Thus, under the rule of the _mir_, about one-fourth of the householders, nominally counted among “peasant proprietors,” are on the way toward expropriation, or have already become expropriated. As to the lessees of the peasant plots, they must be at the top of the tenant class,[140] by reason of the terms of lease. The landlord gives the tenant credit for his rent, at least in part, till after harvest, and, in case of need, part of the rent is permitted to be paid in labor. The peasant lets his plot, either in full for the payment of taxes, or in part, by reason of lack of money. In either case it must be advanced in the fall. It is by no means unusual for the lease to be contracted for a term of from six to twelve years,[141] the rent for the whole being payable in advance. This is very often the case with the plots of emigrants, leaving home for purposes of colonization, and with those who are permanently employed outside. It goes without saying that rent is advanced only at a considerable reduction of the rates.[142] This difference gave rise to speculation in peasant land. A hundred shares are leased by a wealthy peasant or merchant, to be re-rented in the spring in small plots to the poorer among the lessees.[143] The fact that alienability of the peasant land had become a rule in the community, was first stated by Mr. Trirogoff as far back as 1879.[144] The observer, however, was not aware of the economic significance of the phenomenon when he advanced the opinion that alienability of land exhibits the great capacity of adaptation intrinsic in the community. In reality the contrary is the case. The fact that communal land is disposed of by private agreement, means the displacement of agrarian communism by economic individualism. This was most strikingly demonstrated when the question of the general redivision of the communal land came up before the free _mir_ in the beginning of the eighties. CHAPTER XII. THE REDIVISION OF THE COMMUNAL LAND. Peasant Russia of the time of serfdom was a kind of a single tax realm. Land was treated by the peasantry as the only source of taxable income. Accordingly, the terms of the general subdivisions of the land were adapted to the censuses (_revisions_), made by the government for the assessment of the poll-tax, at average intervals of fifteen years.