The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-08-02

I be found in the Northwest. and they | could make enormous sales for our great ! factories.
 These drummers should travel over the | country from village to village and fros. | fair to fair. There are many fairs and markets held at regular intervals all over | Russia. The men should have samples | of their machines and supply in stock at the port. The Russian wants to see | what he buys, but he is willing to pay good price and he wants the best. In a | future letter I will write of the Nijni | Novgorod fair. the biggest fair of the world, which would make a good head | quarters for such work.
 Russian Villages as Customers. | Our drummers will find this market a | curious one. They will need to stay here | for months before they understand their possible customers. In America you sell to the individual farmer. Here a vast business is done with the government. and the towns and villages, in addition to that with private persons.
 Russia is country of villages. The people do not live in houses scattered over the farms. They are collected together in little hamiets. usually composed of log cabins, containing from few hundred to
 a thousand people. They have their sta- bles and cattle in the villages and drive the latter out to the fields. They 20 out to work in gangs every morning and walk back every night.
 Much of the land Is owned by the will lages as such, and not by the individuals living in them. The head men of each town divide up the land from year to year, giving so much to each family, and the crops are divided at the end of the season.
 The village council fixes the time of sowing the crops and of gathering them, and it may buy machinery to aid in the work. Thus. little town may have a half dozen threshers. mowers and reap CTS, and a good American drummer may get big order at one clip. He may in- troduce blows rakes and other small tools at the same time working each lt- the community as lobbyist does legis- lature.
 Russian Lands and Land Owners.
 Indeed, the drummer will have to under stand the system of Russian land owner ship in order to do his work well. He will find that about one-third of all the land here belongs to the state and impe- rial family The Czar owns more than 400 900 acres in Europe al0ee. Much of this land is under cultivation, and his agents buy farming machinery in enor- nous quantities. Many of them are sus- ceptible to persuasion. and judicious present at the right time will help sale
 A second third of European Russia be- longs to the peasants. It came to them
 
 at about the same time as our abolition movement. We freed 100000 negroes. at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and a big national debt. Russia freed fifty millions without losing one life, and it gave every man, women and child, on the average. about seven acres of land. It did not give the land to the individuals, however, but to the villages, and these villages apportion them out from time to time among the families.
 This land was taken from the nobles. but they were paid for it. The serfs had been working the lands and had the villages upon them. The peasants were given the villages and enough land about them to average thirty-three acres to the family. so that village of a hundred families got thirty-three hundred acres of land in common. This land Is still so held, and the village as a whole is re- sponsible for the taxes. It Is bound to pay so much for the land. the payments running over forty-nine years. Some vil- lages have purchased their lands out right Others are still paying for it. AL together, from such payments and from the lands granted the crown peasants the government now gets about 900 a year.
 The Mobiles Have Big Estates.
 Of the private lands of Russia about three-fourths is owned by the nobles. Some of them have tens of thousands of acres. the average size of the estates in
 the North being from 15O00 to 10000 acres and in the south much smaller. There are also many peasants and quite a large number of merchants who have