142 143 THE CLASS STRUGGLE fic is aggravated by delays incident to unloading coal trucks and picking up fallen horses.
Real estate used as coal yards is wasted. If coal in cities were used for heating only and for eking out hydro electric power, great areas of water front could be set free for better The Land Question in the Russian Revolution uses.
By The agrarian question is one of the most delicate and important questions of the Russian Revolution. As we shall see later, its solution involves not only the welfare and the destinies of the many millions of peasants in Russia, but also the destinies of the entire Russian Revolution. Therefore a clear understanding of the agrarian question in Russia is necessary to everyone who would understand the Russian Revolution or forecast its probable outcome.
Because all the ramifications of waste cannot be abolished outright, parts of the country being beyond the reach both of transmission of power from the mine mouth and of hydroelectric power, the point is to reduce the waste to a minimum, leaving the tracks free so far as practicable for transporting heating coal, food and other essentials.
Millions of horse power are at all times wasting undeveloped in our streams. At recurring intervals floods waste lives and interrupt food production, sometimes doing permanent injury to great agricultural areas. By engineering measures of prevention, control and water storage, our floods could in large measure be saved for power production. These are no longer unsolved problems or insuperable difficulties.
Without a unified federal plan there will, however, inevitably occur in the new field of power production the same chaos that we have suffered in the struggle of privateiy owned railroads against all development of our water ways.
The monopolist sellers of coal power will have the same incentive for deliberately choking off the future development and use of water power. An exception to the general choking practice is the use of power from the Great Falls of the Missouri in Montana by the St. Paul railroad. The exception is, however, so unique as to prove the rule.
The roots of the agrarian movement in Russia, in particular, and of the Russian agrarian question, in general, are to be found in the agrarian conditions prevailing up to the Revolution, among the peasants and the great landed proprietors. And in the study of these conditions, most importance must be attached to those prevailing in the fifty governments of European Russia, from which exclude Poland and Finland. These fifty governments include two thirds of the entire population of Russia; in them the power of the great noble landholders was greater than elsewhere, and in them there was a greater. lack of the necessary lands for the peasants, and a greater poverty. Finland has its own special agrarian conditions, which are being decided independently, moreover, by the Finnish people. Poland likewise appears to give promise of an independent solution of the agrarian question, in certain fundamental respects not unlike the Russian. The Caucasus has a very distinct agrarian situation, requiring a peculiar regulation, but there also, because of the slight extent of the holdings of the noble landholders, the agrarian question is not so pressing as in the above mentioned fifty governments. As for Siberia and the Central Asiatic part of Russia, these huge domains have never played an important part in the agrarian movement, for the simple reason that their vast territories have been inhabited by a comparatively thin population of peasants, who either suffered little or not at all from lack of