Of the various functions of the peasant self-government the judicial are perhaps the most frequently and the most severely criticised.  And certainly not without reason, for the Volost Courts are too often accessible to the influence of alcohol, and in some districts the peasants say that he who becomes a judge takes a sin on his soul.  I am not at all sure, however, that it would be well to abolish these courts altogether, as some people propose.  In many respects they are better suited to peasant requirements than the ordinary tribunals.  Their procedure is infinitely simpler, more expeditious, and incomparably less expensive, and they are guided by traditional custom and plain common-sense, whereas the ordinary tribunals have to judge according to the civil law, which is unknown to the peasantry and not always applicable to their affairs.

Few ordinary judges have a sufficiently intimate knowledge of the minute details of peasant life to be able to decide fairly the cases that are brought before the Volost Courts; and even if a Justice had sufficient knowledge he could not adopt the moral and juridical notions of the peasantry.  These are often very different from those of the upper classes.  In cases of matrimonial separation, for instance, the educated man naturally assumes that, if there is any question of aliment, it should be paid by the husband to the wife.  The peasant, on the contrary, assumes as naturally that it should be paid by the wife to the husband—­or rather to the Head of the Household—­as a compensation for the loss of labour which her desertion involves.  In like manner, according to traditional peasant-law, if an unmarried son is working away from home, his earnings do not belong to himself, but to the family, and in Volost Court they could be claimed by the Head of the Household.

Occasionally, it is true, the peasant judges allow their respect for old traditional conceptions in general and for the authority of parents in particular, to carry them a little too far.  I was told lately of one affair which took place not long ago, within a hundred miles of Moscow, in which the judge decided that a respectable young peasant should be flogged because he refused to give his father the money he earned as groom in the service of a neighbouring proprietor, though it was notorious in the district that the father was a disreputable old drunkard who carried to the kabak (gin-shop) all the money he could obtain by fair means and foul.  When I remarked to my informant, who was not an admirer of peasant institutions, that the incident reminded me of the respect for the patria potestas in old Roman times, he stared at me with a look of surprise and indignation, and exclaimed laconically, “Patria potestas? . . .  Vodka!” He was evidently convinced that the disreputable father had got his respectable son flogged by “treating” the judges.  In such cases flogging can no longer be used, for the Volost Courts, as we have seen, were recently deprived of the right to inflict corporal punishment.