as well as their “calves’ grounds” (small fenced patches of soil kept under soft grass for the rearing of calves).  As a rule, the meals are taken separately in each hut; but when meat is roasted, all the twenty to sixty members of the joint household feast together.  Several joint households which live in a cluster, as well as several smaller families settled in the same village—­mostly debris of joint households accidentally broken up—­make the oulous, or the village community. several oulouses make a tribe; and the, forty-six tribes, or clans, of the Kudinsk Steppe are united into one confederation.  Smaller and closer confederations are entered into, as necessity arises for special wants, by several tribes.  They know no private property in land—­the land being held in common by the oulous, or rather by the confederation, and if it becomes necessary, the territory is re-allotted between the different oulouses at a folkmote of the tribe, and between the forty-six tribes at a folkmote of the confederation.  It is worthy of note that the same organization prevails among all the 250,000 Buryates of East Siberia, although they have been for three centuries under Russian rule, and are well acquainted with Russian institutions.

With all that, inequalities of fortune rapidly develop among the Buryates, especially since the Russian Government is giving an exaggerated importance to their elected taishas (princes), whom it considers as responsible tax-collectors and representatives of the confederations in their administrative and even commercial relations with the Russians.  The channels for the enrichment of the few are thus many, while the impoverishment of the great number goes hand in hand, through the appropriation of the Buryate lands by the Russians.  But it is a habit with the Buryates, especially those of Kudinsk—­and habit is more than law—­that if a family has lost its cattle, the richer families give it some cows and horses that it may recover.  As to the destitute man who has no family, he takes his meals in the huts of his congeners; he enters a hut, takes—­by right, not for charity—­his seat by the fire, and shares the meal which always is scrupulously divided into equal parts; he sleeps where he has taken his evening meal.  Altogether, the Russian conquerors of Siberia were so much struck by the communistic practices of the Buryates, that they gave them the name of Bratskiye—­“the Brotherly Ones”—­and reported to Moscow.  “With them everything is in common; whatever they have is shared in common.”  Even now, when the Lena Buryates sell their wheat, or send some of their cattle to be sold to a Russian butcher, the families of the oulous, or the tribe, put their wheat and cattle together, and sell it as a whole.  Each oulous has, moreover, its grain store for loans in case of need, its communal baking oven (the four banal of the old French communities), and its blacksmith, who, like the blacksmith of the Indian communities,(31)