Here is presented the best example in the world to-day of an applied system based upon the communistic as opposed to the individualistic theory. It is therefore of more than local interest. Most apparent of all results is the economic stagnation which has accompanied the elimination of special rewards for special efforts. The man, more daring or more far-sighted than his fellows, who would take for himself the risk of a new enterprise, who would mortgage his house to buy a reaper, or would seek a farther market, is fettered by his plodding neighbors. His financial obligations, if he fail, fall on the others of a common family, whose members have a veto on his freedom of action. His own and his neighbor’s fields by the allotment are proportioned in extent to the old hand-labor standard. A machine has few to serve until the fields are readjusted to a new standard. While technically a man may buy or rent lands outside the commune and may introduce a new rotation of crops or agricultural tools, actually the inertia of the peasants bound to him by the brotherhood of the Mir weighs the adventurous one hopelessly to the earth. Who can persuade an assembly of bearded conservatism-steeped “old ones” to buy for the Mir the costly new machines? Perhaps, with the visible demonstration of profits which private enterprise could make under an individual régime, the doubting elders might consent. But who is there to show them when every village checks back the swift to the lock-step of the clod? Nor is it simply in material things that communism manifests its lotus-fruit in these country hamlets. Ignorance, unashamed, broods over them one and all. What a dead level is revealed by the fact that one peasant in a populous village on the Chickoya, our guide upon a shooting-trip, could not tell time by a watch, and had never seen such an invention.