tly intimate knowledge of the minute
details of peasant life to be able to decide fairly the cases that are
brought before the Volost Courts; and even if a Justice had sufficient
knowledge he could not adopt the moral and juridical notions of the
peasantry. These are often very different from those of the upper
classes. In cases of matrimonial separation, for instance, the educated
man naturally assumes that, if there is any question of aliment, it
should be paid by the husband to the wife. The peasant, on the
contrary, assumes as naturally that it should be paid by the wife to the
husband--or rather to the Head of the Household--as a compensation
for the loss of labour which her desertion involves. In like manner,
according to traditional peasant-law, if an unmarried son is working
away from home, his earnings do not belong to himself, but to the
family, and in Volost Court they could be claimed by the Head of the
Household.

Occasionally, it is true, the peasant judges allow their respect for old
traditional conceptions in general and for the authority of parents in
particular, to carry them a little too far. I was told lately of one
affair which took place not long ago, within a hundred miles of Moscow,
in which the judge decided that a respectable young peasant should be
flogged because he refused to give his father the money he earned
as groom in the service of a neighbouring proprietor, though it was
notorious in the district that the father was a disreputable old
drunkard who carried to the kabak (gin-shop) all the money he could
obtain by fair means and foul. When I remarked to my informant, who was
not an admirer of peasant institutions, that the incident reminded me of
the respect for the patria potestas in old Roman times, he stared at
me with a look of surprise and indignation, and exclaimed laconically,
"Patria potestas? . . . Vodka!" He was evidently convinced that the
disreputable father had got his respectable son flogged by "treating"
the judges. In such cases flogging can no longer be used, for the Volost
Courts, as we have seen, were recently deprived of the right to inflict
corporal punishment.

These administrative and judicial abuses gradually reached the ears of
the Government, and in 1889 it attempted to remove them by creating
a body of Rural Supervisors (Zemskiye Natchalniki). Under their
supervision and control some abuses may have been occasionally prevented
or corrected, and some rascally