Vast changes have nevertheless taken place since the emancipation. Capitalism has made rapid, if uneven, progress. Under the fostering care of the government, industry and commerce have made immense strides. The factory system has taken firm root and has been developing a specialized class of industrial laborers. Great industrial centers have sprung up; towns have grown rapidly. The middle class, hitherto insignificant, has increased in number, wealth and influence. Among the peasants as well, freedom has given birth to the spirit of individualism. The differentiation of the peasantry into wealthier peasants and landless agricultural laborers, the great mass of the peasantry occupying the middle ground, and the gradual dissolution of the two great forces of Russian agricultural life--the patriarchal family and the village community--have been the most important results. Russia is clearly in a state of transition from the agricultural or medieval to the industrial and commercial or modern economic life. This transformation of the economic structure is being effected under great difficulties and the strong opposition of the ruling classes, whose privileges are threatened by the new order of things. The Russian social and political order reflects the medieval background which formed the setting for her entrance upon the modern stage. The class distinctions, naturally obtaining, are hardened into rigidity by the law, which divides Russian society into a hierarchy of five classes or orders--the nobles, the clergy, the merchants, the townsmen and the peasants--each with separate legal status, rights and obligations. The individual is thus not an independent unit, as in the legal codes of Western Europe or the United States. Accompanying the legal stratification there is an exceedingly strong, almost caste-like, sense of difference between the members of the different groups. This emphasis on the person is characteristic of the medieval social order. In Russia it finds additional expression in the control of individual movement by means of the passport, without which document a Russian may be said to have no legal existence. Even more striking is the position of the Russian Church, as well as the religio-national conception which dominates the Russian mind and according to which orthodoxy and nationality are regarded as one. The Russian Orthodox is the only true Russian; all others are foreigners. In the alliance of church and state--which in Russia reaches a degree of strength not attained in any other European state--in the complete control exercised by the Church over the lives of the faithful and the clergy, in secular as in religious matters, in its intolerant attitude towards other creeds and its unceasing attempts to suppress them--it presents characteristics strongly reminiscent of the position of the medieval church in Western Europe.