RUSSIA IN EUROPE 
19 
affairs and business of the mir are regulated in a council, com- 
posed of the adult men and of the adult women when heads of 
a famil3^ This village assembly has power to try and punish 
criminals, and can even send them to Siberia. It is the only 
government of which the vast majority of Russians have any 
experience or in which they take an interest. The peasant gov-' 
crning the world in which he lives does not concern himself 
with the unseen and far away. 
The mir, with the exception of community of property and 
judicial authority, is the counterpart of the New England town 
meeting, the corner-stone of our republican institutions. 
The brightest men leave the commune and go to the cities to 
work as artisans, but they must first obtain permission from the 
mir, return to it when ordered, and send a part of their earnings 
to the village treasury or forfeit all their interest in the com- 
munal property and all connection with their ancestral home 
and kindred. The land and property being held in common 
affords little opportunity for that struggle for wealth and a better 
and higher life absolutely necessary for progress. It is indeed 
a communistic, socialistic system, which some, even in our day, 
propose to engraft upon our life. 
Within fifteen or twenty years the power of the mir has been 
greatly limited by the establishment of the provincial govern- 
ment, with its police officer, the representative of provincial 
government, the police having much greater jDower in his vil- 
lage than formerly. 
SERFDOM. 
Serfdom and slavery, unknown in Russia before the fifteenth 
century, originated from several i)eculiar causes. Prior to the 
conquest of Russia by the Tartars, in the thirteenth century, the 
condition of the peasants of Russia and western Europe was 
in many respects very dissimilar. Russia never felt the bene- 
fits either of Roman law and civilization or of the Roman Cath- 
olic church ; neither the influence of large towns with municipal 
rights and privileges nor of the feudal system. The Teutons had 
a sturdy independence and asserted their rights, while the most 
enterprising of the Russians, having a i)redisi>osition to a vagrant 
life, preferred to seek independence l)y wandering away from 
tlieir communes, forming Cossack bands. This vagrancy was in- 
creased under the Tartar rule, when the ])resent Asiatic dress of 
sheei)skin was adoi>ted and other Asiatic habits accpiired. 
