y he will give his mother a knock or two on the head with a
log of wood. If any member of the family should die from privation, his
death is attributed to fate." Passing to the description of a village
community of higher civilization, the author continues: "The chief
features of such a village are fewer thrashings, a more perceptible
tendency to personal adornment on the part of the women, a larger number
of bachelors, and the existence even of old maids--_i. e._, in the sense
only of unmarried women. In such villages _fetes_ are held each Sunday,
and all the village games, accompanied by much kissing, terminate in the
coarsest sensuality. Immorality prevails, followed by infanticide."
(_Condition of the Laboring Classes of Russia_, by N. Flerofski, 1869.)

For the sake of obtaining an additional laborer in the family it was
customary for the Russian serf to marry his son of tender years to a
woman of riper age, particularly in households where the father had
become a widower, and where, consequently, the family had lost a female
laborer. The son was then sent out to work in the fields, and this
circumstance, together with the subjection and degradation of women in a
social organization in which even the man was a mere chattel, favored
the existence of a crime that greatly complicated the relations of blood
in a peasant family, and often led to the brutal treatment of helpless
wives by infuriated husbands. Nor did the evil stop even with a partial
amelioration of the cause, but tended for a time to reproduce itself;
for the son, grown to a ripe age and bound to a wife now old and
wrinkled, would revenge himself by treating his own son in the manner in
which he had been treated himself.

Says Flerofski: "Women who assist in floating barges down the rivers
from the province of Vologda (in North-eastern Russia, three hundred to
five hundred miles above Nijni-Novgorod) to Nijni-Novgorod receive two
and a half roubles (about $2) for the journey. Both men and women work
until they become exhausted, and return back to their villages on foot.
Their master, the contractor, who is bound to support them until they
return, hastens as much as possible their homeward tramp, in order to
save expense, compelling them to walk eighty versts (fifty-five miles) a
day along village roads and byways. They will sometimes have to wade for
twenty miles through water and mud up to their knees.... The peasant is
ready to carry any burden, to suf