Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 62, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1912 — STOLYPIN IS LAUDED [ARTICLE]

STOLYPIN IS LAUDED

Agrarian Reforms Have Brought Peace to Peasants. Millions Now Possess Farms —Socialistic and Revolutionary Agitators Vainly Appeal to These Contented Yeomen. St. Petersburg. Agrarian reform begins to bear good fruit, a correspondent writes. It was the greatest work of Peter A. Stolypin, premier of Russia, whom Dmitri Bogroff assassinated in the czar’s very presence at a gala performance in the Municipal theater at Kiev last September. “While quelling a bloody revolution Stdiy&ih brought about a peaceful one,” say those today who were the premier’s bitterest enemies. His great plan of letting the peasants hold land in perpetuity, which Stolypin inaugurated in 1906; bias' gfv ; en land of their own to 32,000,000 peasants; th'jy possess 3,000,000 square miles in European Russia and 7,500,000 square miles in Siberia. And the face of the land has been changed. The peasant now lives on his property Instead of miles away, as under the old communal system, when all the land was redistributed every three years. Besides, the owner works intensively now, for he takes pride in his land.

Here again Stolypin’s far-seeing brain came into play. He planned that mujik should be a speculator in the world’s grain trade. He opened hundreds of farming schools and hundreds more are being founded. Besides, Stolypin arranged that money should be advanced to the peasant farmer at low rate of interest, 4% per cent. — something unknown here hitherto. The imperial bank builds granaries and keeps the peasant informed on grain prices by posting official quotations several times a week in railroad stations, inns and markets. Co-opera-tive stores have been opened in the markets; the peasants can buy agricultural machines on easy terms; mechanical experts give instruction ■gratis to The results are as obvious as-benefi-cent. A sturdy, hardworking yeoman class is slowly but surely growing in Russia; this in six years, and the plan will not be worked out completely for several years more. The fact is becoming clearer and clearer that agrarian reform has done more to calm Russia than all the repressive dictates from the city. Socialistic and revolutionary agitators have no success where the mujik owns his land, because it is all he really cares for in this life and once he has it he will run no risks. A tremendous outcry against Stolypin arose when he set this 'Work on

foot; all political parties ridiculed and abused it He never could have carried It out had he not interested the dowager empress in it.