However advantageous the custom of living in large families may appear when regarded from the economic point of view, it has very serious defects, both theoretical and practical.

That families connected by the ties of blood-relationship and marriage can easily live together in harmony is one of those social axioms which are accepted universally and believed by nobody.  We all know by our own experience, or by that of others, that the friendly relations of two such families are greatly endangered by proximity of habitation.  To live in the same street is not advisable; to occupy adjoining houses is positively dangerous; and to live under the same roof is certainly fatal to prolonged amity.  There may be the very best intentions on both sides, and the arrangement may be inaugurated by the most gushing expressions of undying affection and by the discovery of innumerable secret affinities, but neither affinities, affection, nor good intentions can withstand the constant friction and occasional jerks which inevitably ensue.

Now the reader must endeavour to realise that Russian peasants, even when clad in sheep-skins, are human beings like ourselves.  Though they are often represented as abstract entities—­as figures in a table of statistics or dots on a diagram—­they have in reality “organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions.”  If not exactly “fed with the same food,” they are at least “hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,” and liable to be irritated by the same annoyances as we are.  And those of them who live in large families are subjected to a kind of probation that most of us have never dreamed of.  The families comprising a large household not only live together, but have nearly all things in common.  Each member works, not for himself, but for the household, and all that he earns is expected to go into the family treasury.  The arrangement almost inevitably leads to one of two results—­either there are continual dissensions, or order is preserved by a powerful domestic tyranny.

It is quite natural, therefore, that when the authority of the landed proprietors was abolished in 1861, the large peasant families almost all crumbled to pieces.  The arbitrary rule of the Khozain was based on, and maintained by, the arbitrary rule of the proprietor, and both naturally fell together.  Households like that of our friend Ivan were preserved only in exceptional cases, where the Head of the House happened to possess an unusual amount of moral influence over the other members.

This change has unquestionably had a prejudicial influence on the material welfare of the peasantry, but it must have added considerably to their domestic comfort, and may perhaps produce good moral results.  For the present, however, the evil consequences are by far the most prominent.  Every married peasant strives to have a house of his own, and many of them, in order to defray the necessary expenses, have been