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'tralised bureaucracy these village communities are capital 'specimens of representative constitutional government of the 'extreme democratic type. Surely a moment's reflection would have satisfied Mr. Wallace that whatever these assemblies are they are not representative. The essence of political representation is the choice by the people of a deputy or delegate to act on their behalf. Here all the heads of households meet on the village green to manage their own affairs. They are pure democracies of the old Greek type-not in the slightest degree representative or constitutional in the English or any other sense. The only person they elect is their own Volost or Headman, whose powers are small and whose office is not coveted or even respected. The business is carried on by acclamation.

'The Assembly discusses all matters affecting the Communal welfare, and, as these matters have never been legally defined, and there is no means of appealing against its decisions, its recognised competence is very wide. It fixes the time for making the hay, and the day for commencing the ploughing of the fallow field; it decrees what measures shall be employed against those who do not punctually pay their taxes; it decides whether a new member shall be admitted into the Commune, and whether an old member shall be allowed to change his domicile; it gives or withholds its permission to erect new buildings on the Communal land; it prepares and signs all contracts which the Commune makes with one of its own members or with a stranger; it interferes, whenever it thinks necessary, in the domestic affairs of its members; it elects the Elder-as well as the Communal tax-collector and watchman, where such offices exist-and the Communal herd-boy; above all, it divides and allots the Communal land among its members as it thinks fit.

Of all these various proceedings the English reader may naturally assume that the elections are the most noisy and exciting. In reality this is a mistake. The elections produce little excitement, for the simple reason that, as a rule, no one desires to be elected. Once, it is said, a peasant who had been guilty of some misdemeanour was informed by an Arbiter of the Peace-a species of official of which I shall have much to say in the sequel--that he would be no longer capable of filling any Communal office; and instead of regretting this diminution of his civil rights, he bowed very low, and respectfully expressed his thanks for the new privilege which he had acquired. This anecdote may not be true, but it illustrates the undoubted fact that the Russian peasant regards office as a burden rather than as an honour. There is no civic ambition in those little rural Commonwealths, whilst the privilege of wearing a bronze medal, which commands no respect, and the reception of a few roubles as salary, afford no adequate compensation for the trouble, annoyance, and responsibility which a Village Elder has to bear. The elections are therefore generally very tame and uninteresting.' (Vol. i. pp. 198-200.)

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This vaunted Mir is in fact a vestry meeting of all the householders but to describe it by pompous names implying a representative character or any share of political power is an absurd misnomer. It has no political power; but it has social power over its own members, and that of the most harsh and arbitrary kind; in reality it much more resembles an instrument of despotism than an institution of freedom. Thus, Mr. Wallace informs us in the latter part of his book, that the Mir may, by a Communal decree and without a formal trial, have any of its unruly members transported to Siberia'! -surely no tyranny can go beyond that, though it is accompanied by the strange qualification that they are not sent to 'work in mines, but are settled as colonists on unoccupied lands beyond the Ural Mountains.' The peasant has been emancipated from the bonds of serfage to the lord; but he is still the slave of the Mir. Indeed, the first of the fundamental principles of the Emancipation Act was that the authority of the former proprietor should be replaced by the self-governing commune. The peasant lands have been given not to the individual or to the family (except the homestead) but to the commune; and the peasant is bound to share the labours and the fiscal burdens and military obligations of his commune by bonds he cannot shake off. They are all the more strict and imperative, that they are imposed by his own equals; that his life is absorbed in theirs, and that he never can escape from them. If he departs, the Mir may recall him. If he stays to cultivate his share of land, the Mir may deprive him of it at the next distribution. One of the curious effects of this state of things is that it deters the peasant from keeping cattle. There are two events alike,' says Mr. Wallace, which the peasant may be supposed to fear. In the first place part of his cattle may be sold by auction by the Imperial police for Communal arrears, though. he may have paid in full his own share of the taxes and dues; and in the 'second place, the Commune may make a general re-distribution of his land and give to others the plots and strips which 6 he has carefully manured for several years.' In other words, his cattle may be seized for another man's debts and his land taken from him because he has manured it! A power has been given to the Commune by the law of 1861 to redeem the land and convert it into freehold, but nobody has availed himself of it. At present the Russian peasant is rooted in the Communal system in which he was born. Let us point out more fully than Mr. Wallace has done some of its consequences; for with these facts before us we cannot assent to Mr. Wal

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lace's peremptory declaration that certain it is the Russian 'peasantry have reason to congratulate themselves that they were emancipated by a Russian autocrat, and not by a British House of Commons; and it is equally certain that in some of 'the annexed provinces the lower classes enjoy advantages which they would not possess under British rule.' Indeed, his own statements as to the present condition of these rural democracies is in flat contradiction to the glowing hopes he entertains of their future destinies. Take the following very candid avowal:

'That the peasant self-government is very far from being in a satisfactory condition must be admitted by any impartial observer. The more laborious and well-to-do peasants do all in their power to escape election as office-bearers, and leave the administration in the hands of the less respectable members. In the ordinary course of affairs there is little evidence of administration of any kind, and in cases of public disaster, such as a fire or a visitation of the cattle-plague, the authorities seem to be apathetic and powerless. Not unfrequently a Volost Elder trades with the money he collects as dues or taxes; and sometimes, when he becomes insolvent, the peasants have to pay their taxes and dues a second time. The Volost Court is very often accessible to the influence of vodka and other kinds of bribery, so that in many districts it has fallen into utter discredit, and the peasants say that anyone who becomes a judge "takes a sin on his soul." The Village Assemblies, too, have become worse than they were in the days of serfage. At that time the Heads of Households-who, it must be remembered, have alone a voice in the decisions--were few in number, laborious, and well-todo, and they kept the lazy, unruly members under strict control; now that the large families have been broken up, and almost every adult peasant is head of a household, the Communal affairs are often decided by a noisy majority; and almost any Communal decision may be obtained by "treating the Mir "-that is to say by supplying a certain amount of vodka. Often have I heard old peasants speak of these things, and finish their recital by some such remark as this: "There is no order now; the people have been spoiled; it was better in the time "of the masters."' (Vol. ii. pp. 358-9.)

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And this is what Mr. Wallace calls a capital specimen of representative constitutional government of an extreme democratic type!

The theory that the original joint proprietorship in land by cultivation under the system of village communities is a remnant of primæval times, which has been preserved by the peasantry of Russia, though it has been lost in the advancing civilisation of Western Europe, has been discussed with great learning and ability by Sir Henry Maine, in his work on 'Village Communities. As we had occasion to remark, in

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reviewing that essay, he believes in the original distribution even in this country of the arable area into exactly equal portions, corresponding with the number of families in the township; and he holds that the proprietary equality of the families composing the group was at first still further secured by a periodical re-distribution of the several assignments. A vast deal of curious evidence has been collected to show that traces of this ancient 'arable mark' may still be discovered in the land tenures, not only of the Sclavonic, but of the Teutonic race, though, as we have before had occasion to remark, cultivation does not necessarily imply ownership. But if this theory be accepted, it proves that the system of village joint tenures is not at all peculiar to Russia. Far from having the importance which has been ascribed to it by the Russian economists, as a guide to the future of the world, it must rather be regarded as one of the earliest and least perfect forms of social life, buried in the night of the past, and appropriate only to man in his least civilised condition.† As the ideas of law, property, and freedom advanced these customs fell into desuetude; and they only now exist in communities in which the ideas of law, property, and freedom are still wanting. If the whole question rested on the evidence of antiquity and tradition, we should say that these village communities only continue to exist in Russia, because the Russian peasantry is still the most

Edinburgh Review, vol. cxxxiv. p. 467.

† So in a well-known passage of the 'De Moribus Germanorum' (cap. xxvi.) Tacitus says, 'Agri, pro numero cultorum ab universis in vices occupantur, quos mox inter se, secundum dignationem, partiuntur: 'facilitatem partiendi camporum spatia præstant. Arva per annos mutant, et superest ager.' The arva are the cornlands which were divided; the ager is the land about the homestead, gardens, or meadows. These peasants remind one of the 'campestres scythæ' and 'rigidi Getæ,' of whom Horace says—

'Nec cultura placet longior annua; Defunctumque laboribus

Equali recreat sorte vicarius.'

For, as Professor Stubbs describes this Germanic tenure in his very learned Constitutional History' (p. 75), the original gift comes 'from the community of which the receiver is a member. The gift is ' of itself mainly of the character of usufruct, the hold is ideal ' rather than actual; except in his own homestead the freeman can but 'set foot on the soil and say, "This is mine this year; next year it will "be another's, and that which is another's will be mine then!" But at the opening of Anglo-Saxon history, absolute ownership of land in severalty was established and becoming the rule.

barbarous in Europe, not having risen even to the conception and practice of individual property and the undisturbed possession of land for agricultural purposes. British statesmen have some experience of the village communal system as it exists in India, where in some places lands have been held in commonalty from time immemorial by the villagers, and certain village officers exist whose duty it is to protect the interests of the community, more especially by the distribution of water, that essential of tropical cultivation and life. The hereditary headman and Punchayet of an Indian village is a far more rational system of local government than the Russian Mir. But it is only in very few parts of India (if at all) that the periodical mutation of land exists as in Russia; and no one ever supposed that the system of the Indian village communities was adapted to an advanced state of civilisation.

But we dismiss these archæological considerations, which rest on very faint historical evidence, and certainly would not suffice to explain the continuance of this singular tenure of land in Russia to the present day. For this important social fact a far more practical cause may be assigned, though it is one which does not appear to have attracted the attention of Mr. Wallace. In a word, the common tenure of land has, we believe, been perpetuated in Russia mainly for fiscal purposes. As a large portion of the revenue of the Empire is drawn from a poll-tax and a tax on land, it was far more convenient to the State to deal with the village communities collectively, than to levy these taxes on the peasant individually-the more so as all the members of a village community thus became jointly and severally liable for the fiscal dues of one another. Viewed in this light the Russian Mir is not an embryo of democratic freedom and self-government, but an instrument of fiscal oppression. The State calls upon the Mir for a certain amount of taxation. The Mir apportions this taxation by the very act of apportioning the land of the community, because, as Mr. Wallace points out, the burden and the land are inseparably connected, and sometimes the burden exceeds the advantage. This liability affects all alike—those present and those absent, the industrious and the idle, the sober and the drunken, the widow and orphan who have the misfortune to hold a share of land which they cannot till, as well as the robust husbandman with half a dozen sons to cultivate it. It acts therefore with extreme inequality and injustice; but no one can change or shake off the obligation; and the common interest of the Mir is constantly exercised to enforce payment of the taxes by the direct collective action of the village community on

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