done as yet, we are told by Thun that the rich peasants and the very poor peasants are both strongly in favor of the step, because it would give the one permanent ownership of the land and the other permanent relief from its burdens. When a commune gets divided in this way into a rich class of members and a poor class, the old brotherliness and mutual helpful ness of the Russian village are said by the same authority always to disappear and a more selfish spirit to take their place; but then it should be remembered how much easier it is to assist a neighbor out of a little difficulty of the way than to meet the unremitting claims of a class that have sunk into permanent poverty. Anyway, the temptation is equally strong on both parties to escape from the worries of their present situation through the rich buying out the poor.

Another tendency working in the same direction is the rapid dissolution of the old system of large house communities that prevailed before the emancipation. The average household has been reduced from seven and a half to five souls, the married children setting up houses of their own instead of dwelling under one roof with their father and grandfather. The house is a mere hut, with no furniture but a table and a wooden bench used by night for a bed, but still the separate ménage has increased to an embarrassing extent the expenses of the peasant's living at the very time that other circumstances have reduced his resources. The reason for the break-up of the house communities has been the desire to escape partly from the tyranny of the head of the household, but chiefly from the incessant quarrels that prevailed between the several members about the amount they each contributed to the common funds as compared with the amount they ate and drank out of them. One of the brothers goes to St. Petersburg during the winter months as a cabman and bring back a hundred roubles, while another gets work as a forester near home, and earns no more than twentyfive. Now, according to an author quoted by Stepniak, who is describing a family among whom he has lived, the question always is: "Why should he (the forester) consume with such avidity the tea and sugar dearly purchased with the cabman's money? And in general, why should this tea be absorbed with such

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greediness by all the numerous members of the household-by the elder brother, for instance, who alone drank something like eighty cups a day (the whole family consumed about nine hundred cups per diem) while he did not move a finger toward earning all this tea and sugar While the cabman was freezing in the cold night air, or busying himself with some drunken passenger, or was being abused and beaten by a policeman on duty near some theatre, this elder brother was com fortably stretched upon his belly, on the warm family oven, pouring out some nonsense about twenty-seven bears whom he had seen rambling through the country with their whelps in search of new land for settlement." And so the quarrel goes round; always the old difficulty of meum and tuum, so hard to reconcile except under a régime of individual property.

In fact, the shifts to which the Russian peasantry, like other peasantries elsewhere, have been reduced to solve this difficulty in the management of their common land constitute oue main cause of their agricultural backwardness and their consequent poverty. Elisée Reclus calculates that if the Russian fields were cultivated like those of Great Britain, Russia could produce, instead of six hundred and fifty million hectolitres of corn annually about five milliards, which would be sufficient to feed a population of five hundred million souls. A few lessons in good husbandry will do. much more for the comfort of a people than many changes of social organizations; but good husbandry is virtually impossible under a system of unstable tenure, which turns a man necessarily out of his holding every few years for the purpose of a new distribution of the land, and which compels him to take his holding, when he gets it, in some thirty or forty scattered plots. Redistributions, it is true, do not occur so very frequently as we might suppose. Russian land is all cultivated on a three years' rotation, one might be apt to look for a new distribution every three years, but that almost never occurs. Thun states that in the province of Moscow during the twenty years 1858-1878 the average interval of distribution was 12 years, four rotations; that 49 per cent. of the communes had a distribution only once in 15 years, and 37 per cent. only once in 20 years. The dislike to frequent distributions is growing, on the obvious and very reason

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able ground that they either discourage a man from doing well by his land, or they inflict on him the grave injustice of depriving him of the ground he has himself improved before he has reaped from it the due reward of his labor. The tendency toward individual property is therefore strongly at work here, and as this system of periodical redistribution is established merely to give every man that natural right by virtue of his birth to a share in the land, which is now in so many cases such a delusive irony, the resistance to the new tendency cannot be expected to be very resolute. The runrig system of cultivation, which prevails in Russia in the same form as it did in the Highlands of Scotland, does not give any similar appearance of decay. Stepniak says the peasants still prefer that arrangement because it allows room for perfect fairness-perfect reconciliation of the meum and tuum-in the distribution of their most precious commodity, the land, which always presents great variety as to quality of soil and situation with respect to roads, water, the village, etc. Under a communal system with many members this method of arrangement is almost indispensable to avoid quarrels and prevent the indolent from shirking their proper share of the work, but its agricultural disadvantages are so great that it never long resists an improving husbandry. Although an owner, the Russian peasant, in consequence of the shifting nature of his subject, is said by Stepniak to have none of that passionate feeling of ownership and that profound delight in his land which are characteris tic of the peasant proprietors of the West, but he has what is really the same thing -a deep sense of personal dignity from its possession, and he feels himself to have lost caste if he is forced to give up his holding and become a mere batrak, or wage laborer. All the pride of ownership is already there, and in the changes of the immediate future it will have plenty of opportunity for asserting its place.

The Russian communal system is thus threatening to break up; it is on its trial. It is certainly producing as much poverty as any of the much denounced systems of western nations, and we shall now add that, so far from checking revolutionary agitation at home, it has positively assisted, to no inconsiderable extent, in nursing it. The Nihilist agitation has

contracted more and more of an agrarian character, and what, in the beginning of the last Czar's reign, was a movement of a more or less academic character-a lavish outpouring of the spirit that eternally denies-is now concentrating itself into a peasant's cry for more land and less rent and taxes. For the last eight or ten years the Revolutionary Party of Russia has been divided into two separate organizations, which sometimes work together and sometimes fight together, as the manner of revolutionists seems to be; but both sides address themselves to the wants of the peasantry, and profess to give voice to their specific grievances and demands. One-the better-known section which actually accomplished the assassination of the late Czar-calls itself the Will of the People Party, because it holds that in politics the great aim should always be to study and satisfy the needs and desires of the people; and the other takes the name of the Black Division Party, because the thing the people most want at present is the black division, i.e., the great new redistribution of the whole land of the empire, including the estates of the noblesse. The object of this great secular division of the land would be to distribute it more fairly among the communes, and in the system of agrarian ideas that occupies the minds of the Russian peasantry, it seems as much a matter of course that a universal redistribution of that kind should occur once in an age as that a local redistribution of the communal allotments should be made every few years. The "Old Believers" mix this idea up with their dreams of a great millennial reign, and keep on thinking that the day after to morrow is to bring in the happy period before the end of the world, when truth is to prevail and the land is to be equally divided among all; and a feeling easily gets about among the peasantry generally that the "black division" is at last coming. Such a feeling was very widespread during the reign of the late Czar, and, indeed, is still so. Rumors fly every now and then from hamlet to hamlet like wildfire, no one knows whence or how, that the division is to be made in a month, or a week, or a year; that the Czar has decreed it, and when it does not come, that the Czar's wishes have for the time been thwarted, as they had so often been thwarted before, by the selfish machinations of the noblesse. For

the peasant has a profound and touching belief in his Czar. There may be agrarian socialism in his creed, but it is not the agrarian socialism of the schools. The first article of his faith-and it would appear to be the natural faith of the peasant all the world over-is that the earth is the Lord's and not the nobility's; but his second is that the Czar is the Lord's steward, sent for the very purpose of dividing the land justly among his people. If the peasant hopes for the black division, he hopes for it from the Czar. The Emancipation Act has been far from giving him the land or the liberty he looked for, but he believes-and nothing will shake him out of the belief-that the Emancipation Law which the Czar actually decreed was a righteous law that would have met all the people's wishes and claims, but that this law has been altered seriously to their disadvantage, under the influence of the noblesse, in the process of carrying it into execution. But his confidence always is that the Czar will still interfere and put everything to rights. And when, only a few years ago, the revolutionist Stephanovitch stirred up some disturbances in Southern Russia, which were commonly dignified at the time with the name of a peasants' insurrection, he was only able to succeed in doing what he did by first going to St. Petersburg with a petition from the peasants of the distric tto the Czar, and then issuing on his return a false proclamation in the Czar's name, commanding the people to rise against the noblesse, who were declared to be persistently obstructing and defeating His Majesty's good and just intentions for his loyal people's welfare. If an imperial proclamation were issued to the contrary effect-a proclamation condemning or repudiating the operations of the peasants-the latter would refuse to believe it to be genuine. That occurs again and again about this very idea of the black division, which has obtained possession of the brains of the rural population. It often happens that in a season of excitement, like the time of the Russo-Turkish war, or of famine, like the winter of 1880-81, the rumors and expectations of the black division become especially definite and lively, and lead to meet ings and discussions and disturbances which the Government think it prudent to stop. In 1879 the Minister of the Interior, with this object in view, issued a cir

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cular contradicting the rumors that were spread abroad, which was read in all the villages and affixed to the public buildings. It stated, as plainly as it was possible to state anything, that there would be no redistribution, and that the landlords would retain their property; but it produced no effect. Professor Engelhardt wrote one of his published "Letters from a Village" at that very moment, and states that the moujiks would not understand the circular to mean anything more than a request that they would for a time abstain from gossiping at random about the coming redistribution. One of their reasons for making this odd misinterpretation is curious. The circular warned the people against evil-intentioned persons who disseminated false reports, and gave instructions to the authorities to apprehend them. These evil-intentioned persons were, of course, the Nihilist agitators, who were making use of these reports to foment an agrarian insurrection; but the peasants took these enemies of the Government to be the landlords and others who had, they believed, set themselves against the redistribution movement and prevented the benevolence and righteous purposes of the Czar from descending upon his people. In some parts of Russia there has sprung up since 1870 a group of peasantry known as "the medalmen," who have persuaded themselves that the Czar not only wants to give them more land, but has long since decreed their exemption from all taxation except the poll tax. They say, moreover, that he struck a medal to commemorate this gracious design of his, which has been, as usual, so wickedly frustrated by his subordinates; and that even as things are, one has but to get hold of one of these medals and show it to the collector, and the collectors are bound to give the holder the exemption he wants. The medals to which so much virtue is ascribed are merely the medals struck to commemorate the Emancipation of the Serfs; but the "medalmen," who are generally men that have parted with their land, sold their houses, and settled at the mines, pay very high prices for one of these medals, wear it constantly about their necks, and think it will secure them a genuine respite from the burden of taxation they have to bear.

The Nihilist propagandists think-and the idea seems very remarkable-that this

childish and ignorant confidence in the Czar will not be able to stand much longer the strain of the increasing difficulties of the rural situation. The propagandists make it their business to keep alive the idea of the black division in the hearts of the moujiks, and make use of every successive disappointment at its continued delay as an instrument of alienating the affections of the people from the throne. A peasantry are very slow to throw over old sentiments, and will suffer long before breaking with the past, but they take a sure grip of their own interest, and they will turn sometimes very decisively and very gregariously to new deliverers. The Russian peasants see themselves settled on plots of ground too small to work with profit, and overburdened with taxes; they have to pay sixty per cent. of all their earnings in dues of all kinds on their land; and they cast their eyes abroad and see two-thirds of the country still unpossessed by the people, one-half still owned by the State, and one-sixth by the greater landowners; and with the communistic ideas in which they have been nursed, they feel that it is time for a new division of the greater order to take place. A gigantic crofter question is impending, and this agrarian agitation for more land is likely enough to make Nihilism a more formidable thing in the future than it has been in the past. Hitherto it has taken little

hold of the peasantry. At first it was a movement of educated young Russia merely, and might be counted with the ordinary intellectual excesses of youth. It only became a serious political force after the Emancipation Act. For reasons which there is no room to enter upon here, the landed classes were largely impoverished by the new legislation, and the impoverished families were filled with the bitterest and most violent hatred of the Government. Their members were to be found everywhere, at the universities, in the army, in the Government offices, and every where steeped in resentment and discontent. They became zealous recruits of Nihilism, and converted it into active conspiracy and revolution. But it was still a movement of the upper classes, and in spite of immense exertions it has remained so. The situation, however, is rapidly changing, and with the rise--so remarkable in many ways--of a numerous rural proletariat in the country that was supposed to enjoy special protection against it, with the growing distress and discontent of the peasantry, with the louder and more persistent cries for the black division, which their hereditary conception of agrarian justice suggests to them as the only solution of their troubles, who will say what to-morrow may bring forth? National Review.

HAVING dealt in a previous article (see Contemporary Review, June, 1889)* with the voice in its every-day garb of speech, it now remains for me to speak of it as it is when transfigured in song. The organ is the same in both cases, but in song it is used strictly as a musical instrument-one, too, of far more complex structure than any fashioned by the hand of man. The mechanism of voice has already been described, but, for the sake of clearness, it may be well to recall the three essential elements in its production:

* See August issue of THE ECLECTIC.

1, the air blast, or motive power; 2, the vibrating reed, or tone-producing apparatus; 3, the sounding board, or reinforcing cavities. These, to parody a wellworn physiological metaphor, are the three legs of the tripod of voice; defect in, or mismanagement of, any one of them is fatal to the musical efficiency of the vocal instrument. The air supplied by the lungs is moulded into sound by the innumerable nimble little fingers of the muscles which move the vocal cords. These fingers (which prosaic anatomists call fibres), besides being almost countless in number, are arranged in so intricate a manner that

every one who dissects them finds out something new, which, it is needless to say, is forthwith given to the world as an important discovery. It is probable that no amount of macerating or teazing out with pincers will ever bring us to "finality" in this matter; nor do I think it would profit us much as regards our knowledge of the physiology of the voice if the last tiny fibrilla of muscle were run to earth. The mind can form no clearer notions of the infinitely little than of the infinitely great, and the microscopic movements of these tiny strips of contractile tissue would be no more real to us than the figures which express the rapidity of light and the vast stretches of astronomical time and distance. Moreover, no two persons have their laryngeal muscles arranged in precisely the same manner, a circumstance which of itself goes a considerable way toward explaining the almost infinite variety of human voices. The wonderful diversity of expression in faces which structurally, as we may say, are almost identical is due to minute differences in the arrangement of the little muscles which move the skin. The same thing holds good of the larynx. In addition to this there are more appreciable differences, such as we see in the other parts of the body. The larynx itself is as various in size and shape as the nose; and this is still more the case with the other parts concerned in the production of the voice. The most laborious anatomical Gradgrind would shrink appalled from the attempt to measure the capacity and trace the shape of the various resonance chambers -chest, throat, mouth, and nose, with the many intricate little passages and cavelike spaces communicating with the latter -yet the slightest difference in the form, size, or material structure of any of these parts must have its effect in modifying the voice to some extent.

It is a curious fact that singers, who are often rather unwilling to believe that the voice is formed solely in the larynx, are yet generally surprised to be told that the true nature of the voice cannot be certainly determined by examination of that organ. From what has been said as to the extraordinary number of the component parts of the vocal machine, it will be evident that it would be almost as rash to pronounce on the nature of the voice from the appearance of the larynx as it would

be to take the shape of the nose as an index of moral character. It can only be said in a general way that, other things (notably, the resonance chambers) being equal, one expects a large, roomy larynx, with thick, powerful cords, to yield a deep, massive voice, and a small organ, with slender cords, to send forth a shrill, high-pitched voice. These two types represent the male and female voice respectively; that of the child belongs to the latter category. It must be understood that the difference in size between the largest larynx and the smallest is, after all, very trifling in itself. For instance, the vocal cords in women are but a fraction of an inch shorter than in men, and the other dimensions vary in much the same proportion. A like difference prevails throughout the resonant apparatus, the reinforcing chambers being larger in men, and their walls (which are built up of bone, gristle, and muscle) denser and more solid.

The voice varies in compass no less than in quality. A priori long vocal cords should indicate great range of tone, but so much depends on the management of these vibrating reeds that comparatively little significance can be attached to mere length. The average compass of the singing voice is from two to three octaves, the latter limit being seldom exceeded. The artistic effect produced with this small stock of available notes is as wonderful in its way as the marvellous results that can be got out of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. In singing up the scale, the vocalist feels that at a certain point he has to alter his method of production in order to reach the higher notes. This point marks the break between the so-called "chest" and "head" registers, or what I may call the lower and upper stories of the voice.

The subject of the registers has been much debated by the learned, and still more perhaps by the unlearned; it is the "Eastern question" of vocal physiology. Quite a considerable literature has gathered round it; philosophers have lost their tempers and musicians have shown a plentiful lack of harmony in discussing it. The inherent difficulties of the subject have been increased by the fantastic terminology which has come down to us from a pre-scientific age, and by the erroneous observations of incompetent per