At first sight nothing could be more attractive than the great Russian family, nothing more useful than the rural communes; and nowadays, when we are applying the laws and technicism of physiology to the study of society, this primordial association would seem the cell from which the true organism of the State may be born; the family is a sort of lesser municipality, the municipality is a larger family, and the whole Russian people is an immense agglomeration, a great ant-hill whose head is the emperor. In the popular songs we see the Oriental idea of the nation expressed as the family, when the peasant calls the Czar _father_. But this primitive machinery can never prevail against the notion of individualism entertained among civilized peoples. Our way of understanding property, which the admirers of the Russian commune consider fundamentally vicious, is the only way compatible with the independence and dignity of work and the development of industries and arts. The Russian _mir_ may prevent the growth of the proletariat, but it is by putting mankind in bonds. It may be said that agrarian communism only differs from servitude in that the latter provides one master and the former many; and that though the laboring man theoretically considers himself a member of a co-operative agricultural society, he is in reality a slave, subject to collective responsibilities and obligations, by virtue of which he is tied to the soil the same as the vassals of our feudal epochs. Perhaps the new social conditions which are the fruit of the emancipation of the serfs, which struck at and violated the great associated family, will at last undermine the _mir_, unless the _mir_ learns some way to adapt itself to any political mutations. What is most important to the study of the historical development and the social ideas as shown in modern Russian literature, is to understand how by means of the great family and the agrarian municipality, communism and socialism run in the veins of the people of Russia, so that Leroy-Beaulieu could say with good reason, that if they are to be preserved from the pernicious effects of the Occidental proletariat it must be by inoculation, as vaccination exempts from small-pox.