Of these three groups the first in the scale of dignity is that of the merchants.  It is chiefly recruited from the burghers and the peasantry.  Any one who wishes to engage in commerce inscribes himself in one of the three guilds, according to the amount of his capital and the nature of the operations in which he wishes to embark, and as soon as he has paid the required dues he becomes officially a merchant.  As soon as he ceases to pay these dues he ceases to be a merchant in the legal sense of the term, and returns to the class to which he formerly belonged.  There are some families whose members have belonged to the merchant class for several generations, and the law speaks about a certain “velvet-book” (barkhatnaya kniga) in which their names should be inscribed, but in reality they do not form a distinct category, and they descend at once from their privileged position as soon as they cease to pay the annual guild dues.

The artisans form the connecting link between the town population and the peasantry, for peasants often enrol themselves in the trades-corporations, or tsekhi, without severing their connection with the rural Communes to which they belong.  Each trade or handicraft constitutes a tsekh, at the head of which stands an elder and two assistants, elected by the members; and all the tsekhi together form a corporation under an elected head (remeslenny golova) assisted by a council composed of the elders of the various tsekhi.  It is the duty of this council and its president to regulate all matters connected with the tsekhi, and to see that the multifarious regulations regarding masters, journeymen, and apprentices are duly observed.

The nondescript class, composed of those who are inscribed as permanent inhabitants of the towns, but who do not belong to any guild or tsekh, constitutes what is called the burghers in the narrower sense of the term.  Like the other two categories, they form a separate corporation, with an elder and an administrative bureau.

Some idea of the relative numerical strength of these three categories may be obtained from the following figures.  Thirty years ago in European Russia the merchant class (including wives and children) numbered about 466,000, the burghers about 4,033,000, and the artisans about 260,000.  The numbers according to the last census are not yet available.

In 1870 the entire municipal administration was reorganised on modern West-European principles, and the Town Council (gorodskaya duma), which formed under the previous system the connecting link between the old-fashioned corporations, and was composed exclusively of members of these bodies, became a genuine representative body composed of householders, irrespective of the social class to which they might belong.  A noble, provided he was a house-proprietor, could become Town Councillor or Mayor, and in this way a certain amount of vitality and a progressive spirit were infused into the municipal