of its powers has never been determined by legislation, and (according to Mr. Wallace) “there is no means of appealing against its decisions.”  To those who are in the habit of regarding Russia simply as a despotically-governed country, such a statement may seem surprising.  To those who, because the Russian government is called a bureaucracy, have been led to think of it as analogous to the government of France under the Old Regime, it may seem incredible that the decisions of a village-assembly should not admit of appeal to a higher authority.  But in point of fact, no two despotic governments could be less alike than that of modern Russia and that of France under the Old Regime.  The Russian government is autocratic inasmuch as over the larger part of the country it has simply succeeded to the position of the Mongolian khans who from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century held the Russian people in subjection.  This Mongolian government was—­to use a happy distinction suggested by Sir Henry Maine—­a tax-taking despotism, not a legislative despotism.  The conquerors exacted tribute, but did not interfere with the laws and customs of the subject people.  When the Russians drove out the Mongols they exchanged a despotism which they hated for one in which they felt a national pride, but in one curious respect the position of the people with reference to their rulers has remained the same.  The imperial government exacts from each village-community a tax in gross, for which the community as a whole is responsible, and which may or may not be oppressive in amount; but the government has never interfered with local legislation or with local customs.  Thus in the mir, or village-community, the Russians still retain an element of sound political life, the importance of which appears when we consider that five-sixths of the population of European Russia is comprised in these communities.  The tax assessed upon them by the imperial government is, however, a feature which—­even more than their imperfect system of property and their low grade of mental culture—­separates them by a world-wide interval from the New England township, to the primeval embryonic stage of which they correspond.

From these illustrations we see that the mark, or self-governing village-community, is an institution which must be referred back to early Aryan times.  Whether the mark ever existed in England, in anything like the primitive form in which it is seen in the Russian mir, is doubtful.  Professor Stubbs (one of the greatest living authorities on such a subject) is inclined to think that the Teutonic settlers of Britain had passed beyond this stage before they migrated from Germany.[4] Nevertheless the traces of the mark, as all admit, are plentiful enough in England; and some of its features have survived down to modern times.  In the great number of town-names that are formed from patronymics, such as Walsingham “the home of the Walsings,” Harlington