prefer individual ownership; and the struggles often lasted for years.  In certain places the unanimity required then by the law being impossible to obtain, the village divided into two villages, one under individual ownership and the other under communal possession; and so they remained until the two coalesced into one community, or else they remained divided still As to Middle Russia, its a fact that in many villages which were drifting towards individual ownership there began since 1880 a mass movement in favour of re-establishing the village community.  Even peasant proprietors who had lived for years under the individualist system returned en masse to the communal institutions.  Thus, there is a considerable number of ex-serfs who have received one-fourth part only of the regulation allotments, but they have received them free of redemption and in individual ownership.  There was in 1890 a wide-spread movement among them (in Kursk, Ryazan, Tambov, Orel, etc.) towards putting their allotments together and introducing the village community.  The “free agriculturists” (volnyie khlebopashtsy), who were liberated from serfdom under the law of 1803, and had bought their allotments—­each family separately—­are now nearly all under the village-community system, which they have introduced themselves.  All these movements are of recent origin, and non-Russians too join them.  Thus the Bulgares in the district of Tiraspol, after having remained for sixty years under the personal-property system, introduced the village community in the years 1876-1882.  The German Mennonites of Berdyansk fought in 1890 for introducing the village community, and the small peasant proprietors (Kleinwirthschaftliche) among the German Baptists were agitating in their villages in the same direction.  One instance more:  In the province of Samara the Russian government created in the forties, by way of experiment, 1O3 villages on the system of individual ownership.  Each household received a splendid property of 105 acres.  In 1890, out of the 103 villages the peasants in 72 had already notified the desire of introducing the village community.  I take all these facts from the excellent work of V.V., who simply gives, in a classified form, the facts recorded in the above-mentioned house-to-house inquest.

This movement in favour of communal possession runs badly against the current economical theories, according to which intensive culture is incompatible with the village community.  But the most charitable thing that can be said of these theories is that they have never been submitted to the test of experiment:  they belong to the domain of political metaphysics.  The facts which we have before us show, on the contrary, that wherever the Russian peasants, owing to a concurrence of favourable circumstances, are less miserable than they are on the average, and wherever they find men of knowledge and initiative among their neighbours, the village community becomes the very means for introducing various improvements in agriculture and village life altogether.  Here, as elsewhere, mutual aid is a better leader to progress than the war of each against all, as may be seen from the following facts.