Russia

We now know much more clearly than we did before that the soil of the older provinces of the Russian Empire has been, from time immemorial, almost exclusively distributed among groups of self-styled kinsmen, collected in cultivating village-communities, self-organised and self-governing;

The secret of the comparatively slight departure of the Russian village-communities from what may be believed to have been the primitive type, appears to me to lie in the ancient Russian practice of colonisation, by which swarms were constantly thrown off from the older villages to settle somewhere in the enormous wastes;

In comparing the two extant types of Village-Community which have been longest examined by good observers, the Russian and the Indian, we may be led to think that the traces left on usage and idea by the ancient collective enjoyment are faint exactly in proportion to the decay of the theory of actual kinship among the co-villagers.

if twenty years reign of Elizabeth, empress of Russia, in which she gave the fathers of their country an example more illustrious than many conquests bought with blood;

This is also practised in Russia, where not one criminal was executed during the whole reign of the autocratical Elisabeth.

The course of events since that period in Russia and in Northern America has taken away much of its application to existing facts from the language employed by the writer on the subject of serfage in Russia, of the Russian village-communities, and of negro-slavery in the United States.

In the assumption of an agnatic connection between the villagers, in the blending of personal rights with privileges of ownership, and in a variety of spontaneous provisions for internal administration, the Russian village appears to be a nearly exact repetition of the Indian Community;

Is not the analogy between the Russian and this mode of construction, apparent?

But a landed aristocracy in Russia at this time holds the manufacturing interest in a tributary state.

The will and power of Nicholas, and that will and power which he has concentrated around, or rather within himself, establishes all Russia, both in Europe and Asia, as “a state.

If one portion of the State governments should be republican, like Vermont, where suffrage is open to all—and another portion should be oligarchies, like South Carolina, and the other slave States—another portion limited monarchies, like England—another portion ecclesiastical, like that of the Pope of Rome, or that of the ancient Jews—and another portion absolute despotisms, like that of Nicholas, …

But it may be asserted with substantial truth that Peter the Great laid the foundation of Russian power without much deference to the opinion of Russia, and that modern Prussia was created by Frederick the Great, who certainly drew his ideas of good government from other than Prussian sources.

Many of the trade difficulties of ancient times and of the middle ages can be directly traced to drought, or to flood, in the same way that famine due to similar causes has a prejudicial effect upon commerce in China, in India, in Russia, and even to a certain extent in Europe and America to-day.

and in Russia, where an extremely peculiar rule of succession prevailed, one of the most usual successions being that of the widow of the late Emperor, the exclusive devolution of the Crown through males on males was for the first time introduced by the Emperor Paul I.

The Czar might, with perfect safety to his authority, introduce the trial by jury into Russia, if he could but be permitted to select his jurors from those who were ready to maintain his laws, without regard to their injustice.

The Christians in certain parts of Russia have an idea that they are outwitted and injured by their Jew fellow-citizens.