of land placed at his disposal by his lord, had more personal freedom than the peasant liable to the corvée.
A class of free operatives early came into existence side by side with those who remained serfs, so that at the opening of the nineteenth century about one half of all operatives were freeman. The employment of free workmen was more profitable to the entrepreneur, and for this reason the liberation of the peasantry became a demand of those who desired the strengthening of manufacturing industry.
In proportion as manufacture developed under Alexander, and in proportion as European technical skill found place in the factories, the opposition between agriculture and industry, and also the reciprocal dependence of agriculture and industry, forced themselves on the attention. Down to the present day, agrarianism and industrialism have continued to find exclusive champions. In Russia, as in the west, there were protectionists and free-traders, and members of both parties advocated the maintenance of serfdom. In conformity with his general foreign policy, Alexander adhered to the continental system, but Russian conditions and the increasing need for manufactured articles unobtainable in Russia gave the impulse towards a more liberal tariff policy. Simultaneously, Russian manufacturing industry underwent modifications in a similar direction, the operatives being more and more generally recruited from among the free and comparatively mobile elements in town and country. In 1825, fifty-four per cent. of the workmen were engaged by free contract.
Under Nicholas I, industry made rapid progress, Moscow and its environs becoming the centre of the growing industrialisation and capitalisation, especially as regards textiles. Nicholas declared that serfdom in Russia prevented commerce and industry from flourishing as they might otherwise have done. He had derived this opinion from Storch, his teacher in political economy, the most notable adherent in Russia of Adam Smith. It is significant of the political condition of the country that Storch's leading work, Cours dc l'économie politique, could not be published in Russian, although the tsar shared the author's views. For a long period the official tendency in political economy had been to favour the agrarian outlook on industry, for it was still held that agriculture was a "natural," manufacture an "artificial" source of popular well-being, and manufacture therefore was no more than
