The little I have here said about the organisation of the village community will answer the end I have in view of placing clearly before you the economic arrangements made by the village in reference to the common lands. The relation in which the village stands to them is not that of proprietor. They belong according to law to the State alone. In those villages which are occupied by the so-called "State-peasants," that is the heirs of the serfs lately belonging to the "public domains," no means have been adopted to allow of the peasant becoming even in future the proprietor of the soil. Such, however, is not the case in those communes, which have been established on lands lately belonging to the nobility. As soon as the peasants on each estate have paid back the money advanced by the State to facilitate the acquisition of the land which the proprietor was forced to give up to them, they become the legal proprietors of the soil they now occupy. This payment may be made by the whole commune or by the separate households which belong to it. Five millions of roubles had been already devoted to this purpose up to the year 1881; later statistics are still wanting. Each time that the payment is made by a separate household, common property is of course superseded by private property and this enactment is rightly considered by Russian publicists as prejudicial to the further maintenance of agrarian communism. *The commune exercises its proprietary rights in different ways. It keeps the waste-land and forests undivided, and makes periodical allotments of arable and meadow land. it was most prejudicial to the welfare of the peasants that the obligatory expropriation of 1861 did not extend to a part at least of the waste-land of the manor, held previously to that date in common by the manorial lord and his serfs. We must acknowledge that in this respect the government of the old French monarchy, that of Louis XIII and of Louis XIV, showed a far greater knowledge of the economic wants of the agricultural classes. The so-called "triages" secured to the peasants the right of exclusive enjoyment to at least a third of the manorial wastes and woods.
Nothing which corresponds to those triages has been established in Russia. The result of this can be seen in the need which the peasant is under of diminishing year by year the number of his cattle, a condition of things which has already re-acted on the state of agriculture. In those cases where the village has had no access to the waste land, it has been obliged to carve out of its arable ground a special field to serve as a common pasture. But this can only be done where the allotments made out of the manorial land are of large extent. In the greater number of villages they have not amounted to more than three dessiatines a head, and the commoners have been forced to content themselves either with sending their cattle on to the "Lammas" lands, that is, the arable land after harvest, or with renting some pasture ground from a neighbouring squire.
As for the forests, allotments out of. them were rarely made, at least in our Southern provinces where woods are scarce, and the peasant is quite dependent for his fuel on the squire, who takes advantage of this fact, and secures the regular performance of agricultural labour on his own domains in return for permission to use the dead wood which would otherwise lie unused.
In the northern provinces allotments were frequently made of forests, and were sometimes treated as "assart lands." I make use of a term which is probably quite familiar to you, as it is frequently to be met with in English documents even of the first part of the present century. But for those who are not aware of its meaning I will add the following explanation. When population became dense, the village allowed new homesteads to be established in the middle of the forest the trees were burned down, the roots seldom being removed, and the plough began to work in a region which had hitherto been accessible only to the axe. The area thus cleared for a time paid nothing to the State;but after a few years, three as a rule, it was annexed to the number of common lands which were burdened by personal taxes. The owners of these cleared lands received no allotments out of the common fields, but they regularly paid to the Government as much as the commoners of the same village.
We must now turn our attention to the way in which the arable land and the meadows are used. Equality being the chief aim of the members of the village community, its arable fields are as a rule very numerous. The commoners take into account both the differences in the fertility of the soil and the comparative advantages of its situation. Land which is either mountainous or distant from the village is not likely to produce the same revenue, or to be so easily cultivated as an equal area to it;the black soil is far more fruitful than the sandy or the clayey soil. The community, therefore, has a great number of "shots" or "furlongs," * and in each of these shots every householder receives a number of strips equal to the number of the taxed persons in his household. You can easily imagine how scattered and intermixed are the possessions of each homestead. In cases where there is no great difference in the fertility of the soil, and the shots are consequently not very numerous, the community sometimes adopts a different method. The whole number of commoners is divided into "tythings," or decenas, and the fields are divided into as many parts as there are tythings. Each tything, or decena, then makes the division for itself. Lots are drawn to decide the order in which the strips must be distributed among the tythings and subdivided among the persons composing them.* Owing to the almost universal preva1ence of the three-field system, the number of shots never falls below three.
