"Your excellency, I find that one cannot discuss the least question of pedagogy or economics in Russia without touching high politics."
"Very true. You may see from that to what a pass we have come. We have been going backward uninterruptedly for the last twenty years. The nobility is losing its estates because it has not learned to manage them, and has not recovered to this very day from the abolition of serfdom. But the land does not fall into the hands of the peasants, who need it, but into those of the merchants. The agricultural proletariat remains unprovided for. The peasant cannot raise the taxes. The soil here gives fourfold returns; in Germany eightfold returns. It pays at the same time, this side of the Dnieper, ten to fifteen per cent. annually for tenure; in England two to three per cent.; in France and Germany four to five per cent.; and on the other side of the Dnieper, where long tenures are in vogue, five to six per cent. Remember that this is a yearly tenure. It is a premium on soil robbery. Sixty rubles for the tenure of one desyatin. The peasant cannot raise that amount, and yet he is compelled at the same time to pay taxes. Year after year hunger visits entire governments, for the peasants are utterly impoverished and have not even seed. With an empty stomach and a dark mind the peasant must bear family, communal, and government burdens."
"I read something similar two years ago in a book by an Englishman."
"You mean _The Russian Conditions_, by Lanin, from the _Fortnightly Review_."
"Quite right, your excellency. But I considered the description overdrawn. Moreover, I cannot conceive how abuses could be so clearly painted as in that book, the statements of which your excellency now confirms, without any prospects of redress."
"The Czar is living behind a Wall of China. He has never visited a 'duma' (city council), never a zemstvo (district council), never a village, never an industrial centre. He is kept by the camarilla in constant dread, and is so closely watched that he sees not a finger's-breadth of heaven, much less of earth. He rejoices when an occasional quarrel breaks out among the ministers, for he then has the opportunity to learn here and there a fragment of truth."