The Zemstvo is a kind of local administration which supplements the action of the rural Communes, and takes cognizance of those higher public wants which individual Communes cannot possibly satisfy.  Its principal duties are to keep the roads and bridges in proper repair, to provide means of conveyance for the rural police and other officials, to look after primary education and sanitary affairs, to watch the state of the crops and take measures against approaching famine, and, in short, to undertake, within certain clearly defined limits, whatever seems likely to increase the material and moral well-being of the population.  In form the institution is Parliamentary—­that is to say, it consists of an assembly of deputies which meets regularly once a year, and of a permanent executive bureau elected by the Assembly from among its members.  If the Assembly be regarded as a local Parliament, the bureau corresponds to the Cabinet.  In accordance with this analogy my friend the president was sometimes jocularly termed the Prime Minister.  Once every three years the deputies are elected in certain fixed proportions by the landed proprietors, the rural Communes, and the municipal corporations.  Every province (guberniya) and each of the districts (uyezdi) into which the province is subdivided has such an assembly and such a bureau.

Not long after my arrival in Novgorod I had the opportunity of being present at a District Assembly.  In the ball-room of the “Club de la Noblesse” I found thirty or forty men seated round a long table covered with green cloth.  Before each member lay sheets of paper for the purpose of taking notes, and before the president—­the Marshal of Noblesse for the district—­stood a small hand-bell, which he rang vigorously at the commencement of the proceedings and on all the occasions when he wished to obtain silence.  To the right and left of the president sat the members of the executive bureau (uprava), armed with piles of written and printed documents, from which they read long and tedious extracts, till the majority of the audience took to yawning and one or two of the members positively went to sleep.  At the close of each of these reports the president rang his bell—­presumably for the purpose of awakening the sleepers—­and inquired whether any one had remarks to make on what had just been read.  Generally some one had remarks to make, and not unfrequently a discussion ensued.  When any decided difference of opinion appeared a vote was taken by handing round a sheet of paper, or by the simpler method of requesting the Ayes to stand up and the Noes to sit still.