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speech just quoted. It was being said down on theVolga: "The government keeps us peasants jammed.The fault is with the Romanovs; the tsar has sold Russiato Japan. For three hundred years the Romanovs havedone nothing for the peasants, and the grand dukes donothing but drink ... as for us we have no one to setour hopes on, but we must take all by force." The dark,inscrutable peasant mass clearly was not the faithful,conservative bulwark which most of the authoritiesimagined when they gave it specially strong representationin the Duma.Stolypin dissolved the second Duma (cf. p. 69) anddrastically reduced the peasants' votes and deputies(1907). Immediately before he had begun his agrarianreforms, typically enough by government decree not bypassage through the Duma.Already before 1905 there had been much discussionof the advantages and disadvantages of the commune.Stolypin had expressed himself emphatically against it."The natural counterweight to the communal principleis individual ownership. It is also a guarantee of order,since the small owner is the cell on which rests all stableorder in the state." That, in a nutshell, was the policyof the 1906 and subsequent agrarian legislation.The first object of the new policy was to break downthe control of the commune over the peasant's life andmethods of cultivation and to substitute consolidatedholdings for the scattered strips in the common fields,strips that in some villages were held hereditarily, inmost on a tenure involving redistribution at variableintervals among the members of the commune: in thecase of these latter the initial aim was to convert theminto hereditary holdings.The second object was to facilitate the purchase orrenting of land from the gentry, the state, and other nonpeasantlandowners and the establishment of separate,compact farms. To this end reforms were introducedin the working of the Peasants' Land Bank, which hadbeen founded by the government in 1883 but had infact done little to assist the purchase of land by individualpeasants owing to its high rates of interest. Rural credit133