among the separate households, and it is evident that no one has the right of taking hay from a neighbour’s stack without his permission; but the limitation of this last rule among the Caucasian Ossetes is most noteworthy.  When the cuckoo cries and announces that spring is coming, and that the meadows will soon be clothed again with grass, every one in need has the right of taking from a neighbour’s stack the hay he wants for his cattle.(13) The old communal rights are thus re-asserted, as if to prove how contrary unbridled individualism is to human nature.

When the European traveller lands in some small island of the Pacific, and, seeing at a distance a grove of palm trees, walks in that direction, he is astonished to discover that the little villages are connected by roads paved with big stones, quite comfortable for the unshod natives, and very similar to the “old roads” of the Swiss mountains.  Such roads were traced by the “barbarians” all over Europe, and one must have travelled in wild, thinly-peopled countries, far away from the chief lines of communication, to realize in full the immense work that must have been performed by the barbarian communities in order to conquer the woody and marshy wilderness which Europe was some two thousand years ago.  Isolated families, having no tools, and weak as they were, could not have conquered it; the wilderness would have overpowered them.  Village communities alone, working in common, could master the wild forests, the sinking marshes, and the endless steppes.  The rough roads, the ferries, the wooden bridges taken away in the winter and rebuilt after the spring flood was over, the fences and the palisaded walls of the villages, the earthen forts and the small towers with which the territory was dottedall these were the work of the barbarian communities.  And when a community grew numerous it used to throw off a new bud.  A new community arose at a distance, thus step by step bringing the woods and the steppes Under the dominion of man.  The whole making of European nations was such a budding of the village communities.  Even now-a-days the Russian peasants, if they are not quite broken down by misery, migrate in communities, and they till the soil and build the houses in com mon when they settle on the banks of the Amur, or in Manitoba.  And even the English, when they first began to colonize America, used to return to the old system; they grouped into village communities.(14)

The village community was the chief arm of the barbarians in their hard struggle against a hostile nature.  It also was the bond they opposed to oppression by the cunningest and the strongest which so easily might have developed during those disturbed times.  The imaginary barbarian—­the man who fights and kills at his mere caprice—­existed no more than the “bloodthirsty” savage.  The real barbarian was living, on the contrary, under a wide series of institutions, imbued with considerations as to what may be useful or noxious to his tribe or