He saw now distinctly that Kauffmann and Michelli had nothing to tell him. He knew what he wanted.
He saw that Russia had splendid land, splendid laborers, and that in certain cases, as at the peasant's
on the way to Sviiazhsky's, the produce raised by the laborers and the land is great - in the majority
of cases when capital is applied in the European way the produce is small, and that this simply arises
from the fact that the laborers want to work and work well only in their own peculiar way, and that this
antagonism is not incidental but invariable, and has its roots in the national spirit. He thought that the
Russian people whose task it was to colonize and cultivate vast tracts of unoccupied land, consciously
adhered, till all their land was occupied, to the methods suitable to their purpose, and that their methods
were by no means so bad as was generally supposed. And he wanted to prove this theoretically in his
book and practically on his land.