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The ispravniki were further empowered to distrain should the fine not be paid. Thereupon began a most iniquitous series of proceedings. Dressed in their little brief authority, these tyrants played such fantastic tricks that misery and ruin were brought to hundreds of happy homes. All through the winters of 1882 and 1883 it was quite a common thing to see in the villages auctions of the effects of Stundists—their bedding, clothes, and sticks of furniture being sold to liquidate these scandalous fines. We have before us a list of the Stundists fined and imprisoned in the one village of Nerubalsk. During the space of eighteen months, twelve families here were fined the incredible sum of two thousand six hundred roubles, equivalent in our currency to £260. One man, more than usually obstinate in his views, was fined altogether over seven hundred roubles. His name is Khariton Konotop, and he and all his brethren, rather than pay these iniquitous fines, went to prison, and had their effects sold by the police. The deeds done in Nerubalsk were only a sample of the proceedings in scores of other villages where Stundists lived. But the clergy were not yet satisfied. Another highly-placed minister of religion, writing to the Kief Ecclesiastical Consistory in 1883, states that these acts of the local authority cannot cope with the evil, and that until the "great powers" (meaning the Holy Synod and the provincial governors) take decisive action, there can be no hope for any mitigation of the evils of Stundism. "It is a national evil, this Stundism," he writes; "it is destructive of our best and holiest institutions; it aims its shafts at the State as well as at the Church; it seeks to bring about anarchy and Nihilism, and it is therefore the paramount duty of provincial governors to leave no stone unturned in their efforts to purify our beloved fatherland from the stain of these dangerous disturbers of society." The bishops took precisely this view, and either in 1883 or 1884 they petitioned the Holy Synod to move provincial