Note 75 — Chapter VII · THE WAGES IN THE RURAL DISTRICTS.

Optimism is inborn in the Russian; to whatever creed or party he may belong, things ever appear to him as he would like them to be. The Russian peasantist must not therefore be censured for his misconception of this most typical figure of the modern Russian village. The peasant who agrees to do the full work of cultivating and harvesting a tract of the landlord’s field appears to Mr. Euzhakoff as a tenant, with the only peculiarity that “the tenant takes his share in money, while leaving the landlord to take the crops” (loc. cit., pp. 26-27). This confusion reminds one to some extent of the attempts of certain economists to represent the workingman as capitalist, and the capitalist as workingman. There is, however, one extenuating circumstance that may be urged on behalf of the well-meaning author, in the hopelessness of the task he has undertaken with the best intentions, viz., to demonstrate that the debilitated Russian Capitalism, condemned before its birth by history, is unable to hold its ground in the contest with the triumphant small peasant culture.