Mir

From Slavic.info

Mir (from Russian or better to say, from the Old Church Slavic language miru — concord, peace, union and world) means an association of several families under one head. From the most ancient times the rural population of Russia has been organized into these mir.t. Adjacent mirs are united into volosts or small cantons. In Mir the land is owned in common and is regularly re-allotted by the villagers themselves among the householders according to their working capacities and needs. It elects its own executive, or starosta, as he is called, and he may undertake all kinds of work of public utility. Land belongs not to individual peasants in Russia but to the villagers as a whole. It can be redivided every twelve years at the wish of a majority of two-thirds. This and all other local questions such as the incidence of taxation, are settled by village meetings, consisting of the heads of houses, where age naturally has a predominance. A decision which carries a majority of twothirds is, by law of the Russian Empire, a legal "sentence" of the village. The village elects its own village-elder, who is responsible for the calling' of meetings; and at certain seasons (e. g., that of hay-making) these meetings take place as often as once a week, Many villages are united in a canton, which is ruled by a cantonal elder, similarly elected by the chosen representatives of all the villages of the canton. The cantonal clerk is nominated by the Government, but the cantonal judges, all of whom are peasants, are elected by the cantonal assembly. Yes, in Russia, where communal property obtains, where the Mir, a communal form of government dominates the social order, and where the unit of industrial organization is the Artel with its gtarosta, there the masses, by a federation of communes, may awake and overthrow oligarchy and install a real democratic government any time the people wish. A. S. Khomyakov, brothers Kiriycvsky, brothers Aksakov, and the famous followers of these Slavophiles down to Pobyedonotszev saw in the Russian Mir a guarantee, not only for the welfare of Russia and Slavdom, but for all the world, because it offers that economic communism and moral brotherhood which Western social democracy is vainly trying to discover in other ways, because it was destined to assure the future of the Russian people and to afford it the means of settling all the social questions of the world in accordance with the laws of justice and of love. Gustave Le Bon, in his Psychology of People (London, Unwin, 1909, p. 228) claims (1) that the Latin races are in a desperate case, and the Germans are no better off, because they are rushing headlong to socialism which is ruin; (2) that England and the United States are in a better position, but the future of the world rests with Russia, because she has "evolved too recently from the regime of the 'mir,' or from a primitive communism, the most perfect form of socialism, to return to this inferior stage of evolution. It has other destinies. It is doubtless Russia that will one day furnish the irresistible flood of barbarians destined to destroy the old civilization of the West, whose end will have been led up to by economic struggles and socialism."

That the Mir is by no means a sign of a lack of individual initiative, rather that it expresses a spirit of independence is admitted by many sociologists and economists. Professor A. H. Miller finds a historical parallel to "Mir" in Switzerland, who democracy is traced to the common management of the village land, which persisted through the autocratic and feudal systems which prevailed in Western Europe. He says: "As in Switzerland the isolation of a mountainous country prevented the imposition of any system not indigenous, so in Russia the isolation of a backward civilization and vastness of area have accomplished the same result. ... In Russia, as in Switzerland, the villages are united into larger administrative units; in Russia these are <;alled Zemstvos.1 For some centuries these units have carried on a degree of selfgovernment such as has been unobtainable in the most enlightened countries. These features, which an extremely despotic Government has not been able to suppress, have recently been incorporated into its political organization. We have, then, a very curious condition of unusual oppression and unusual freedom existing side by side. Instead of declining under modern economic conditions we find that the system has grown stronger. The effort to introduce individualistic economic methods has been unavailing. Communal ownership has come spontaneously into existence in the marvellously rich regions of Southern Russia, which were colonized within a century under individual ownership. The same thing has repeatedly happened among the recent immigrants to Siberia."

It is interesting to note the fact that the Russian immigrants formed the Russian Village in England, modelled after plan of community of peasants in native land. To quote a recent statement:

In England there is a village in which all the inhabitants are Russians and in which the religion, work, customs aud language are all those of Russia. It is Tuckton, which lies in the parish of Christchurch, on the Southbourne side of the river Stour.

The community had its beginning several years ago, when Af. Vladimir Trhertkor came there to escape from Russian oppression, says an English periodical. He had been a wealthy landowner in Russia and an officer in the Imperial Guards, but he became a convert to the wisdom of Count Tolstoy and afterward was that noted man's chief friend and helper.

Tchertkov made his home at what was then called Tuckton House, a large residence with eight or ten acres of land about it, and he brought with him friends and dependents, who laid the foundation of what is nov a fair-sized colony. At Tuckton Tchertkov weleomed many other Hussian exiles and found work for all, either in agricultural labor, in printing txxiks and pamphlets on liberty and human rights, or in the ordinary trades common to village life.

The Russians built new houses and took cottages even in Southbourne itself, and went on printing literature that was spreading Tolstoy's doctrines in every part of the world. They began book-binding, too, in some of the nouses. So prosperous did the community become that M. Tchertkov finally leased the disused premises of the old Christchurch Waterworks Company for his printing establishment.

The village of Tuckton is one of the most peaceful in England and tI1 its residents live in almost ideal communistic fashion. They form indeed a large band of exiles, brought together as brothers, laboring for the good of humanity, they include every sort of well-educated men from Russia, as well as many of the lower peasantry.

At Tuckton you may meet and talk with clever journalists, physicians, Lawyers, university folk, former wealthy people and aristocrats of Russia, who have all either escaped the clutches of the authorities who used to serve the czar or have voluntarily exiled themselves in order to share in carrying out the enlightenment to the masses of their fellows, from this secure haven of freedom by the charming banks of the Stour.

Among the hardest worked and the busiest of all the settlers in this English hamlet is M. Tchertkov himself, for he oversees everything, and acts as the "little father" of the whole community.

He molds his own life on the simplest plan; he eats frugally, and furnishes his own rooms as plainly as if he were the lowest of the peasants. The whole hamlet is guided by him, and modelled as if it wrre an ordinary Russian village of peasants in the heart of a Russian forest.

He and those he appoints for the purpose look after the excellent sanitation, the health, the cleanliness of the settlement. They take note of any domestic arrangements among new workers that are not as satisfactory as they should be, and insist on an immediate alteration; they act as guides and mentors to the newcomers, and gradually teach them what it is necessary for dwellers in Enp-land to know and at the same time help to retain their true Russian individualism and nationality.

E. D. Schoonmaker gives a comparison of the Mir with the Saxon village of early England. He says:

"The first thing that strikes us is that the Russian village is a democracy similar to the Saxon village of early England. But in the Saxon there has always been an clement which rebelled against social control. The Saxon is by na ture an individualist. He is willing to take his chances in a general mix-up. And therefore it is that at the earliest opportunity he threw off the shackles of collective ownership. In that long and successful assault which the barons of England made upon the people's land, the Englishman fell far short of that unconquerable spirit of resistance and counterassault which we think of as the natural reaction of the Saxon to injustice. Had the aggression been political, there is no doubt that he would have shown his old spirit. It is this inability of the Saxon to comprehend the larger meaning of democracy that has made England what it is—a people willing to see their land taken over by the barons, though it means starvation for themselves. For this is right in line with the Saxon theory of the rights of the individual, whereas group control is slavery. The widespread poverty in which England finds herself to-day is due to this excessive individualism. The age of co-operation has come, and the Briton cannot adjust himself. He will starve, but he will not give up his lords.

"Let us now pass into Russia, the land of autocracy. Here we sec an exactly opposite development. Instead of the baron absorbing the property of the commune, the commune is succeeding to the property of the baron. It is the village, not the individual, that owns the land and at irregular intervals redistributes the land, though not the house, among the members of the commune, or mir, as it is called,—every family is a member, and is represented by its head,—according to the size and the respective needs of the families. And there is here none of that instinctive rebellion on the part of the individuals composing it, but, on the contrary, a submission to its will which to-day, to any man of Germanic blood, is irritating and inconceivable. While in Russia, too, there is poverty, this condition is at least not due to the fact that the people are outcasts from the land. That is the chief difference, one might say, between Russia and the 'civilized' pat Ions, namely, that whereas in the former the poverty of the people is due to the Government, to what it has done and what it has left undone, conditions in the latter are due to the people themselves. And therefore while in Russia education and the resultant political changes may remedy the condition, in the more 'advanced' nations an improvement can be brought about only by a social revolution. And it is worth mentioning in passing that the starost, or head, of the Russian village never seeks the office, but has it thrust upon him, another illustration of the difference between the Slav and the Saxon."

Edwin D. Schoonmaker claims that there is no better illustration of the most characteristic difference between the Saxon and the Slav than that afforded by the respective ways in which Saxon America solved the slave problem and Slavic Russia the serf problem (emancipation of the serfs is, no doubt, one of the greatest events in modern history of the vast Russian Empire, that "granary of the world"). He says:

"Passing over the fact that in America it required half a century of the most active propaganda to convince the people, even the people of the North, that slavery was wrong, whereas in Russia no such extensive agitation was required, we come to the still wider chasm that yawns between the ways in which, after their emancipation, the slave and the serf were treated in their respective countries. So obsessed is the Saxon mind with the idea that freedom is a matter of politics that it seemed even to the abolitionist that ample justice had been done the negro when, after his liberation, he was given the vote. In Russia, on the other hand, where the people are unpractical in politics and see things rather in their social aspects, the permanent freedom of the serf seemed to depend not upon the franchise, but upon the essentials of livelihood. Therefore, while the armies of tto North at the point of the bayonet were enforcing the negro's right to the ballot, the Russian Government was quietly endowing its fifty millions of serfs with land. And when we remember that in both cases the emancipated peoples were a childlike people, the supreme folly of the SaxonAmerican becomes apparent. And he himself has become aware of this, or rather half aware of it; for while he has reversed his policy, he has reversed it only half-way. He has recovered the vote which he gave to the negro, but the latter's right to some part of the land which he has tilled for centuries the Saxon-American will not concede. And the reason why he will not concede it is as clear as day: the Anglo-Saxon is inherently an aristocrat."

A Slovene diplomatist who knows Russia well, Dr. Joseph Goricar, in his The Betrayal of Socialism by the German Social-Democratic Party with a Short Sketch of tlte Russian Forms of Self-Government; published by The Slovak League of America, Pittsburg, Pa., 1917, pp. 89-49), also calls the Russian Mir "a panacea for social and political evils," for in it

The 'Khozain', as the head of the family is called, is the undisputed master of this large peasant family, all members of which have all things in common; that is, the house and all its furnishings are common property. Its members have common responsibilities. For instance, all debts are contracted by the whole family jointly. Furthermore, all the families or households of a village own all the arable land, all the pastures and forests in common; all of which enters into the constitution of the Mir. The village Elder of the Mir is called the 'Starosta' which is a departure from the conception which the Southern, and the Western Slavs have of the term, who ordinarily use the word 'Starosta' to apply only to the head of a family or of some civil institution, as for instance, the 'Starosta' of the 'Sokols', a gymnastic organization.

The Mir has also common obligations; it is responsible to the government for all the taxes and other civil obligations. On the other hand, coexistent with these common duties, the members of the Mir enjoy certain inalienable rights; the family cannot be deprived of its homestead or the necessary farming implements, and the Mir, or Cbmmtme, cannot be deprived of its lands by creditors. The 'Seltki Starosta' is the executive head of the village, but ttie supreme authority is vested in the assembly of nil the 'Khozains' or heads of families. It should be noted for the edifiration of the Western world, that in case of the absence or the death of her husband, the Russian peasant woman has the right to take part in the debates of the village assembly. As Jie Head of her household, she has the right to cast her vote on all questions of common welfare. This famous Russian Village Parliament has a speaker but not a president, and its meetings are held on Sundays or holidays, so that all the members of the commune may have the opportunity to take part in them. Due to the havoc which this war has wrought in the ranks of the Russian peasant soldiers, it can be readily seen what important role the peasant women, being now the heads of their families in large numbers, will play after this war. At these meetings little speaking is indulged in: the resolutions to be passed are usually drafted by small groups and then put to the vote of the meeting. The majority of the votes cast prevails. Common sense usually rules all such deliberations; and since the abolition of the liquor trade, there is very little disturbance. In fact 'no class of men in the world is more good natured and pacific than the Russian peasantry,' says Sir Wallace, the English author and the most noted foreign student of this institution.

The common land which the Mir possesses is of four kinds: the land on which the village is built, all the arable land set aside for cultivation, the meadows and pastures and the forests. Hie homestead, which stands in the village, is the inalienable property of the family and can never be partitioned, as it is done in the case of the arable land and the meadows and pastures.

It is one of the powers of the village assembly to apportion and allot the communal lands among the members of the Mir. This procedure takes place at irregular intervals, sometimes every three years, in case of the arable lands; but the meadows are divided every year. The land is divided according to the number of male members in the Mir; being redistributed whenever necessary. As the taxes due to the central government are levied on every family according to the number of lots it owns, it goes without saying that a just distribution of the land is possible only if the arable land is divided according to the labor power of every family. And this is done often to enable the families to pay their taxes. After the number of parcels and shares have been determined, the assembly proceeds to the work of real partition of the parcels. The divisions and subdivisions and the allotment of the shares is done by the peasants themselves and with great justice and accuracy too, considering that these uneducated peasants use only the crudest measuring rods. The meadows, as already mentioned, are distributed every year, and this procedure takes place regularly at harvest time to enable every family to harvest its hay immediately. Very often the hayfields are mown by the whole community in common and only the hay distributed among the families. The assembly also has the power to decide upon the proper time for plowing, for making hay, for electing the Elder, etc. All the members of one family cultivate their land in common. The absent ones, working in the cities or elsewhere, must send their savings to the family, the same as it is done by the Southern Slavs where the Zadrugas exist. The families that constitute the Mir need not farm in common but they must pay a fixed sum into the common treasury. Every family, however, must strictly comply with the rules relating to'crop rotation, so that it can be truly said that the lands are cultivated as one farm. All the households and all their members are thus united together by a bond of common interest. The result is that in a Russian village there con be no isolation of any family, in striking contrast to the condition under which the villagers in other portions of Europe live, with no such common bond of union, each one working independently, which tends to foster the instincts of selfishness and to promote enmities. The sociability and good nature of the Russian muzhik are proverbial and must be ascribed chiefly to the Mir, which smooths out differences and keeps all the families in constant touch with each other. The Mir educates these peasants not only to work together but also to cultivate among themselves the spirit of solidarity and the willingness to make concessions to each other in the interest of the welfare of the entire community. The will of the assembly is never opposed, even though it should visit a hardship on some individual. On the whole it may be said that such a village commune is a very good example of a constitutional government. It is a living real institution, with very few written laws. It has been described by many profound students of Russian institutions as the real solution of many difficult social problems, which are agitating the social and economic life of Western Europe. Sir Wallace calls the Mir the 'panacea for social and political evils'. Above all, it secures to every one of its members his land, the same being allotted to him in severally, thus satisfying the most deep-rooted desire and longing of every tiller of the soil to possess land. And when a man does possess land on which he can build his home and from which he can derive a comfortable living according to his standards, he is inspired with the true spirit of a home builder. Perhaps it is this fact more than any other that constitutes the source of Russia's power, which produced the marvelous growth of her population and enabled her to settle rapidly the vast uninhabited areas of land she possesses in the various parts of her empire. The Mir, therefore, does not permit, or at least it tends to retard the growth of the discontented element, which forms one of the greatest evils of Western European and American social organizations. There can be little doubt that this dangerous element was produced chiefly by the expropriation of the peasantry or the farming population. When a small landowner becomes separated from the soil, there remain but few opportunities for him to make a living; he can either go to the city or find employment with a rich landowner; become either a wage earner, well paid perhaps, or a servant, as long as he remains in good health. But in either event his condition is very precarious; either work may become scarce or he may lose his position on account of ill health or for some other reason. The Russian peasant, on the contrary, remains a member of his Mir, even though he engage temporarily in some other occupation by becoming a wage earner or an employee of the government in some distant parts of the Empire, working on the railroads in Siberia or Turkestan. He only needs the written permission from his Mir to absent himself, which serves him also as his passport. He may return to his village whenever he pleases and continue tilling the soil, because he never ceased to be a member of his Mir and never lost his rights in it.

Such half farmers, haW artisans always could be found in great numbers in Russia. They may be found in the farthest corners of the empire, sometimes many months' journey from their villages. The Mir not only prevents the separation of the small farmers from their soil, but it also makes it impossible for wealthy people and land-speculators from buying up its lands, and thus compelling the peasant families to forsake their villages and depriving them of the lands of their ancestors. Even the more enterprising and grasping peasants themselves are prevented from biking advantage of their weaker and less provident neighbors, who might be tempted, if they could, to dispose of their patrimony and lose their means of making a safe living. This is one of the greatest blessings of this ancient Russian institution. Whoever had the opportunity to observe the disastrous effects which the unrestricted ownership of land had upon the peasantry of Austria-Hungary, where immense tracts of land passed into the hands of comparatively few persons, as in Galicia and some parts of Hungary, where the greatest portion of the farming land came into the possession of the Jews, who themselves are not tillers of the soil, he must admit that the Mir is admirably adapted to prevent the alienation of land by its actual tillers. The evil consequences of land being but the object of barter and trade, and the means of making money thereby, as it was done in Germany, where the Prussian 'Junkers' are the omnipotent masters, or as in Rumania, where large 'Latifundia' were created, whose owners squander their profits in gay living in the capitals of Europe, are very apparent. England and Ireland, where land is tied up for hunting grounds and other recreations and lost to farming, its natural purpose, may be also cited as good examples of its eviL There is one more reason why this village commune is a boon to the peasantry; a peasant always finds a safe refuge in his village when he is overtaken by old age. Besides this, bis children are raised in the healthy atmosphere of the country. American surgeons, attached to the Russian armies, attest to the fact that the Russian soldiers are remarkably free from those contagious diseases which are the greatest curse and misfortune of the modern city dwellers.

Notwithstanding all these evident advantages, there were found some, even among the Russians themselves, who pretended to find serious objections to it. One of the greatest faults of this venerable institution, this sacred relic of the ancient Russian life, was said to be the lack of the spirit of competition among its members, and that to tills is attributable the backwardness of the Russian village agriculture, as compared with that of the rest of Europe. It is most unfortunate that this opinion was entertained even in some governmental circles. Still there were some Russians who earnestly advocated its preservation in modern life. The so-called Slavophils, a group of educated Muscovites, were most strenuous in upholding all the good ideas found in the Mir. Yet, to the great disadvantage of the Russian national life, the government decided to abolish it. The principal reasons which led the Russian government to believe that the Mir has become obsolete and inconsistent with the spirit of modern progress and unrestricted competition, are not generally known. A disinterested person, however, would not be far from the truth by assuming that it entered upon this perilous course of 'liberating* the peasants from the restrictions imposed on them by the unwritten laws of the Mir, chiefly because of the fear entertained by the great landowners that land communism, as it existed in the Mir, would finally deprive them of their immense landed estates. During the revolution of 1907, the revolutionary party displayed great activity among the peasant class, instilling into their minds the idea that all the land belongs to them. No more weleome economic creed could have been taught to the peasants, who by nature and the force of circumstances always were land hungry. The result of spreading these revolutionary ideas was that the peasants, working for the large landowning capitalists, or aristocrats, either refused to work or considered themselves as the owners of the land which they were tilling for their absent masters. Many of these large landowners, in consequence of this, were compelled to abandon their estates to the peasants. It was only another method of squeezing them out of the possession of lands which they inherited from their ancestors. This movement spread very rapidly even to other countries and led to bloody uprising in Rumania, where it was directed principally against the Jewish lessees of the large estates of the Rumanian 'Boyars'. It should be noted that under the Rumanian constitution the Jews cannot own land, but they evade this law by leasing the Moldavian and Wallachian estates. The bitterness of the poor peasants of Rumania, who were unable to subsist on their small holdinfrs, was so great, that even in peaceful times they often forcibly resisted the Jews in entering into the possession of their leased estates.

This revolution originated in Southern Russia, where this passive opposition of the peasantry was so great that often the harvest on these large estates could not be gathered in. The revolt of the peasantry assumed the most alarming proportions on the estates of the Ost-See barons in the Baltic provinces; but unlike Rumania, Prussia, their neighbor, was able to stop its spread into her territories. These Ost-See barons, who until lately were all powerful in directing the internal and external policies of Russia, were, therefore, the ones who decided to apply the ax to this storm battered and centuries old Russian institution, this land communism. Disregarding the well known principle that ownership of property makes a man cautious, this group of men whose ranks were later augmented by some truly Russian aristocrats, finally succeeded in convincing the Russian statesmen that the surest way of preventing similar outhreaks in the future would be by abolishing land Socialism, through the abolition of the Mir and the establishment of individual ownership. They expected that the greedy and the reckless would get an opportunity, alongside of the titled aristocracy and the landsharks, gradually to absorb the land of their less fortunate or less provident neighbors. In a word they proposed to the Russian Government to make a thrifty German bauer out of the Russian muzhik, This catch phrase, assisted by the great pressure exerted by the great landowners and capitalists, carried enough weight to induce the Government to abolish this time honored system. It is a matter of common knowledge that the Russian capitalist class looked upon the Russian scheme of landownership as a great drawback, because it prevented them from furthering their own ambitions, by putting immense areas out of their greedy reach. The land owned by the Mir is, the same as the land owned by the Catholic Church in Austria-Hungary, or in England in the feudal days, held in mortmain. The strangest part of this movement is that it was not Witte, a Baltic baron himself, who dared to lay his hands on the Mir. Premier Stolypin, his successor and a genuine Russian, was the one who hearkened to the siren voices of the Germanic plotters and committed the unpardonable mistake of yielding to the pressure brought to bear upon the government by the large land owners and the capitalists. But it must be admitted that Witte prepared the way by his reckless and gigantic enterprises in the domain of finance. Witte conceived the plan of making Russia a great industrial country, to enable it not only to supply its own wants but also those of Asia. Through Witte's efforts, Russia became the rendezvout of the capitalists, schemers and investors from all over the world. Great industries sprang up as if by magic and not a few men became fabulously wealthy in a few years. But all this was nt the expense and to the detriment of the agricultural classes, who fell into deeper misery than they ever were before. With a view of remedying this, Stolypin enacted the land reform laws of 1906. The decision to abolish the Mir once reached, the government went to work with amazing rapidity. The work of laying out the individual farms and transplanting the muzhik from his village to the single farms was carried on in Central Russia as fast as the surveying could be done. In the meanwhile the single farm system was assiduously extolled to the skies by the press, and every case of success of the muzhik, transformed into a banter, was hailed as a sure sign of better times to come. No doubt Catherine the Great, who imported thousands of German bcuien and settled them in the heart of Russia, along the Volga River and other rivers where the best agricultural lands are situated, firmly expected that the example of the privileged immigrants would stimulate the muzhik to greater activity and induce him to follow it. But nothing like that happened. The Germans grew rich by their thrift and the muzhik remained stolidly immovable in their deep rooted apathy. The some may happen now. Signs are not wanting that the desired transformation in the Russian system of landownership will prove a failure. What far sighted persons and the lovers of the Mir predicted, is taking place now by reason of the sudden change in this most ticklish question of Russian internal policy, making the peasant land an object of mere barter and trade and money making through speculation and robbing it of all the sentimental and social background. The very thing that the adherents of capitalism had expected is actually happening. The hind became the property of the peasants only temporarily. Soon signs of restlessness were noticeable among this new class of men. The newly made individual landowners began selling their farms faster than was food for the safety of the Empire. A pauper proletariat, living from h'md to mouth, was soon formed and the farms rapidly passed into the hands of a small body of speculators, of people who lived far away from their land which they used only to enrich themselves by trading in it. In these transactions Jews also took part, repeating their performances in Western Europe. The country soon began to drift on the same danrerous current on which other countries were floating, with pauperism and plutocracy and an acute and intensified struggle for existence as their outstanding features. Being a farming country, whose might 'Spends upon the prosperity of its farming population, this was the nmre dangerous to Russia, because it should always have remained on the old basis. Whatever is likely to weaken the source of vitality of any country will also endanger its power. The great German philosopher, kttmitz, when he visited Paris in 1674, predicted the downfall of the mighty Turkish empire, and he based his prophecy mainly on the condition of its rural population. The 'agas' or large landowners were very rich and powerful, while the 'rayas' the tillers of the soil were living in the greatest poverty. The frequent uprisings of this poor landless mass of people has always been a source of embarrassment to the Turkish government, leading to revolts and subsequent bloody reprisals which invited foreign intervention. What makes France so powerful to-day? It is her prosperous farming population. This can also be said of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. On the other hnnd the belated measures of land reform and the difficulties which Great Britain is experiencing in trying to induce her masses to fight for the safety of their country, must be attributed to the indifference with which her landless proletariat regards the efforts of the government.

Russia reaped great victories in the past and she will come out victorious now, because of the infinite sacrifices which her peasant population brought and is ready to bring. This idea is most vividly portrayed In the pen picture of Stephen Graham, in his interesting work on Oreat Russia, quoting the following answer of a prominent Russian to the question put to him as to what he thought of the present war: 'It is the Last Judgment. Every one has been handed in his account . Now we've got to get square with Destiny. We must realize all our resources of will, faith and health and put them in front of our national life to save it. The war reminds me of the crisis in the drama of Peer Oynt. You remember, when the button moulder came and said to Peer that his day was done, and that he must be put into the melting pot and re-cast as some one else. Peer searched in his history and in his life to get something that could redeem him. Only in the peasant girl did he find refuge from the moulder. So with Russia; to her also the button moulder has come and offered to melt her up with a strong alloy of Germany into something new. Russia must go to her peasants if she wishes to remain herself. In the hour of distress it is our peasants who will save us.'

It follows, therefore, that the Russian statesmen will always have to turn their attention to improving the well-being of their peasantry, as they are the backbone of the Empire. Many an emergency will arise, when they will have to call on the help of the peasantry, because, no matter how pacific herself Russia will be exposed to attacks by her neighbors, sometimes simultaneously from many sides. Instead of abolishing the Mir, the Russian government should have done everything in its power to instill new life into it by teaching its members improved methods of cultivation, by granting them loans to buy modern farming implements, in fact by putting the whole system on a modern cooperative basis. In this way Russia possibly could unite her social and economic reconstruction with the village commune and could pass without embarrassment from her ancient communism to a higher level of social order, avoiding the dangers of a purely capitalistic period. The unlimited confidence which the Russian statesmen had in Germany and her Kultur led them into committing serious blunders with disastrous results, bringing the Russian people to the brink of ruin. A healthy reaction against this slowly working deadly poison is permeating to-day all the governmental circles and all classes of Russian society. It is to be hoped that the Russian Socialists of all denominations, be they Social-Democrats, Nihilists, Anarchists or Social Revolutionaries, will also finally become thoroughly awake to the dangers of an eventual unrestricted introduction of the German Socialist principles into Russia. It will be easier for them to repudiate the German Socialistic supremacy, >ecause the Mir embodies in itself all the fundamental principles of socialism, being at the same time the embryo of self-government. The. Vlir is an intensely democratic institution, each one being practically iel f-governing, having its own elected officers. Several of these are joined into cantons called the Volosts'.

The Mirs are supplemented by the Zemstvos, the same comprising larger territories with local self-governments. The Zemstvo takes care of the larger public matters of the village communes and of their material and moral well-being. The Zemstvo is similar to the Mir, consisting of an assembly of deputies and of a permanent executive department. Every 'Ujezd"' or district, and every 'Gubernia' or province, has n. Zemstvo. The officers for these executive departments are elected by the Mirs, the landed proprietors and by the municipal corporations. The Zemstvo is essentially a parliamentary institution. It is a fair example of a local parliament with an executive department, corresponding to the cabinet. Rich and poor are all on the same level in this local body, the Counts, the Barons and the Dukes and Princes are on. the same footing as the muzhiks. The Mir and Zemstvo are the strongholds of Slav democracy, of its political rights and liberties, and on this foundation the future greatness of Russia must be built The Duma, having now obtained, through the revolution, its full powers will be like a dome, capping this grand edifice of popular government of the Empire, the State, the Province and the Mir.

In order to give a clearer idea of the Mir, I shall quote two more authors: Georg Brandes (a Dane) and Stepniak ( a Russian nihilist who cannot be accused of sympathy with the Russian autocracy). Brandes says:

"Russia is primarily and in its very essence a patriarchal state, a state where the father has the authority and the children are in a condition of equality with one another. As a result of a development ordained by fate, Russia has become a bureaucratic state, where official power has destroyed all spontaneous and natural growth in the relations of public life. Nevertheless, the family, the municipality, and the state in Russia are three organisms, constructed on entirely homogeneous principles, but moving in different spheres. The great Russian family is not restricted to parents and children; it includes several generations and many families, married sons, brothers of the father or mother, who have down to a very recent period worked in the same house or on the same farm, yielding obedience to the authority of the oldest, and with property in common. This family relation is now being broken up, because in it (as in the state) the parental authority has been inflated till it became unnatural and oppressive.

"In the meantime, the municipality is only the larger family, as the state is only the union of all the municipalities into one great family, whose father is the Tzar. The Russian family has two decided characteristics: the unlimited authority of the father, and the unlimited possession by the children. The Russian state, absolute monarchy, has developed first; the municipality, mir, the second. In fact these two characteristics—the power of the Tzar and the ownership of land in common—are the two fundamental principles which distinguish the Russian people from all others. It is very true that many other countries, Denmark among the rest, have long known a similar common ownership of property; but elsewhere it has been abolished with the abolition of serfdom, or with the emancipation from villeinage; here, on the contrary, it still survives. While the common family (or the organization which may be termed a family partnership) is undergoing dissolution since the emancipation of the serfs,2 the municipal joint property has not only held its own since then, but it has even increased at the expense of private property. In the department of Moscow, since 1861, of 74,480 farms, only nineteen have abandoned the joint proprietorship; and at the present time, in the whole of Greater Russia, of all the peasant farm lands 90 to 98 per cent, are owned in common. Even in White and Little Russia common ownership has made inroads.

"It is natural that the Russians, underneath the socialistic agitations of our time, should see in their mir the healthy germ of better social relations. They generally regard themselves in this particular as the pioneer or prototype for Europe."

It is interesting to note that the Russian literature is full of poems, treatises, and religious contemplations in praise of Mir. Dostoyevsky and other great Russian minds were smitten with the idea of Mir. Tolstoy (who is the living voice of the Slavic people just as Abraham Lincoln is the living voice of the American people) in his note book of 1865 says, that the historical mission of Russia consists in bringing before the world the idea of the socialization of land.8 It is rightly said that Tolstoy is the glorified Russian or Slavic peasant uttering his heart to the world from the cross of ages, for from this great Slav alone, in modern times, has gone out the living conviction that peace and brotherhood are realities destined sooner or later to conquer the world. Yes, Schoonmaker is right when he claims that from this heart of the Russian people we see, like a saving spirit in the midst of blood and death, spreading out over the world, that wide circle of democracy beyond which you cannot go.

The author of the History of Peasantry (London, 1888),4 Stepniak (Sergius Michael Dragomanov-Kravchinsky, 18411895), says this about the Mir:

"Up to the present time the law has allowed the mir a considerable amount of self-government. They are free to manage all their economical concerns in common—the land, the forests, the censors, the publie-houses, etc. They distribute among themselves, as they choose, the taxes. They elect the rural executive administration. They elect the judges of the volost, or district.8 The jurisdiction of the peasant tribunal is very extensive, all the civil and a good many criminal offences, in which one of the parties at least is a peasant of the district, are amenable. They are not bound to abide by the official code of law. They administer justice according to the customary laws and traditions of the local peasants. The women are in all respects dealt with on sn equal footing with the men. Labor, not kinship, is always recognized as giving a defensible right to property. The mir recognizes no restraint on its autonomy. It embraces all domains and branches of peasant life. In older times the mir elected the parson. Sometimes the mir decided that the whole village shall abandon orthodoxy and become evangelic. To the Russian peasant it seems the most natural thing in the world that the mir should do this whenever it chooses. The mir forms indeed a microcosm, or small world of its own. With the Russian mir the law is nowhere, the conscience everywhere. Not merely criminal offenders are dealt with, but every disputed point is settled according to the individual justice of the case, no regard being paid to the category of crime to which it may chance to belong. The mir recognizes no permanent laws restricting or guiding its decisions. It is personification of the living law speaking through the collective voice of the community."

In the light of all these statements about the Russian Mir, is it really true that the Mir is a menace to civilization? Does such a communal life represent only a primitive tendency of a Tartar institution, national weakness and dependence? Is this only a Slavic feeling of gregariousness, a remnant of an early and once widespread communism? Referring to this municipality whose bond of union is home rule and common ownership of the soil, Mr. Stead says in his Truth about Russia (London, Cassell, 1883, pp. 464): "Here in Russia we have the true peasant republic, the most democratic and socialistic of any institution now existing in all Europe, which may yet supply to a world wearying of unrest, of individualism, and of universal competition on the principle of the 'devil take the hindmost,' a clue to the solution of our (i. e., English) most pressing difficulties." John Fiske compares the local legislative power of Mir with that of the New England town meeting, and claims that this power of the Mir is in some respects even greater, since the precise extent of Hair's powers has never been determined by legislation, and, according to Mr. Wallace, "there is no means of appealing against its decisions." Fiske adds: "To those who are in the habit of regarding Russia simply as a despotically governed country, such a statement may seem surprising." (See Fiske's American Political Ideas, London & N. Y., Harper, 1903, p. 40; and the first chapter of his The Beginning of New England.)0

As the Mir is the creation of the Russian peasant there is, no doubt, a great nucleus in his mentality, which the future psychologists will consider as one of the main working hypotheses in the psychology of the peoples.7 Nikolay K. Mikhailovsky (1843-1903), the noted Russian essayist, critic, and sociologist,8 claims that Western Europe has been irredeemably degraded and lowered to the bourgeois type, and thinks that Russia ought to be spared this lowering of type by the maintenance and development of her Mir. To quote him:

"Adversaries of our communal land system clamor for personal liberty. They say that the commune ties the owner hand and foot to the soil, and that it does not give him any freedom for individual activity. This was once spoken in the West. There the commune decayed, the individual triumphed and received the liberty of choosing his occupation, he had but to adapt himself to the new conditions. The right of 'free choice' of the emancipated individual was, however, immediately limited by historical development. He became a factory slave instead of a land owner, producing great wealth and yet actually starving."

Miihailovsky gives the following warning to humanity:

"Fear more than anything else a social order that will divert property from labor. It will deprive the people of the possibility of individual initiative, of independence and of liberty."

In one word: Russian Mir is one of the most determining factors in the past, present and future of the Russian people. It represents the Russian soul and mentality in understanding the Humanity. Along with a rather moderate amount of superstition there is a somewhat pure and sound form of primitive Christianity, a type of religion and morality, if not the highest, at least much higher than that which has during the same period governed in neighboring European countries. The common Russian people have always had traditions of a communal life and to a large extent of a Christianity applied in humble brotherly living.