When the Emancipation question was raised there was a considerable diversity of opinion as to the effect which the abolition of serfage would have on the material interests of the two classes directly concerned. The Press and "the young generation" took an optimistic view, and endeavoured to prove that the proposed change would be beneficial alike to proprietors and to peasants. Science, it was said, has long since decided that free labour is immensely more productive than slavery or serfage, and the principle has been already proved to demonstration in the countries of Western Europe. In all those countries modern agricultural progress began with the emancipation of the serfs, and increased productivity was everywhere the immediate result of improvements in the method of culture. Thus the poor light soils of Germany, France, and Holland have been made to produce more than the vaunted "black earth" of Russia. And from these ameliorations the land-owning class has everywhere derived the chief advantages. Are not the landed proprietors of England—the country in which serfage was first abolished—the richest in the world? And is not the proprietor of a few hundred morgen in Germany often richer than the Russian noble who has thousands of dessyatins? By these and similar plausible arguments the Press endeavoured to prove to the proprietors that they ought, even in their own interest, to undertake the emancipation of the serfs. Many proprietors, however, showed little faith in the abstract principles of political economy and the vague teachings of history as interpreted by the contemporary periodical literature. They could not always refute the ingenious arguments adduced by the men of more sanguine temperament, but they felt convinced that their prospects were not nearly so bright as these men represented them to be. They believed that Russia was a peculiar country, and the Russians a peculiar people. The lower classes in England, France, Holland, and Germany were well known to be laborious and enterprising, while the Russian peasant was notoriously lazy, and would certainly, if left to himself, not do more work than was absolutely necessary to keep him from starving. Free labour might be more profitable than serfage in countries where the upper classes possessed traditional practical knowledge and abundance of capital, but in Russia the proprietors had neither the practical knowledge nor the ready money necessary to make the proposed ameliorations in the system of agriculture. To all this it was added that a system of emancipation by which the peasants should receive land and be made completely independent of the landed proprietors had nowhere been tried on such a large scale.
There were thus two diametrically opposite opinions regarding the economic results of the abolition of serfage, and we have now to examine which of these two opinions has been confirmed by experience.
Let us look at the question first from the point of view of the land-owners.
