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 plentiful enough in England; and some of its features have survived down to modern times. In the great number of town-names that are formed from patronymics, such as _Walsingham_ "the home of the Walsings," _Harlington_ "the town of the Harlings," etc.,[5] we have unimpeachable evidence of a time when the town was regarded as the dwelling-place of a clan. Indeed, the comparative rarity of the word _mark_ in English laws, charters, and local names (to which Professor Stubbs alludes) may be due to the fact that the word _town_ has precisely the same meaning. _Mark_ means originally the belt of waste land encircling the village, and secondarily the village with its periphery. _Town_ means originally a hedge or enclosure, and secondarily the spot that is enclosed: the modern German _zaun_, a "hedge," preserves the original meaning. But traces of the mark in England are not found in etymology alone. I have already alluded to the origin of the "common" in English towns. What is still more important is that in some parts of England cultivation in common has continued until quite recently. The local legislation of the mark appears in the _tunscipesmot_,--a word which is simply Old-English