subject and decided in the autumn to go abroad and study the matter on the spot, so that he might not have with this question the experience that had so often met him with various questions in the past. How many times in a discussion he had just begun to understand his opponent's thought and to expound his own, when suddenly the question would be asked: "But Kaufmann, Jones, Du Bois, Mitchell? You have not read them? Read them, they have worked out this question."
He saw clearly now that Kaufmann and Mitchell could not tell him anything. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia possessed an admirable soil and admirable workmen, and that in certain cases, as with the muzhik by the roadside, the land and the laborers could produce abundantly, but that in the majority of cases when capital was spent upon them in the European manner, they produced little, and that this resulted entirely from the fact that the laborers like to work, and work well only in their own way, and that this contrast was not the result of chance, but was permanent and based on the very nature of the people. He thought that the Russian people, which was destined to colonize and cultivate immense unoccupied spaces, would consciously, until all these lands were occupied, hold to these methods as necessary to them, and that these methods were not so bad as they were generally considered. And he wanted to demonstrate this theoretically in his book, and practically on his estate.
CHAPTER XXX
Toward the end of September the lumber was brought for the construction of a barn on the artel land, and the butter was sold, and showed a profit. The new administration, on the whole, worked admirably in practice, or at least it seemed so to Levin.
But in order to explain the whole subject into a clear
