Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 160, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 July 1917 — The Russian Peasants. [ARTICLE]

The Russian Peasants.

The taking over of some of the czar’s landed possessions recalls the fact that Albert J. Beveridge, in his book, “The Russian Advance,” published a few years ago and in which he gathered political, social and economic facts, states that evdn then the Russian peasant was looking forward “to a second emancipation, giving them new additions of land absolutely and without any cost whatever to themselves.” When the peasant ceased to be a slave he did not comprehend that he was still not free to use his master’s tools or to cut from the landowners’s forests timber for his use, “The most curious situations,” says Mr. Beveridge, “are even yet arising, growing out of this inability of the peasant to comprehend the obligation as well as the benefits of his emancipation. Liberties are taken by the Russian peasant with the property of a Russian proprietor which would not be tolerated for an instant by an American in the same situation. In all of this there is not the slightest impertinence, not the least intention to wrong the landed proprietor, nor the faintest conception on the part of the peasant that there is anything Immoral In what he does. He or his fathers did the like before, and he just continues to do the same as a matter of coursei”