436 



TUB POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMEXT. 



ants have no land. First, certain inhabitants of 

 superior intelligence or influence, by means of 

 brandy, acquired a larger share. The mougilc 

 calls them the ' consumers of the mir.'' Others were 

 too poor or idle to cultivate a share ; they live by 

 ■wages. In a very instructive work of Prince Va- 

 siltchikof, partial statistics from a province are giv- 

 en, from which it appears that out of 1,193,000 

 households 75,000 have no land at all, and 7,400 

 have only preserved the hereditary inclosure" 

 (page 17). 



The village community rests on the patriar- 

 chal family ; but — 



" since the emancipation the old patriarchal fam- 

 ily has tended to fall asunder. The sentiment of 

 individual independence is weakening and destroy- 

 ing it. The young people no longer obey the ' an- 

 cient.' The women quarrel about the task they 

 have to perform. The married son longs to have 

 his own dwelling. The dissolution of the patriar- 

 chal family will perhaps bring about that of the 

 village community, because it is in the union of the 

 domestic hearth that the habits of fraternity, the 

 indifference to individual interest, and the com- 

 munist sentiments which preserve the collective 

 property of the mir, are developed. ... It is the 

 habit of submission to the despotic authority which 

 has given the Russian people the spirit of obedi- 

 ence, self-denial, and gentleness, characteristic of 

 them" (page 19). 



M. de Laveleye sees that the system is 

 doomed ; but he laments over its fate as if the de- 

 fects he himself indicates in it were of trivial con- 

 sequence. That the soil is ill cultivated by the 

 Russian peasant is notorious. But he attributes 

 this not to the lethargy such a system encour- 

 ages, but to the long yoke of serfage. He does 

 not appear to perceive that the long existence of 

 serfage was itself connected with an institution 

 which smothered individual energy and indepen- 

 dence, and gave the lord the one neck the em- 

 peror desired to develop among his Romans. 

 Permanent and costly improvements are acknowl- 

 edged to be practically unknown in Russian com- 

 munal territory ; but the Swiss allmends, where 

 the commune undertakes expensive irrigation and 

 drainage works, we are informed, show that the 

 collective resources of a commune might accom- 

 plish, if well directed, even more than the marvels 

 effected by private ownership. Europe is invited 

 to go back a thousand years and more in its land 

 tenure on the chance of reaping the advantages 

 observable in a handful of mountain districts, 

 where the men live on wages paid by capitalist 

 manufacturers, and inherit in their communal 

 lands pensions paid in free milk and fuel. Under 

 the Russian communal system every obstacle to 



the increase of population is removed. Even a 

 premium is, as M. de Laveleye admits, offered for 

 the multiplication of offspring, since every addi- 

 tional head gives a right to a new share on re- 

 partition. It is a poor consolation to the moral- 

 ist that, in fact, the population does not perma- 

 nently increase at a rate to starve the villages. 

 The number of births is nearly twice as large in 

 Russia as in France ; but then the mortality in 

 Russia is 1 in 26, while in France it is 1 in 39, 

 and in England 1 in 49. The average of life is 

 from twenty-two to twenty-seven years, and in 

 Western Europe about thirty-five. Out of 1,000 

 male children only 593 attain the age of five years. 

 Just as the excessive number of births is due to 

 the improvidence which the communal system 

 fosters, so is this massacre of infant life. " The 

 working hand," as M. de Laveleye expresses it, 

 "is rare in Russia, and valuable in proportion." 

 So the mothers who do a large part of the field- 

 work, though women have no title to the soil, are 

 in many cases incapable of nursing their infants. 

 Seventy-five per cent, of the deaths among chil- 

 dren are in July and August, when the mothers, 

 being detained all day in the fields, abandon their 

 babes altogether. The births and the known 

 mortality would even exceed these terrible figures 

 but for the frequent disparity of age in husband 

 and wife. But the effects of this check are yet 

 more pernicious than the evil they obviate. In 

 the patriarchal society of which M. de Laveleye 

 regrets the decadence, the autocratic father, to 

 obtain additional female field-laborers, commonly 

 marries his sons at eight or ten years of age to 

 women of five-and-twenty. He then " neglects 

 his own superannuated wife, and abuses the in- 

 fluence which he exercises over the wife of his 

 son, who is too young either to enjoy his rights 

 or to protect them. An incestuous piomiscuous- 

 ness is thus introduced." M. de Laveleye puts 

 down this horrible state of things to the account 

 of serfage ; but he had already explained it very 

 clearly as a natural consequence of the patriarchal 

 prerogatives necessary to the communal system. 

 Obsolete modes of tillage, a drawback which, 

 if not absolutely inherent in the system, is al- 

 lowed to have " almost universally accompanied 

 it " — a population always tending to exceed its 

 means of support, incest in the family life, and in 

 the village life " games and debauches in which 

 drunkenness and gross lasciviousness have full 

 career"' — these are incidents of the Russian mir, 

 of which M. de Laveleye " would see with regret 

 the suppression, since, if improved,- it may be the 

 safeguard of modern democracy." 



