The difficulty of making the peasant respect the principle of private
ownership of land is due to many causes. The most liberal minded landowners
were usually those who spent their winters in various occupations in large
cities and used their estates as summer homes and a partial source of
income. The work of supervision was only too often intrusted to utterly
unscrupulous and uneducated managers belonging to the peasant class, while
the neighboring peasants were employed as day laborers in the field and
garden. This kind of labor was already available, because peasants were
unable to derive sufficient income from their own land to pay the heavy
taxes and to support their families. Scarcely any landowners understood
anything of agriculture and few paid any attention to it. I know splendid
estates which brought in miserable incomes, not normal even under the
antiquated system of four year crop rotation and quite absurd if measured
by standards of modern American farming, yet sufficient to place at the
disposal of the owners a splendid mansion in Moscow or Petrograd and a no
less splendid summer home on their estate. There, during the hot summer
days, the owners were enjoying their comfort in idleness and talking of
reforms necessary for the benefit of the peasants, while peasant women were
cutting the wheat for them with sickles, stooping and sweating under the
scorching rays of the sun. The superintendents of those estates enriched
themselves at the expense of the blind or careless and carefree owners
under the very eyes of the peasants who hated the superintendents, pitied
or despised the liberal owners, as the case might be, and gloomily compared
their own poverty and labor with the ease and wealth of their employers.

The more thrifty and less liberal owners, who remained the greater part
of the year on their estates, were perhaps more respected but still less
liked. Any attempt at careful management of the estate was invariably
considered to be a sign of stinginess or of hardheartedness. The idea of