Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/602

598 group. Furthermore the nadiel often enclosed in its boundaries lands owned by the state, the church or private individuals. Suppose these villages request what is known in German as Verhoppelung und Auseinandersetzung—consolidation by means of exchange of land belonging to each village. It then becomes the task of the government surveyor to measure off the land belonging to the entire community and to give to each village in one piece, if possible, the equivalent of the many parcels belonging to it heretofore. The difficulties of such a task are apparent at first sight. The quality of soil may be anything from very good to very bad. It is necessary to fix a standard and then determine the value of each particular quality with reference to that standard. If the best soil is taken as the standard then it will require let us say 1 dessiatines to equal one dessiatine of the best, 1 dessiatines of the next poorest to equal the best and so on down to the worst. The problem attaching itself to the division of the arable land among the villages being solved, there remain the questions of the meadows, the pastures and the woods. Each village will wish to have some grazing ground in its immediate vicinity even though its arable land should be far away. The group of villages may desire to continue to hold the meadows and woods in common. This arrangement was often made in the surveys of several years ago, but the government now distinctly discourages it. When the private lands strewn among the parcels of the community hinders the giving of a compact area to each village, then efforts are made to buy the offending pieces or to exchange them for outlying portions of the community land.

It must be understood that each village, being now provided with the equivalent in one tract of its many parcels, is still at liberty to regard the tract as communal property. It is under no obligation to divide it into individual holdings. But any family in the village may demand that its just share be given it in perpetuity, in which case the matter is either amicably arranged in the village, or is settled by government authorities. It frequently happens that a number of families, alert, ambitious and enterprising, make this request and transport their little homes from the village to their new farms which are then known as houtors. Curious it is to see, but not at all uncommon in Russia, four such families whose lands form approximately the four quarters of a square, building their izbas in the angles that meet at the center so that a few steps will cover the distance from the door of one house to the next. Even these pioneers dread living alone. The mujiks are gregarious. The opportunity for companionship is a prime requisite with them. And, indeed, quite aside from the matter of temperament, a family might well wish to avoid complete isolation during the long weeks when the melting of the snow and the spring rains render the roads impassable.