Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/69

 Rh meadows, lakes, and forests certainly sprang up, and showed a tendency to develop. But all this was local, rudimentary, or recent, a far cry from the full and general collectivity of the Russian mir of our days, with its periodical redivision of allotments, like the run-rig on certain modern manor lands in England and Ireland. In those days the mir only existed in the most embryonic form, and no possibility offers, so far, for tracing either its origin or its mode of development.

This development occurred in the fifteenth century. At that period the Russian commune was assuredly not a rel the patriarchal organization of the old times, wiped out by the Norman invasion, or even before that, as some historians have admitted, by the admixture of foreign and Finnish elements with the Slav race. But were there any Finns in ancient Southern Russia? The fact is not clear. Was this renovated commune a resurrection of the ancient communistic régime, called forth by the permanence of certain social habits? Or was it the entirely new product of a spontaneous generative process, to be explained, as the Slavophils are inclined to explain it, by a special aptitude of the national temperament for a communistic life? These are knotty questions, and the demands of the national vanity do not facilitate their solution. That such an aptitude may exist is undeniable. Of that the artels are a standing proof. But in Germany, and more especially in England, as in the case of those guilds which have held out against the whole force of modern centralization, the spirit of association has proved infinitely more energetic.

I am disposed to opine that the two principles of historic atavism and congenital predisposition, working on a population in the case of which the inorganic stage had been exceedingly prolonged, combined to determine the production of this rudimentary organization on the very threshold of the modern epoch. The Russian commune of the fifteenth century has no family quality about it. It is open to all comers. Any peasant who pays his share of the common obligations can enter it. It is purely conventional, and this characteristic distinguishes it from the antique formations preserved, in their primitive peculiarities, amongst some other Slav peoples. Yet a certain administrative autonomy brings it back to this ancestral type. The nature and character of this autonomy are likewise open to discussion. Did the commune of the fourteenth century bear any part, and, if so, what part, in the exercise of justice? This is still an open question. But it is certain, nevertheless, that the judicial organization of that period, and the system, already described, of the kormlénié, left little room for the exercise of any rival