Of all the ordinary means of gaining a livelihood--with the exception perhaps of mining--agriculture is the most laborious, and is never voluntarily adopted by men who have not been accustomed to it from their childhood.
The life of a pastoral race, on the contrary, is a perennial holiday, and I can imagine nothing except the prospect of starvation which could induce men who live by their flocks and herds to make the transition to agricultural life.
The prospect of starvation is, in fact, the cause of the transition--probably in all cases, and certainly in the case of the Bashkirs.

So long as they had abundance of pasturage they never thought of tilling the soil.

Their flocks and herds supplied them with all that they required, and enabled them to lead a tranquil, indolent existence.
No great legislator arose among them to teach them the use of the plough and the sickle, and when they saw the Russian peasants on their borders laboriously ploughing and reaping, they looked on them with compassion, and never thought of following their example.

But an impersonal legislator came to them--a very severe and tyrannical legislator, who would not brook disobedience--I mean Economic Necessity.

By the encroachments of the Ural Cossacks on the east, and by the ever-advancing wave of Russian colonisation from the north and west, their territory had been greatly diminished.