The Manner of Dissolving a Community--The Peasants of any Village are Always Free to Suppress the Mir--Why they don't Do it more Frequently--What they Think of the Mir--How the Mir has No Objection Whatever to Individual Property, even though it Usually Upholds the Communal System--Purchases of Land by Peasants--Distribution of the Arable Lands between the Communes and Other Proprietors-- Utility and Functions of Personal Property--Can Both Modes of Tenure Co-Exist Some Day?
WHAT is the ultimate fate of the rural communes to be? and shall a decision on this head be postponed until they are free from all the encumbrances which crush them, and have become real and full proprietors of the land allotted them--or, do the difficulties that at present beset them make it desirable to come to a decision at once and to cut down at the root that gigantic growth of centuries, the mir, without first attempting to trim it down and to rid it of the parasitical plants which choke it?
Few are those who demand the immediate abrogation of the mir, but many those who wish for measures that should prepare and ensure its gradual disparition. Even now village communes are not indissoluble. The law, while upholding them, leaves to the members the privilege of abolishing them by instituting a final division of the communal domain between themselves. Nothing more is needed for that than a resolution passed by the assembled community, by a majority of not less than two thirds.* The an-
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