To learn that the forms of democracy are not new in Russian life one needs only to turn to the villages. The very word Duma is not new. Towns and even villages have their Duma. Tolstoi talks about the “Gospel as understood by the muzhik.” The ideal of civic life as conceived by the muzhik culminates not in the state and autocracy but in the people--an aggregation of muzhiks. There is an ancient proverb familiar throughout Russia which expresses this ideal of democracy: “Each for himself, but God and the Mir for all”--the Mir being an association of villagers coming together to work out the common weal of the village under the laws of the land. The national laws have allowed a wide scope in certain directions, and the opportunity has not been lost by the muzhiks. They have been left free to manage many of their local economic interests in common, like the allotment and periodic redistribution of land, their fisheries, cutting of timber, and also they have been given absolute freedom to divide and distribute among themselves the village share of the taxes collected from all of the people. They have elected their own immediate administrative officers, a certain number of local judges, and those in turn have limited freedom in regard to accepting local custom and tradition in precedence to civil or criminal law prescribed by the state. To the peasant, therefore, the Duma is an institution similar to this local town meeting he has always been used to, only on a national scale. The shock came when the Duma delegates in St. Petersburg found that to deliberate, come to conclusions and to vote for certain measures was wholly a different thing from [Illustration: A Russian farmer] gaining those measures. This was not like the Duma they had been accustomed to at home.