nd Political Importance of the Mir--The Mir and the Family
Compared--Theory of the Communal System--Practical Deviations from the
Theory--The Mir a Good Specimen of Constitutional Government of the
Extreme Democratic Type--The Village Assembly--Female Members--The
Elections--Distribution of the Communal Land.

When I had gained a clear notion of the family-life and occupations of
the peasantry, I turned my attention to the constitution of the village.
This was a subject which specially interested me, because I was aware
that the Mir is the most peculiar of Russian institutions. Long before
visiting Russia I had looked into Haxthausen's celebrated work, by which
the peculiarities of the Russian village system were first made known
to Western Europe, and during my stay in St. Petersburg I had often
been informed by intelligent, educated Russians that the rural Commune
presented a practical solution of many difficult social problems with
which the philosophers and statesmen of the West had long been vainly
struggling. "The nations of the West"--such was the substance of
innumerable discourses which I had heard--"are at present on the
high-road to political and social anarchy, and England has the
unenviable distinction of being foremost in the race. The natural
increase of population, together with the expropriation of the small
landholders by the great landed proprietors, has created a dangerous and
ever-increasing Proletariat--a great disorganised mass of human beings,
without homes, without permanent domicile, without property of any kind,
without any stake in the existing institutions. Part of these gain a
miserable pittance as agricultural labourers, and live in a condition
infinitely worse than serfage. The others have been forever uprooted
from the soil, and have collected in the large towns, where they earn a
precarious living in the factories and workshops, or swell the ranks of
the criminal classes. In England you have no longer a peasantry in the
proper sense of the term, and unless some radical measures be very soon
adopted, you will never be able to create such a class, for men who
have been long exposed to the unwholesome influences of town life are
physically and morally incapable of becoming agriculturists.

"Hitherto," the disquisition proceeded, "England has enjoyed, in
consequence of her geographical position, her political freedom, and her
vast natural deposits of coal and iron, a wholly exceptional po