ntiquity are discoverable in almost every
single feature of the Indian Village Communities. We have so many
independent reasons for suspecting that the infancy of law is
distinguished by the prevalence of co-ownership by the intermixture of
personal with proprietary rights, and by the confusion of public with
private duties, that we should be justified in deducing many important
conclusions from our observation of these proprietary brotherhoods,
even if no similarly compounded societies could be detected in any
other part of the world. It happens, however, that much earnest
curiosity has been very recently attracted to a similar set of
phenomena in those parts of Europe which have been most slightly
affected by the feudal transformation of property, and which in many
important particulars have as close an affinity with the Eastern as
with the Western world. The researches of M. de Haxthausen, M.
Tengoborski, and others, have shown us that the Russian villages are
not fortuitous assemblages of men, nor are they unions founded on
contract; they are naturally organised communities like those of
India. It is true that these villages are always in theory the
patrimony of some noble proprietor and the peasants have within
historical times been converted into the predial, and to a great
extent into the personal, serfs of the seignior. But the pressure of
this superior ownership has never crushed the ancient organisation of
the village, and it is probable that the enactment of the Czar of
Russia, who is supposed to have introduced serfdom, was really
intended to prevent the peasants from abandoning that co-operation
without which the old social order could not long be maintained. In
the assumption of an agnatic connection between the villagers, in the
blending of personal rights with privileges of ownership, and in a
variety of spontaneous provisions for internal administration, the
Russian Village appears to be a nearly exact repetition of the Indian
Community; but there is one important difference which we note with
the greatest interest. The co-owners of an Indian village, though
their property is blended, have their rights distinct, and this
separation of rights is complete and continues indefinitely. The
severance of rights is also theoretically complete in a Russian
village, but there it is only temporary. After the expiration of a
given, but not in all cases of the same, period separate ownerships
are extinguished, the l