at a low rate and on long time to actual settlers and improvers.  As a result, some twelve thousand people have been drawn thither, who cultivate all this tract and work numerous industries besides.  No liquors are allowed to be sold in the place, so that the population is exceptionally moral as well as industrious, and offers a model example of low rates and good government.  A successful colony exists also at Prairie Home in Franklin county, Kansas, which was founded by a Frenchman, Monsieur E.V.  Boissiere.  It is designed to be an association and co-operation based on attractive industry; a large number of persons contributing their capital and labor under stringent laws, the proceeds to be divided among them whenever a majority shall so desire.  I might mention other associations of this kind, which are, in fact, however, only a variety of partnership or corporation.

It strikes me, however, that this is the only practical remedy for the evils which are aimed at by the communists, as far as they are remedial by social means.  If a number of working people, with the capital which their small savings will amount to (which is always large enough for any ordinary business if there be any considerable number of them), can be induced to organize themselves under competent leaders, and work for a few years together as faithfully as they ordinarily do for employers, they might realize considerable results, and get the advantage of their own work instead of enriching capitalists.  But the difficulty is, that this class have not, as a rule, learned either to manage great enterprises or to submit to those who are wisest among them, but break up in disorder and divisions when their individual preferences are crossed.  The first lesson that a man must learn who proposes to do anything in common with others (and the more so if there be many of them) is to submit and forbear.  With a little schooling our people ought, to a greater extent than at present, to be able to co-operate in large numbers in firms and corporations where the members and stockholders shall themselves do all the work and receive all the profits, and so avoid the two extremes of making profits for capitalists and paying their earnings to officers and directors.

AUSTIN BIERBOWER.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

NOTES FROM MOSCOW.

JUNE 1 (May 20, Russian style), 1877.

This diversity in the matter of dates is unpleasantly perplexing at times.  With every sensation of interest and pleasure I set myself about the task of describing, I must at once begin to reckon.  Twelve days’ difference!  Yes, I have already grasped that fact, but then in which direction must the deduction begin?—­backward or forward?  Such is the question that instantly arises, and if we are at the fag end of one month and the beginning of another, the amount of reckoning involved seems somewhat inadequate to the occasion.  The Russian clergy, it is said—­those, at any rate, of the lowest class, designated as “white priests,” many of them peasants by birth and marvellously illiterate—­have ever been averse to any change being made in the calendar, in order that their seasons of fasting and feasting may not be disturbed.