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 farming 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.