But while the family, understood as a group or an association, offers many advantages from the agrarian point of view, its disadvantages are serious and considerable because it annuls individual liberty. It facilitates agricultural labors, it puts a certain portion of land at the service of each adult member, as well as tools, implements, fuel, and cattle; helps each to a maintenance; precludes hunger; avoids legal exactions (for the associated family cannot be taxed, just as the _mir_ cannot be deprived of its lands); but on the other hand it puts the individual, or rather the true family, the human pair, under an intolerable domestic tyranny. According to traditional usage, the authority of the head of the family was omnipotent: he ordered his house, as says an old proverb, like a Khan of the Crimea; his gray hairs were sacred, and he wielded the power of a tribal chieftain rather than of a head of a house. In our part of the world marriage emancipates; in Russia, it was the first link in a galling chain. The oppression lay heaviest upon the woman: popular songs recount the sorrows of the daughters-in-law subjected to the maltreatment of mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, or the victims of the vicious appetites of the chief, who in a literally Biblical spirit thought himself lord of all that dwelt beneath his roof. Truly those institutions which sometimes elicit our admiration for their patriarchal simplicity hide untold iniquities, and develop a tendency to the abuse of power which seems inherent in the human species.