Page 1398 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

them, seemed of no importance, that in the question of
the elections too he assumed and tried to find some serious
significance.
Sergey Ivanovitch explained to him the meaning and

object of the proposed revolution at the elections. The
marshal of the province in whose hands the law had placed
the control of so many important public functions—the
guardianship of wards (the very department which was
giving Levin so much trouble just now), the disposal of
large sums subscribed by the nobility of the province, the
high schools, female, male, and military, and popular
instruction on the new model, and finally, the district
council—the marshal of the province, Snetkov, was a
nobleman of the old school,—dissipating an immense
fortune, a good-hearted man, honest after his own fashion,
but utterly without any comprehension of the needs of
modern days. He always took, in every question, the side
of the nobility; he was positively antagonistic to the spread
of popular education, and he succeeded in giving a purely
party character to the district council which ought by
rights to be of such an immense importance. What was
needed was to put in his place a fresh, capable, perfectly
modern man, of contemporary ideas, and to frame their
policy so as from the rights conferred upon the nobles, not

1397 of 1759