Russia was as bad as the worst form of negro slavery in America.
Nicholas had meditated putting a stop to the dreadful social condition of his empire that serfdom involved; but it was left for his son to carry out the great reform. This was done in the year 1861. The landowners received an indemnity from the State, and the serfs were set free from all bondage to them; at the same time the land of the village commune was made the actual property of the peasants.
Three years later (a.d. 1864), Alexander released the clergy from their caste bondage. The Church was now thrown open to all classes. Nevertheless, as there were no parsonages and glebes attached to the parishes, and since each pope's house and the land he cultivated was his own property, it still remained necessary for a newly appointed priest to marry his predecessor's daughter—unless his own father was a priest whom he might succeed—in order to have a house to live in and a field to live by.
Some other slight changes have since been effected in the social life of the people. Count Dmitri Tolstoi, when both High Procurator and Minister of the Interior, multiplied the parish schools and put them under the direction of the local clergy. In the reign of Alexander ii. there were as many as 20,000 such schools—on paper. Subsequently the Zemstvos established secular schools, before which the church schools shrank up and withered away. One of the reactionary measures of the notorious Pobiêdonostsef was the restoration of the church schools. In 1884 he stated to the Holy Synod that the parish schools were especially intended to strengthen the people in the foundations of the faith! These schools were then placed Tmder the direction of the Holy Synod.[1]
There is tragic irony in the fate of the tsar who conferred the greatest boons on his people. Alexander had found his people really no nation, divided by a gulf of social cleavage, the workers mere bondsmen to the lords. At one
- ↑ Leroy Beaulieu, part iii. p. 265.
