e Russian government is called a bureaucracy,
have been led to think of it as analogous to the government of France
under the Old Regime, it may seem incredible that the decisions of a
village-assembly should not admit of appeal to a higher authority. But
in point of fact, no two despotic governments could be less alike than
that of modern Russia and that of France under the Old Regime. The
Russian government is autocratic inasmuch as over the larger part of the
country it has simply succeeded to the position of the Mongolian khans
who from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century held the Russian people
in subjection. This Mongolian government was--to use a happy distinction
suggested by Sir Henry Maine--a tax-taking despotism, not a legislative
despotism. The conquerors exacted tribute, but did not interfere with
the laws and customs of the subject people. When the Russians drove out
the Mongols they exchanged a despotism which they hated for one in
which they felt a national pride, but in one curious respect the
position of the people with reference to their rulers has remained the
same. The imperial government exacts from each village-community a tax
in gross, for which the community as a whole is responsible, and which
may or may not be oppressive in amount; but the government has never
interfered with local legislation or with local customs. Thus in the
_mir_, or village-community, the Russians still retain an element of
sound political life, the importance of which appears when we consider
that five-sixths of the population of European Russia is comprised in
these communities. The tax assessed upon them by the imperial government
is, however, a feature which--even more than their imperfect system of
property and their low grade of mental culture--separates them by a
world-wide interval from the New England township, to the primeval
embryonic stage of which they correspond.

From these illustrations we see that the mark, or self-governing
village-community, is an institution which must be referred back to
early Aryan times. Whether the mark ever existed in England, in anything
like the primitive form in which it is seen in the Russian _mir_, is
doubtful. Professor Stubbs (one of the greatest living authorities on
such a subject) is inclined to think that the Teutonic settlers of
Britain had passed beyond this stage before they migrated from
Germany.[4] Nevertheless the traces of the mark, as all admit, are
plentifu