4:90 INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



tions with outsiders. Thus, speaking generally, serfs were 

 citizens subject to extra duties and restraints. Their legal 

 status was one of half-freedom and half -servility. 



Russia repeats with variations the lesson we have already 

 learnt. Originally the peasants (distinguished from slavey 

 who had always existed) were independent proprietors 

 grouped into village-communities. With the rise of local 

 magnates princes, boyars, &c. implying turbulent times, 

 the poor and powerless found it here as elsewhere needful to 

 put themselves under the protection of the powerful to 

 accept partial subjection, with its obligatory services, for the 

 sake of safety. Further, where they wished to take unculti 

 vated land, of which there was plenty, they became indebted 

 to the wealthier men for capital, and so became tied to their 

 farms as debtors. And then, just as in Rome the perpetual 

 wars led to the fixing of citizens in their occupations and 

 localities, so that all might serve the State in the ways its 

 officers directed, so was it in Russia: the whole society was 

 regimented. The lands of petty princes and boyars were 

 changed into fiefs held from the Tsar ; and while these local 

 rulers became vassals, the peasants on their estates became 

 serfs : the whole process being the concomitant of the cease 

 less fightings by which the empire was established. 



807. Throughout this brief, and therefore very inade 

 quate, outline of an institution extremely varied and com 

 plex in origin and nature, little has been said concerning its 

 character as a system of industrial regulation. We have 

 seen, however, that, growing out of a primitive state in which 

 a slave-class had to supply the warrior-class with the neces 

 saries of life, it became, as societies evolved, a permanent 

 commissariat a working part which fed the fighting part. 



Subordination, coordination, consolidation these are 

 phases of the process by which war tends to combine all social 

 actions for offence and defence; throughout the nation as 

 throughout the army. Be he soldier or be he civilian, the 



