Another tendency working in the same direction is the rapid dissolution of the old system of large house-communities that prevailed before the emancipation. The average household has been reduced from seven and a half to five souls, the married children setting up houses of their own instead of dwelling under one roof with their father and grandfather. The house is a mere hut, with no furniture but a table and a wooden bench used by night for a bed, but still the separate _ménage_ has increased to an embarrassing extent the expenses of the peasant's living at the very time that other circumstances have reduced his resources. The reason for the break-up of the house-communities has been the desire to escape partly from the tyranny of the head of the household, but chiefly from the incessant quarrels that prevailed between the several members about the amount they each contributed to the common funds as compared with the amount they ate and drank out of them. One of the brothers goes to St. Petersburg during the winter months as a cabman and brings back a hundred roubles, while another gets work as a forester near home, and earns no more than twenty-five. Now, according to an author quoted by Stepniak, who is describing a family among whom he has lived, the question always is: "Why should he (the forester) consume with such avidity the tea and sugar dearly purchased with the cabman's money? And in general, why should this tea be absorbed with such greediness by all the numerous members of the household--by the elder brother, for instance, who alone drank something like eighty cups a day (the whole family consumed about nine hundred cups per diem) whilst he did not move a finger towards earning all this tea and sugar? Whilst the cabman was freezing in the cold night air, or busying himself with some drunken passenger, or was being abused and beaten by a policeman on duty near some theatre, this elder brother was comfortably stretched upon his belly, on the warm family oven, pouring out some nonsense about twenty-seven bears whom he had seen rambling through the country with their whelps in search of new land for settlement." And so the quarrel goes round; always the old difficulty of _meum_ and _tuum_, so hard to reconcile except under a _régime_ of individual property.