that the Russian household is not identical with the Roman family or its derivatives. The Roman paterfamilias is the absolute master of all living under his patria potestas; he is the unlimited owner of all property belonging to the household, even where such property is the product of the personal industry of particular members of the family. The modern family, on the other hand, is merely a union of individuals having their individual rights recognized by law, though sometimes not without certain limitations in favor of the head of the family. The Russian peasant family alone is a perfect communistic commonwealth. All the moveables belonging to the household, as well as its whole income, constitute the collective property of the family, but not of its head. The same holds good even of those parts of the Empire in which the village community disappeared long before the emancipation of the peasants. In Little Russia and White Russia, as elsewhere, the statute of 1861 recognized the rural institutions upheld by peasant common law. Thus the land was there allotted to the families, and it was subsequently reaffirmed by the Senate, in one of its interpretations, that the land does not belong to the head of the family, but does belong to the family as a whole.

Moreover, an old Russian family greatly resembled a community even in the number of its members. Mr. Krasnoperoff, in a paper which appeared some ten years ago in the Otechestvenniya Zapiski, described a family he met with in the province of Mohileff. The family numbered ninety-nine members, and was composed of a grandmother, with her children and married grandchildren, all of whom were living together and working for their own common benefit. Such households are, indeed, isolated exceptions at the present day, but they were universal in the past.

Thus ownership of land by the community without, and complete communism within the family, were the fundamental elements in the structure of the village at the dawn of Russian history.

The rise and growth of private property in land soon came in to restrict the domain of the village community.

In the early days of mankind coöperation is essential to success in the struggle for life which man is carrying on daily against his natural surroundings. Landholding, whether collective or individual, must be large enough to admit of coöperation. Therefore private ownership in land first appears in history in the form of large holdings. Now, so long as population is thin, and vacant land lies practically free to anybody, it would be useless to occupy large estates if there were no means of compelling the husbandman to labor in the landlord’s fields instead of for his own benefit. Indeed, private property in land in the early periods of history goes hand in hand with the personal dependence of the tiller of the soil.

In the Muscovite State we find two forms of individual landed property: patrimony (vottchina) or freehold, and fee (pomest’ye) or benefice.

While fee was an institution of public law, patrimony owed its origin to private law and to a more ancient epoch. Patrimonies were to be found in the Republic of Novgorod, and in some other States of the Russian Federation, before their conquest by the Great Princes of Muscovy, afterwards Czars of all the Russias. The rise of this form of property is intimately bound up with the growth of slavery in ancient Russia. Slavery, like patrimony, was also an institution of private law, arising from the transaction of loan. The payment of the debt was secured, as in the civil law (jus civile), by the person of the debtor. Unquestionably this was the only possible security in an historical epoch when landed property had no value, save when human labor was applied to it. As in Rome, war was the constant cause that put the peasant under the necessity of contracting loans. As in Rome, there could hardly be found two years of uninterrupted peace in the course of the first centuries of Russia’s history. Destruction, by force of arms and rapine, usually compelled the plundered peasant to alienate his liberty to the “better man” (vir bonus, καλὸς κἀγαθός) who furnished him with cattle, seed, and implements. The peasant sold himself either for a term of years, or for life, and in the course of time the state of serfdom became hereditary. The labor of these slaves (zakup, kabalniy holóp) was used by the creditors to cultivate their estates, or to reclaim new acres from the forest. Amidst the wilderness of primitive forests, such parcels of cultivated land had already a certain value which attracted settlers. Here we have the origin of patrimonies in Russia during the “period of federation and witenagemote.”

Left, however, as it was, to private intercourse and initiative, the spread of individual landed property, like the number of slaves, remained comparatively limited. It was only as political institutions that individual landholding and personal dependence of the peasant were to become the foundations of social life in Russia.

The fee was the virtual germ of Russian private property in land.

Not only in Russia, but also in many other countries, private property in land owed its origin to relations of public law. Public land (ager publicus) was primarily held by officers on the ground of, and for the purposes of their office as a benefice. In proportion as the offices became hereditary, and the relations growing out of administration of public affairs developed into personal dependence of the common people upon the office holders, the tenure of land by reason of office became hereditary, and subsequently developed into an institution of private law. The next step was in the direction of freeing the landholder from the duty of public service connected with the tenure of his land. Thus his possession became independent. On the other hand, the free ownership of land by the people was replaced, in the course of evolution, by dependent possession. And finally, with the abolition of the personal dependence of the peasant, his right to land expired.

Such was, taking a bird’s eye view, the evolution of private property in most European countries. In Russia the course was essentially the same.

Old republican and semi-republican Russia of “the period of federation and witenagemote” knew no firm government. The prince was elected and deposed by the people, and it was very difficult for him to hold his position for more than any single year amidst the dissensions of the hostile factions of turbulent citizens. Usually princes tramped their whole life long from one principality to another, attendants tramping with them. War was their chief business and war was also their chief source of income. Moreover, through a confiscation of the judicial functions by the prince, a part of the wergild paid by the convicted wrongdoer to the right party, found its way into the treasury of the prince to be distributed among his followers. No bond wedded the prince and his followers to the land until the nomadic elected prince was replaced by the Muscovite Great Prince and Lord of All the Russias. Struggle with the Tartar conquerors—a struggle that lasted for two centuries—furthered the growth of centralization and of monarchical authority, and the former free attendant of the prince became the servitor of his sovereign. The State in Russia has always been a self-sufficing entity, which claimed the services of everybody, without owing in return anything to anybody. And this still remains to-day the fundamental principle wherein Russian public law differs from constitutional law. If, perchance, the state engaged in suppressing crime, it was not for the sake of justice or defense to the people, but rather for fiscal