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to see that all this is in the last result squeezed out of the
workers. Besides this, railroad statistics show that the chief
travellers are the peasants, who are forced to use the cars, not
in profitable enterprise, but in their wanderings in search of
the means of subsistence, out of which a heavy payment has
to be made for railway tickets. About three-fourths of the
peasants lead this nomadic kind of life.
In the most intimate connection with the railroads are the
banks, as is natural in a pre-eminently agricultural country.
The money market and the railway traffic correspond in their
rise and fall. It is from the great banking institutions that
have risen in the last few decades that the money flood is
periodically sent out to all the villages in the country, and
returns thither, after having finished its work of nominally
providing capital for agricultural operations, but really of
fleecing the peasants. This is partly through a shameless
system of usury by which the mushiks have to pay 200-300 per
cent. interest, and partly by custom, somewhat akin to what
used to be forbidden in England as “forestalling” and
“regrating.” Immediately after harvest agents appear on the
scene, and take advantage of the peasant’s need of ready cash
wherewith to pay their taxes to buy up their produce at a
shamefully low rate; they must have money to pay their taxes
or they will be flogged nearly to death by the police. Before
the new year provisions run out, and the mushiks are face to
face with the alternatives of buying back their produce at
exorbitant prices, leaving their homes to look for work
elsewhere, or begging.
The moneylenders who thrive so well by draining the
lifeblood of the peasants are usually known as kulacks, literally
fists. Some interesting figures have been collected by several
Russian authorities as to the extent of these gentlemen’s
operations. It seems that the peasant, in his distress, applies
to anyone who has money to help him, and among his creditors
are found merchants, priests, deacons, nuns, village scribes,
surgeons, noblemen, military men, teachers, and such peasants
as have managed to get a footing above their fellows. But the
professional money-lenders, or kulacks, are his great resource.
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