in gross, for which the community as a whole is responsible, and which
may or may not be oppressive in amount; but the government has never
interfered with local legislation or with local customs. Thus in the
_mir_, or village-community, the Russians still retain an element of
sound political life, the importance of which appears when we consider
that five-sixths of the population of European Russia is comprised in
these communities. The tax assessed upon them by the imperial government
is, however, a feature which--even more than their imperfect system of
property and their low grade of mental culture--separates them by a
world-wide interval from the New England township, to the primeval
embryonic stage of which they correspond.

From these illustrations we see that the mark, or self-governing
village-community, is an institution which must be referred back to
early Aryan times. Whether the mark ever existed in England, in anything
like the primitive form in which it is seen in the Russian _mir_, is
doubtful. Professor Stubbs (one of the greatest living authorities on
such a subject) is inclined to think that the Teutonic settlers of
Britain had passed beyond this stage before they migrated from
Germany.[4] Nevertheless the traces of the mark, as all admit, are
plentiful enough in England; and some of its features have survived down
to modern times. In the great number of town-names that are formed from
patronymics, such as _Walsingham_ "the home of the Walsings,"
_Harlington_ "the town of the Harlings," etc.,[5] we have unimpeachable
evidence of a time when the town was regarded as the dwelling-place of a
clan. Indeed, the comparative rarity of the word _mark_ in English laws,
charters, and local names (to which Professor Stubbs alludes) may be due
to the fact that the word _town_ has precisely the same meaning. _Mark_
means originally the belt of waste land encircling the village, and
secondarily the village with its periphery. _Town_ means originally a