The rule of the Mir is strangely democratic in so despotic an empire. The Government never interferes with the communes if they pay their taxes, and the ignorant peasants of the rural courts may pass sentences of imprisonment for seven days, inflict twenty strokes with a rod, impose fines, and cause a man who is pronounced "vicious or pernicious" to be banished to Siberia. The authority of the Mir, of the Starosta, the Whiteheads, the chief elders, seems never to be resisted, and there are a number of proverbs declaring "what the Mir decides must come to pass"; "The neck and shoulders of the Mir are broad"; "The tear of the Mir is cold but sharp." Each peasant is bound hand and foot by minute regulations; he must plough, sow and reap only when his neighbours do, and the interference with his liberty of action is most vexatious and very injurious. The agriculture enforced is of the most barbarous kind. Jensen, Professor of Political Economy at Moscow, says: "The three-field system--corn, green crops and fallow--which was abandoned in Europe two centuries ago, has most disastrous consequences here. The lots are changed every year, and no man has any interest in improving property which will not be his in so short a time. Hardly any manure is used, and in many places the corn is threshed out by driving horses and wagons over it. The exhaustion of the soil by this most barbarous culture has reached a fearful pitch." The size of the allotments varies extremely in the different climates and soils, and the country is so enormous that the provinces were divided into zones to carry out the details of the Emancipation Act--the zone without black soil; the zone with black soil; and, third, the great steppe zone. In the first two the allotments range from two and two-thirds to twenty acres, in the steppes from eight and three-quarters to thirty-four and one-third. "Whether, however," says Jensen, "the peasants cultivate their land as proprietors at 1_s_. 9_d_. or hire it at 18_s_. 6_d_. the result is the same--the soil is scourged and exhausted, and semi-starvation has become the general feature of peasant life."