formed of converts collected from a variety of districts. It is said that these persons readily fall into a "brotherhood,"[1] and assume the character of a genuine village community. The experiment is one of deep interest to those who observe social phenomena. To those who are occupied with higher concerns it may possibly prove a new and potent force.
If we cannot measure the Past by the Present, so it is vain to seek for the Present a standard in the Past. The structures of the two societies are radically different. Some persons have fancied that they can see in the Russian Mir the realization of their communistic dreams, just as the philosophers of the Porch once thought that they had found in the jurisdiction of the Prætor their long-sought Law of Nature. But the Mir is on a lower level of social structure than that of Western Europe; and the attempt on our part to imitate it is not more reasonable than would be an attempt to make men quadrupeds, or to convert mammals into birds. We cannot, while we remain what we are, restore the institutions of the past. The better adapted these institutions were to their original purpose, the less fit are they for the altered conditions of our present life. The land tenure of archaic times implied among the freemen an aristocracy of birth, and below the freemen a servile population. Our forefathers would have regarded the doctrine of the equality of man as folly, and the doctrine of the free transfer of land as impious. We cannot, then, hope to learn from the history of these lower forms any practical improvement in our social arrangements. But we can more or less distinctly trace the steps by which these arrangements in fact arose. We can see how much of them is permanent, and in what direction alteration is safe.
- ↑ Sir H. S. Maine, "Early History of Institutions," p. 238. See also Mr. Hunter's "Orissa," vol. ii., p. 143.
