suspicion, the informal co-operation—­the artel—­makes the very substance of Russian peasant life.  The history of “the making of Russia,” and of the colonization of Siberia, is a history of the hunting and trading artels or guilds, followed by village communities, and at the present time we find the artel everywhere; among each group of ten to fifty peasants who come from the same village to work at a factory, in all the building trades, among fishermen and hunters, among convicts on their way to and in Siberia, among railway porters, Exchange messengers, Customs House labourers, everywhere in the village industries, which give occupation to 7,000,000 men—­ from top to bottom of the working world, permanent and temporary, for production and consumption under all possible aspects.  Until now, many of the fishing-grounds on the tributaries of the Caspian Sea are held by immense artels, the Ural river belonging to the whole of the Ural Cossacks, who allot and re-allot the fishing-grounds—­perhaps the richest in the world—­among the villages, without any interference of the authorities.  Fishing is always made by artels in the Ural, the Volga, and all the lakes of Northern Russia.  Besides these permanent organizations, there are the simply countless temporary artels, constituted for each special purpose.  When ten or twenty peasants come from some locality to a big town, to work as weavers, carpenters, masons, boat-builders, and so on, they always constitute an artel.  They hire rooms, hire a cook (very often the wife of one of them acts in this capacity), elect an elder, and take their meals in common, each one paying his share for food and lodging to the artel.  A party of convicts on its way to Siberia always does the same, and its elected elder is the officially-recognized intermediary between the convicts and the military chief of the party.  In the hard-labour prisons they have the same organization.  The railway porters, the messengers at the Exchange, the workers at the Custom House, the town messengers in the capitals, who are collectively responsible for each member, enjoy such a reputation that any amount of money or bank-notes is trusted to the artel-member by the merchants.  In the building trades, artels of from 10 to 200 members are formed; and the serious builders and railway contractors always prefer to deal with an artel than with separately-hired workers.  The last attempts of the Ministry of War to deal directly with productive artels, formed ad hoc in the domestic trades, and to give them orders for boots and all sorts of brass and iron goods, are described as most satisfactory; while the renting of a Crown iron work, (Votkinsk) to an artel of workers, which took place seven or eight years ago, has been a decided success.