follows:

 
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    We see also how profoundly the facts are distorted when the most varied types of occupations are lumped together under the heading of "industries" or "employments," when the "combination of agriculture with industries" is depicted (as, for example, by Messrs. V. V. and N.-on) as something uniform, identical in nature and precluding capitalism.

    Let us point in conclusion to the similarity of the data for Ekaterinburg Uyezd. If from the 59,709 households in the uyezd we subtract the landless (14,601 households), those having only meadow land (15,679 households), and those neglecting their allotments entirely (1,612 households), we get for the remaining 27,817 households the following data; the 20,000 households that cultivate no land or cultivate little (up to 5 dess.) have an aggregate area under crops of 41,000 dess. out of 124,000 dess., i.e., less than 1/3. On the other hand, 2,859 well-to-do households (with over 10 dess. under crops) have 49,751 dess. under crops, and 53,000 dess. of rented land out of a total of 67,000 dess. (including 47,000 dess. out of 55,000 dess. of rented peasant land). The distribution of the two opposite types of "industries" and also of the households employing farm labourers in Ekaterinburg Uyezd is shown to be quite similar to the distribution of these indices of differentiation for Krasnoufimsk Uyezd.

    We have at our disposal two volumes of statistics, for the Yelets and Trubchevsk uyezds of this gubernia, which classify the peasant households according to the number of draught horses owned.*

    Combining the two uyezds, we give the following joint data by groups.

 
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especially of allotment land, improved methods of farming, hiring of regular farm labourers and day labourers, here omitted, and the combining of commercial and industrial enterprises with agriculture. The scale of farming by the peasants here, however, is generally much smaller than in the above-quoted cases; there are far fewer big crop growers, and the differentiation of the peasantry, to judge by these two uyezds, therefore seems weaker. We say "seems" on the following grounds: firstly, though we observe here that the "peasantry" turn more rapidly into a rural proletariat and produce hardly perceptible groups of rural bourgeois, we have, on the other hand, already seen examples of the reverse, where this latter pole of the countryside becomes particularly perceptible. Secondly, here the differentiation of the agricultural peasantry (we confine ourselves in this chapter to the agricultural peasantry) is obscured by the "industries," the development of which is particularly extensive (40% of the families). And the "industrialists" here too include, besides a majority of wage-workers, a minority of merchants, buyers-up, entrepreneurs, proprietors, etc. Thirdly, here the differentiation of the peasantry is obscured because of the absence of data regarding the aspects of local agriculture that are most closely connected with the market. Commercial, market cultivation is not developed here to expand the crop areas to produce grain for sale but for the production of hemp. The largest number of commercial operations are bound up with this crop but the data of the tables given in the volume do not single out this particular aspect of agriculture among the various groups. "Hemp growing is the main source of the peasants' income" (that is, money income. Returns for Trubchevsk Uyezd, p. 5 of descriptions of villages, and many others), "the peasants devote their attention mainly to the cultivation of hemp. . . . All the manure . . . is used on the hemp fields" (ibid., 87), everywhere loans are contracted "on security of hemp," and debts are paid with hemp (ibid., passim). For the manuring of their hemp fields the well-to-do peasants buy manure from the poor (Returns for Orel Uyezd, Vol. VIII, Orel, 1895, pp. 91-105), hemp fields are leased out and rented in home and outside village communities (ibid., 260), and the processing of the hemp is done by part of the "industrial establishments" of whose concentration we have

 
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families, combining thousands of peasants who own no horses with thousands who own many, peasants who rent land and peasants who lease land, cultivators and non-cultivators, thousands of wage-workers and a minority of employers, etc. General "averages" for the entire neutral group are obtained, for example, by adding together landless households or those possessing 3 to 4 dess. per household (of allotment and purchased land in all) and households possessing 25, 50 and more dessiatines of allotment land and purchasing additionally tens and hundreds of dessiatines of land (Returns for Bobrov Uyezd, p. 336, Col. No. 148; for Novokhopersk Uyezd, p. 222) -- by adding together households with 0.8 to 2.7 animals per family and those with 12 to 21 animals (ibid.). Naturally, one cannot depict the differentiation of the peasantry with the aid of such "averages," and so we have to take the classification according to draught animals as the one most closely approximating classification according to scale of farming. We have at our disposal four volumes of returns with this classification (for Zemlyansk, Zadonsk, Nizhnedevitsk and Korotoyak uyezds), and from these we must choose Zadonsk Uyezd, because no separate returns are given for the others on the purchase and leasing of land according to groups. Below we shall give combined data for all these four uyezds and the reader will see that the conclusions they yield are the same. Here are general data for the groups in Zadonsk Uyezd (15,704 households, 106,288 persons of both sexes, 135,656 dess. of allotment land, 2,882 dess. of purchased land, 24,046 dess. of rented, and 6,482 dess. of land leased out).

 
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    The relations between the groups are similar here to those in the gubernias and uyezds already mentioned (concentration of purchased and of rented land, the transfer of allotment land from the poor peasants, who lease out land, to the renting and affluent peasants, etc.); but here the significance of the affluent peasants is very much smaller. The extremely negligible scale of peasant farming even raises the question, and naturally so, of whether the local peasants do not belong to the "industrialists" rather than to the tillers of the soil. Here are data on the "industries," first of all on their distribution according to groups:

 
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see what sort of industries these are. The Evaluation Returns on Peasant Landownership in Zemlyansk, Zadonsk, Korotoyak and Nizhnedevitsk Uyezds (Voronezh,1889) contains a list of all the trades of the "industrialists," working locally and away from home (222 trades in all), classified in groups according to allotment, and indicating the size of earnings in each trade. This list shows that the overwhelming majority of the peasant "industries" consist of work for hire. Of 24,134 "industrialists" in Zadonsk Uyezd, 14,135 are farm labourers, carters, shepherds and unskilled labourers, 1,813 are builders' labourers, 298 are town, factory and other workers, 446 are engaged in private service, 301 are beggars, etc. In other words, the overwhelming majority of the "industrialists" are members of the rural proletariat, allotment-holding wage-workers, who sell their labour-power to rural and industrial employers.* Thus, if we take the ratio between the different groups of the peasantry in a given gubernia or a given uyezd, we find everywhere the typical features of differentiation, both in the land-abundant steppe gubernias with their relatively huge peasant crop areas, and in the most land-poor localities with their miniature peasant "farms"; despite the most pro-

 
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found difference in agrarian and agricultural conditions, the ratio between the top group of the peasantry and the bottom is everywhere the same. If, however, we compare the different localities, in some we see with particular clarity the formation of rural entrepreneurs from among the peasants and in others we see the formation of a rural proletariat. It goes without saying that in Russia, as in every other capitalist country, the latter aspect of the process of differentiation embraces an incomparably larger number of small cultivators (and very likely a larger number of localities) than the former.

    For three uyezds of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia -- the Knyaginin, Makaryev and Vasil uyezds -- the Zemstvo house-to-house census returns have been reduced to one table, which divides the peasant farms (only allotment-holding and only of peasants living in their own villages) into five groups according to draught animals held (Material for the Evaluation of the Lands of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia. Economic Section. Vols. IV, IX and XII, Nizhni-Novgorod, 1888, 1889, 1890).

    Combining these three uyezds, we get the following data on the groups of households (in the three uyezds mentioned the data cover 52,260 households and 294,798 persons of both sexes. Allotment land -- 433,593 dess., purchased -- 51,960 dess., rented -- 86,007 dess., counting all kinds of rented land, allotment and non-allotment, arable and meadow land; land leased out -- 19,274 dess.):

 
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    Here too, consequently, we see that the well-to-do peasants, despite their better provision with allotment land (the percentage of allotment land in the top groups is larger than the percentage these groups constitute in the population), concentrate in their hands the purchased land (the well-to-do households, 9.6% of the total, have 46.2% of the purchased land, whereas the poor peasants, 2/3 of the households, have less than a quarter), as well as concentrate the rented land, and "gather" the allotment land leased by the poor. As a result of all this the actual distribution of the land in use by the "peasantry" is quite unlike the distribution of the allotment land. The horseless peasants have actually less land at their disposal than the allotment guaranteed them by law. The one-horse and two-horse peasants increase their holdings by only 10 to 30% (from 8.1 dess. to 9.4 dess., and from 10.5 dess. to 13.8 dess.), whereas the well-to-do peasants increase their holdings one and a half times to double. While the differences in the allotment land of the groups are negligible, the differences in the actual scale of cultivation are enormous, as can be seen from the above-quoted data on animals and from the following data on area under crops;

 
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    As the reader will have observed, in studying the process of the differentiation of the peasantry we use exclusively Zemstvo house-to-house census statistics, if they cover more or less extensive areas, if they give sufficiently detailed information on the most important indices of differentiation, and if (which is particularly important) they have been processed in such a way as to make it possible to single out the various groups of peasants according to their economic strength. The data given above, relating to seven gubernias, exhaust the Zemstvo statistical material that answers these conditions and that we have been able to use. For the sake of completeness, let us now point briefly to the remaining, less complete, data of a similar kind (i.e., based on house-to-house censuses).

 
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rented land, despite the fact that those with many horses have an amount of allotment land above the average. Households with 3 or more horses, 10.7% of the total number of households and 16.1 % of the population, possess 18.3% of all allotment land, 43.4% of the purchased land, 26.2% of the rented land (to judge from the area under rye and oats on rented land), and 29.4% of the total "industrial buildings." On the other hand 51.3 %, the horseless and one-horse households, constituting 40.1% of the population, have only 33.2% of the allotment land, 13.8% of the purchased land, 20.8% of the rented land (in the sense indicated above), and 28.8% of the "industrial buildings." In other words, here too the well-to-do peasants "gather" the land and combine commercial and industrial "trades" with agriculture, while the poor abandon the land and turn into wage-workers (the percentage of "persons engaged in industries" diminishes as we pass from the bottom group to the top -- from 26.6 % among the horseless peasants to 7.8% among those having 3 and more horses). The incompleteness of these data compels us to omit them from the following summary of the material on the differentiation of the peasantry.

    For the same reason we omit the data on part of Kozelets Uyezd, Chernigov Gubernia (Material for Evaluating Farmlands, Compiled by the Chernigov Statistical Department of the Gubernia Zemstvo Board, Vol. V, Chernigov, 1882; the data on the number of draught animals are classified for 8,717 households of the black-earth district of the uyezd). The relationships between the groups are the same here too: 36.8% of the households, with no draught animals and constituting 28.8% of the population, have 21% of their own and allotment land and 7% of the rented land, but account for 63% of the total land let out on lease by these 8,717 households. On the other hand, 14.3% of the households, with 4 and more draught animals and constituting 17.3 % of the population, have 33.4% of their own and allotment land and 32.1% of the rented land, and account for only 7% of the land let out on lease. Unfortunately, the other households (owning 1 to 3 draught animals) are not subdivided into smaller groups.

    In Material for an Investigation of the Land-Usage and Domestic Life of the Rural Population of Irkutsk and Yenisei

 
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Gubernias there is a very interesting table (classification according to number of draught horses) of peasant and settler farms in four regions of Yenisei Gubernia (Vol. III, Irkutsk,1893, p.730 and foll.). It is very interesting to observe that the relationship between the well-to-do Siberian and the settler (and in this relationship the most ardent Narodnik would hardly dare to seek the famous community principle!) is essentially the same as that between our well-to-do village community members and their horseless and one-horse "brethren." By combining the settlers and the peasant old-timers (such a combination is necessary because the former serve as labour-power for the latter), we get the familiar features of the top and bottom groups. Of the households, 39.4%,the bottom groups (those with no horses, and with 1 or 2), constituting 24% of the population, have only 6.2% of the total arable and 7.1% of the total animals, whereas 36.4% of the households, those with 5 and more horses, constituting 51.2% of the population, have 73% of the arable and 74.5% of the total cattle. The latter groups (5 to 9,10 and more horses), cultivating 15 to 36 dess. per household, resort extensively to wage-labour (30 to 70% of the farms employ wage-workers), whereas the bottom three groups, cultivating 0 -- 0.2 -- 3 -- 5 dess. per household provide workers (20 -- 35 -- 59% of the farms). The data on the renting and leasing out of land are the only exception we have met to the rule (of the concentration of rented land in the hands of the well-to-do), and this is the sort of exception that proves the rule. The point is that in Siberia there are none of the conditions that created this rule, there is no compulsory and "equalitarian" allotment of land, there is no established private property in land. The well-to-do peasant neither purchases nor rents land, but appropriates it (at least that has been the case till now); the leasing out and the renting of land are rather of the character of neighbourly exchange, and that is why the group data on the renting and the leasing of land display no consistency.*

 
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so, we have to split up these groups so as to take in each locality an equal percentage of households. Let us agree to take 20% of the households for the well-to-do peasants and 50% for the poor, i.e., let us form out of the top groups one of 20% of the households, and out of the bottom groups one of 50%. Let us illustrate this method by an example. Suppose we have five groups of the following proportions, from the bottom to the top: 30%, 25%, 20%, 15% and 10% of the households (S = 100%). To form a bottom group, we take the first group and 4/5 of the second group (30 + ^(25x4)/₅ = 50%), and to form a top group we take the last group and 2/3 of the penultimate group (10 + ^(15x2)/₃ = 20%), the percentages for area under crops, animals, implements, etc., being determined, of course, in the same way. That is to say, if the percentages for area under crops corresponding to the above-stated percentages of the households are as follows: 15%, 20%, 20%, 21% and 24% (S = 100%), then our top group, 20% of the households, will account for (24 + ^(21x2)/₃ = 38%) of the area under crops, while our bottom group, 50% of the households, will account for (15 + ^(20x4)/₅ = 31%) of the area under crops. Obviously, in splitting up the groups in this manner, we do not change by one iota the actual relationship between the bottom and top strata of the peasantry.* This splitting up is necessary, firstly, because in this way, instead of 4 -- 5 -- 6 -- 7 different groups, we get three large groups with clearly defined indices**; secondly, because only in this way are data on the differentiation of the peasantry in the most varied localities under the most varied conditions comparable.

 
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    To judge the interrelation between the groups we take the following data, the most important on the question of differentiation: 1) number of households; 2) number of persons of both sexes of the peasant population; 3) amount of allotment land; 4) purchased land; 5) rented land; 6) land leased out ; 7) total land owned or in use by the group (allotment + purchased + rented - land leased out); 8) area under crops; 9) number of draught animals; 10) total number of animals; 11) number of households employing farm labourers; 12) number of households with employments (singling out as far as possible those forms of "employment" among which work for hire, sale of labour-power predominates); 13) commercial and industrial establishments and 14) improved agricultural implements. The items given in italics ("leasing of land" and "employments") are of negative significance, since they indicate the decline of the farm, the ruin of the peasant and his conversion into a worker. All the other data are of positive significance, since they indicate the expansion of the farm and the conversion of the peasant into a rural entrepreneur.

    On all these points we compute for each group of farms the percentages of the total for the uyezd or for several uyezds of one gubernia, and then ascertain (by the method we have described) what percentage of the land, area under crops, animals, etc., falls to the 20% of the households of the top groups and to the 50% of the households of the bottom groups.*

    We give a table drawn up in this manner covering the data for 21 uyezds in 7 gubernias, with a total of 558,570 peasant farms and a population of 3,523,418 persons of both sexes.