Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/173

 Rh circumstances the commune often has a progressive force. For, as the peasants told me, it safeguards them against the encroachments of squatters and wandering immigrants, and it co-ordinates and regulates the arable holdings, causing each peasant to make common cause in taming nature just where such collective action is most required.

Here, then, was a "socialistic" system—a system in which the little State owned the means of production—in process of change before the forces of "Individualism" and the rights of private property. A movement the very antithesis of that towards which the proletariat of Western Europe are said to be trending. Which of these two movements is "progress" and which is "reaction"?

Such a village as I have been describing is typical of the little communal colonies which lie scattered in all spots where cultivation is possible on the edge of the great forest zone which surrounds the Siberian-Mongolian frontier. In their general type they are very similar to those of European Russia, except that there is an atmosphere of prosperity which is not always the case in the old country. If a traveller tries to observe human nature in a Siberian village, he may at first fail to sympathize with the people or see any common bond between himself and them. He will be struck with their rather indolent and shiftless character, which is the common trait of all Russian peasants, the somewhat austere severity their life, and the absence of all pretensions to art. But even if he may see defects in the Slavonic nature, still if he observes intelligently he will soon be struck with the lovable, childlike character of the