Now these pursuits were necessary for him that life might not be too uniformly bright.

Taking up his manuscript, reading through what he had written, he found with pleasure that the work was worth his working at.

Many of his old ideas seemed to him superfluous and extreme, but many blanks became distinct to him when he reviewed the whole thing in his memory.

He was writing now a new chapter on the causes of the present disastrous condition of agriculture in Russia.

He maintained that the poverty of Russia arises not merely from the anomalous distribution of landed property and misdirected reforms, but that what had contributed of late years to this result was the civilization from without abnormally grafted upon Russia, especially facilities of communication, as railways, leading to centralization in towns, the development of luxury, and the consequent development of manufactures, credit and its accompaniment of speculation--all to the detriment of agriculture.