AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITY. Ingiving an account of agricultural communities it seems best to follow the plan adopted by Mr. Seebohm in his standard work on the English Village Community, and to proceed from known and undisputed facts, open to present observation, back through historical evidence which step by step decreases in authority and increases in difficulty of interpretation until we arrive at the tribal organisations, clans, and kindred settlements of prehistoric times ; that is to say, the comparative method may be first applied to existing communities, and to the traces and survivals of the past, and then an explanation may be attempted by the historical method.
Communities in which land is practically owned and cultivated in a collective manner, according to customary rules of great antiquity, and in which the rights and powers of any individual are strictly limited, still exist over large areas and among vast populations. In Central Asia the tribes of pastoral nomads are made up of groups, each under the authority of the head of a family, and nothing is the subject of separate ownership except clothes and weapons (La PLAY, Ouvriers Europiens). When a group becomes too large a division is made by the head in a manner suggestive of the division made between Abraham and Lot.
More interest, however, attaches to the communities which have a settled system of agriculture in a fixed area. The most important at present is the Russian MIR, which may be described as " the aggregation of inhabitants of a village possessing in common the land attached to it." Each male inhabitant of full age is entitled to an equal share of the land. The period of distribution at present varies in different districts, nine years being the average, and the limits from three to fifteen. The arrangements for the partition are decided by the peasants under the presidency of the stavosta (headman or mayor). All the arable land is divided into three concentric zones which extend round the village, and these zones arc again divided into three fields to admit of the three-field system of cultivation. These fields again are divided into long narrow strips, in length from one to four furlongs, and in breadth from one to two rods. The division of the parcels is arranged so that every man hat at least one parcel in each of the great. fields. The bundle of parcels is arranged before the lots are drawn. As a rule there is not much difference in the fertility of the land, but in some cases the measuring rods are of different lengths according to the fertility. Formerly a
certain amount of forest, pasture, and meadow was attached to each village, the inhabitants paying a kind of labour rent, but by the Act of Emancipation of 1861 this part of the land was made over to the lord. The cultivation is carried on in a strictly routine manner, the time of sowing, reaping, etc., being fixed by the village assembly, and there being no division between the parcels of land, and no separate approach. The dwelling-house, izba, with its enclosed garden ground, is, however, private property, although even in this case the owner cannot sell it to a stranger without the consent of the mir, which has always the right of pre-emption. Before the abolition of serfdom the lord of the manor (to give the nearest English equivalent) granted about half the arable land to the SERFS, and cultivated the remainder with their forced labour of about three days a week. On the emancipation a rent (redeemable—the money being in many eases advanced by government) was fixed, and a minimum amount of land assigned to each serf. Power was given to the mirs by a twothirds majority to abandon the system of collectivism in favour of individual ownership, but on the whole the mir has been rather strengthened, and is taken by the government as the basis of taxation. From the economic standpoint the most striking objections to the mir, which also seem to render its long continuance under modern conditions doubtful, are (1) the natural growth of population under the system of equal division. Hitherto this increase has been slow, owing partly to the large mortality of the children, and partly to the women being much older than their husbands, and to the prevalence of immorality. But the infant mortality might readily be lessened, and the system of unequal marriages, which rests on the convenience of the head of the family in obtaining women-servants by the marriage of his boys, seems to be falling into disfavour. (2) The second objection lies in the constraint placed upon individual enterprise by the compulsory cultivation according to fixed methods, in the impossibility of highly extensive cultivation with the periodic divisions of the land, and the absence of enclosures, and in causes similar to those which in England in the 15th century secured the victory of several (enclosed, individual) over champion (non-enclosed, common) cultivation (compare E. de LAVELEYE, Primitive Property, ch. iii. " Economic Results of the Russian Mir ").