each of these authorities can do and cannot do. The commune is, in fact, a living institution, whose spontaneous vitality enables it to dispense with the assistance and guidance of the written law. As to its thoroughly democratic character there can be no possible doubt. The elder represents merely the executive power. All the real authority resides in the assembly, of which all heads of households are members. Theoretically speaking, the village parliament has a speaker, in the person of the village elder. . . The elder comes prominently forward only when it is necessary to take the sense of the meeting. On such occasions, he may stand back a little from the crowd and say, 'Well, orthodox, have you decided so?' and the crowd will probably shout, 'Ladno! ladno!' that is to say, 'Agreed! agreed!' Communal measures are generally carried in this way by acclamation; but it sometimes happens that there is such a decided diversity of opinion that it is difficult to tell which of the two parties has a majority. In this case, the elder requests the one party to stand to the right and the other to the left. The two groups are then counted, and the minority submits, for no one ever dreams of opposing openly the will of the mir."

Who can read that description without comparing the Russian village assembly with a New England town meeting, which is simply a reproduction on American soil of the Old-English township, as it appeared before it was ever overlaid by ecclesiastic and feudal organizations. The analogy may be carried farther. In the earliest times, the system of cultivation through a periodical redistribution of agricultural lands surely existed in the English township, as it exists in the mir to-day. Common lands were and are incident to both. Boston Common is simply a survival of the system as it reappeared upon our Atlantic seaboard.

Such is the nature of the village communities, with their village parliaments, in which the machinery of election and representation is constantly employed by perhaps five-sixths of the Russian people in the regulation of their local concerns. The greater number of the Russian towns are mere villages, whose inhabitants depend upon agriculture. Of the 68,600,000 who formed the rural population of European Russia in 1882, the greater part were settled in 555,278 villages, almost entirely built of wood. It thus appears that the national life of the greater part of the people of Russia is village life, a life packed away in the cells in which immemorial custom has enclosed it. The unit of state organization is still the village community known as the "mir." A union of such communities is called a "volost," whose peasant inhabitants elect an elder (volostnoy starshina). The

elder of the volost and his clerk have become, however, mere organs of the local police and tax-gatherers, while the tribunal of the volost is at the mercy both of influential land proprietors and of the wealthier peasants or merchants, subject as they are to the uncontrolled rule of a state official, the mirovoy posrednik, and of the police. The system of local self-government is also continued in the elective district and provincial assemblies, the Zemstvos, on the one hand, and, on the other, the elective justices of the peace (mirovoy sudia), whose periodical gatherings (mirovoy syezd) are courts of appeal against the decisions of the individual justices. But neither of these institutions, says a competent authority, and least of all the Zemstvo, is capable of acquiring the necessary independence. The Zemstvos-one for each district, and another for the province-consist of a representative assembly (zemskoye sobraniye) and an executive (Zemskaya uprava) nominated by the former. While in theory the Zemstvos have large powers in relation to the incidents of taxation, as well as to matters affecting education, public health, roads and the like, their decisions are jealously controlled by the representative of the central government, the Governor, and promptly annulled whenever they conflict with the spirit prevailing for the time at the Court. Disobedience is punished by dissolution, and sometimes by administrative exile,-circumstances which have tended to eliminate from the Zemstvos the better elements that entered originally into their composition. In the light of this statement it may be easier to understand the significance of the recent conference of the presidents of the Zemstvos, whose memorial, in the words of Mr. Sauverin, "embodies to the last word the science of constitutional government."

Whenever the local communities in which the main body of a nation live are nurseries in which the principle of election and representation is kept alive, workshops in which it is daily applied to the necessities of local existence, an explosion is possible at any moment which may lift it into a higher sphere. In the several colonial commonwealths founded by English settlers upon American soil, the typical English national assembly reappeared in an embryonic form, as the predestined product of a natural process of reproduction. These assemblies "were not formally instituted, but grew up themselves, because it was in the nature of Englishmen to assemble." A graphic statement of that fact

may be found in the words of Hutchison, a writer upon our colonial history, who tells us that in "this year [1619] a House of Burgesses broke out in Virginia." It is evident that the point has been reached when a representative national assembly, a real parliament on the modern plan, is about to break out in Russia; the travail of war is forcing the parturition. An eminent American publicist, in writing upon "Law: Its Nature and Development,"* said, not long ago:

"There can be no reasonable doubt that the power of Russia's Czar, vast and arbitrary as it seems, derives its strength from the Russian people. It is not the Czar's personal power; it is his power as head of the national church, as semi- sacred representative of the race and its historical development and organization. Its roots run deep into the tenacious, nourishing soil of immemorial habit. The Czar represents a history, not a caprice. Again, it is said, apparently with a quite close regard for the facts, that in Russia sovereignty is lodged with the Czar, the supreme master 'of all the Russias.' That his will is law, Siberia attests and Nihilism recognizes. But is there no de facto limitation to his supremacy? How far could he go in the direction of institutional construction? How far could he succeed in giving Russia at once and out of hand the institutions, and Russians the liberties, of the United States and its people? How far would such a gift be law? Only so far as life answered to its word of command."

In that last sentence is embodied the essence of the problem. As the writer just quoted has well said in the same connection: "Temporary, fleeting despots, like the first Napoleon, lead nations with them by the ears, playing to their love of glory, to their sense of dignity and honor, to their ardor for achievement and their desire for order." To that he might well have added that fleeting despots cannot create, out of hand, enduring institutions. And yet, while it is true that "constitutions are not made, they grow," there can be no doubt that, at certain stages of the growth, it may be greatly accelerated by external influences. While it would be impossible for the Czar to create by edict an artificial scheme of liberty for Russia, it may be quite possible for him, in that way, to quicken into a new and larger life, and to lift into a higher sphere, the representative system whose "roots run deep into the tenacious, nourishing soil of immemorial habit." A great beginning could be made, if the Imperial hand

* Woodrow Wilson, "The State," pp. 620, 624.

would only cut away the vines with which the bureaucracy has for so long a time been strangling the rich undergrowth of representation embedded in local institutions. Statesmen, like Prince Mestchersky, who are saying that "constitutional government is impossible in Russia for the simple reason that the vast majority of the people have not the slightest conception of its meaning," seem to be strangely ignorant of the fact that, for centuries, the Russian people have been having the best of all constitutional training in their village parliaments, the identical training out of which has grown the representative assemblies of England and the United States. There is no reason why a parliamentary system should not be rapidly developed in Russia, because the entire substructure of the state is composed of nurseries in which the principle of election and representation by small democracies is in full bloom. Russia cannot afford to wait. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, no vast political aggregate ever suffered so much from the lack of the helping hand of a representative national assembly, capable of insuring the equal and concerted action of widely diffused populations. If to-day Russia had such a parliament, whose elongated fingers could reach down into the pockets of consenting millions, the brilliant adversary now defying her would be as helpless as a cripple in the grasp of a Titan. HANNIS TAYLOR.

THE ISSUE OF THE OPEN AND CLOSED

SHOP.

BY HENRY WHITE.

THE working class is rapidly raising itself out of its servile state through concerted action, and for the first time in history it is becoming a leading social factor. In consequence, the quiescent mass which gave society a firm base is growing restless, and the onerous task now faces mankind of readjusting the economic relations in conformity with democratic ideals.

The disappearing of the individual personal element in industry and the coming together of workmen in large groups, has developed among them a consciousness of their common interest, thereby promoting unity of purpose. This tendency is culminating in a definite working-class movement, which is widening the breach between employer and employed.

So far has the organization of the wage-workers proceeded, and likewise the counter combination of the employers, that the gravest of social problems has been narrowed down to the rights of the contending parties, as chiefly embodied in the problem of the "open" and "closed" shop. By the "open" shop is commonly meant the policy of employing workmen without regard to their affiliation with unions; and the "closed" shop is the antithesis of this, or the union shop. The term "union shop" is also made to apply to places where only union members are employed without the employer's agreeing to follow this course, but in the closed shop the employer expressly agrees to exclude nonunionists. The open-shop question is by no means new, as the unionizing of the shops has been naturally resisted by the employer wherever possible, but the term has taken on a new significance since it has been adopted as a slogan, as an emancipation declaration against union rule. The open-shop advocates dis