At the right hand of the imperial power stands the second Russian national institution, the municipal commune known as the _mir_, which is arresting the attention of European statesmen and sociologists, since they have learned of its existence (thanks to the work of Baron Haxsthausen on the internal life of Russia). Who is not astonished at finding realized in the land of the despots a large number of the communist theories which are the terror of the middle classes in liberal countries, and various problems, of the kind we call formidable, there practically solved? And why should not a nation often called barbarous swell with pride at finding itself, suddenly and without noise or effort, safely beyond what in others threatens the extremity of social revolution? Therefore it happens that since the discovery of the _mir_, the Russians have one argument more, and not a weak one, against the corrupt civilization of the Occident. The European nations, they say, are running wildly toward anarchy, and in some, as England, the concentration of property in a few hands creates a proletariat a thousand times more unhappy than the Russian serf ever was, a hungry horde hostile to the State and to the wealthy classes. Russia evades this danger by means of the _mir_. In the Russian village the land belongs to the municipality, amongst whose members it is distributed periodically; each able-bodied individual receives what he needs, and is spared hunger and disgrace. Foreigners have not been slow to examine into the advantages of such an arrangement. Mackenzie Wallace has pronounced it to be truly constitutional, as the phrase is understood in his country; not meaning a sterile and delusive law, written upon much paper and enwrapped in formulas, but a traditional concept which came forth at the bidding of real and positive necessities. What an eloquent lesson for those who think they have improved upon the plan of the ages! History, scouting our thirst for progress, offers us again in the _mir_ the picture of the serpent biting his own tail. This institution, so much lauded by the astonished traveller and the meditative philosopher, is really a sociological fossil, remains of prehistoric times, preserved in Russia by reason of the suspension or slow development of the history of the race. Students of law have told me that in the ancient forms of Castilian realty, those of Santander, for example, there have been discovered traces of conditions analogous to the Russian _mir_. And when I have seen the peasants of my own province assembled in the church-porch after Mass, I have imagined I could see the remains of this Saturnian and patriarchal type of communist partition. Common possession of the land is a primitive idea as remote as the prehistoric ages; it belongs to the paleontology of social science, and in those countries where civilization early flourished, gave way before individual interest and the modern idea of property.