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system, allow me to ask?”
“There it is—the labor force—the chief element in agriculture,”
thought Levin.
“With laborers.”
“The laborers won’t work well, and won’t work with good imple-
ments. Our laborer can do nothing but get drunk like a pig, and when
he’s drunk he ruins everything you give him. He makes the horses ill
with too much water, cuts good harness, barters the tires of the wheels
for drink, drops bits of iron into the thrashing machine, so as to break it.
He loathes the sight of anything that’s not after his fashion. And that’s
how it is the whole level of husbandry has fallen. Lands gone out of
cultivation, overgrown with weeds, or divided among the peasants, and
where millions of bushels were raised you get a hundred thousand; the
wealth of the country has decreased. If the same thing had been done,
but with care that...”
And he proceeded to unfold his own scheme of emancipation by
means of which these drawbacks might have been avoided.
This did not interest Levin, but when he had finished, Levin went
back to his first position, and, addressing Sviazhsky, and trying to draw
him into expressing his serious opinion:-
“That the standard of culture is falling, and that with our present
relations to the peasants there is no possibility of famling on a rational
system to yield a profit—that’s perfectly true,” said he.
“I don’t believe it,” Sviazhsky replied quite seriously; “all I see is
that we don’t know how to cultivate the land, and that our system of
agriculture in the serf days was by no means too high, but too low. We
have no machines, no good stock, no efficient supervision; we don’t
even know how to keep accounts. Ask any landowner; he won’t be able
to tell you what crop’s profitable, and what’s not.”
“Italian bookkeeping,” said the gentleman of the gray whiskers
ironically. “You may keep your books as you like, but if they spoil
everything for you, there won’t be any profit.”
“Why do they spoil things? A poor thrashing machine, or your
Russian presser, they will break, but my steam press they don’t break.
A wretched Russian nag they’ll ruin, but keep good dray-horses—
they won’t ruin them. And so it is all round. We must raise our farming
to a higher level.”
“Oh, if one only had the means to do it, Nikolay Ivanovitch! It’s all
very well for you; but for me, with a son to keep at the university, lads
to be educated at the high school—how am I going to buy these dray-
horses?”
“Well, that’s what the land banks are for.”
“To get what’s left me sold by auction? No, thank you.”
“I don’t agree that it’s necessary or possible to raise the level of
agriculture still higher,” said Levin. “I devote myself to it, and I have
means, but I can do nothing. As to the banks, I don’t know to whom
they’re any good. For my part, anyway, whatever I’ve spent money on
in the way of husbandry, it has been a loss: stock—a loss, machinery—
a loss.”
“That’s true enough,” the gentleman with the gray whiskers chimed
in, positively laughing with satisfaction.
“And I’m not the only one,” pursued Levin. “I mix with all the
neighboring landowners, who are cultivating their land on a rational
system; they all, with rare exceptions, are doing so at a loss. Come, tell
us how does your land do—does it pay?” said Levin, and at once in
Sviazhsky’s eyes he detected that fleeting expression of alarm which
he had noticed whenever he had tried to penetrate beyond the outer
chambers of Sviazhsky’s mind.