Having insisted on this omission, of which every one will see the importance, I shall consider one by one the nations spoken of by our author, and verify his assertions. 1. Among the Slavs of Russia M. de Laveleye observes the _mir_, _i.e._, a village dividing its soil annually or every few years among its members. In this _mir_ he recognises an association with common ownership of the soil. “The _mir_ alone,” he says, “owns the land, and individuals have nothing more than the enjoyment of it, turn and turn about.” On this I have two observations to make. In the first place, the Russian _mir_ is only a village and a small village, the population rarely exceeding two hundred souls; it always cultivates the same land; so that if this be a communistic group it is at any rate one which is confined to a narrow radius. The _mir_ by no means represents a “tribal community,” still less a “national community.” One cannot conclude from the _mir_ that the Russian nation follows a system of agrarian communism, or that the soil is the property of the whole nation, or that the soil is common to everyone; so that the example departs widely from the thesis that is sought to be maintained. In the second place, if we examine the _mir_ as it was before the reforms of the last Czar but one, we discover that the _mir_ is not owner of the soil, but is itself owned by some one else. In the _mir_, lands and men alike belong to a lord; and lord and landowner are one. M. de Laveleye does not deny this fact; he even recognises “that the _mir_ pays the rent to the lord collectively.” This single fact makes the whole theory fall to the ground. Since the soil belongs not to the _mir_, but to some one else, the _mir_ does not represent agrarian communism. It is a village, like all our villages of the Middle Ages, which is the private property of a single individual; the peasants are only tenants or serfs; the only peculiarity about it is, that these peasants who pay rent for the land collectively also cultivate it collectively.