PEASANTS    PROPRIETORSHIP.
desiatines,  or  40/0,  to  the  Appanage  Department,   the Church, monasteries, towns, and other institutions.
Therefore the Crown in Russia is proprietor of the largest quantity of land, which, however, is very unequally distributed. If we exclude the provinces of the north (Archangel, Vologda and Olonets), and of the north-east, (Perm and Viatka), where Crown lands constitute from 48 to 97%) of the total area, the remaining 44 provinces do not contain more than 16 million desiatines of Government territory, or only 7°/o. As the same time the amount of available Crown land, not covered with forest, in these 49 provinces is about 4 million desiatines, of which Vs is concentrated in the province of Samara. Consequently, the peasant holdings come first as the most important in relation to agricultural economy, and as providing for the subsistence of the most numerous class in the State. It is, therefore, necessary to   enquire   somewhat more closely into their condition.
1. Peasants' proprietorship, a) Its character and dimensions. The peasant reforms consolidated the old form of peasant ownership of land, descended from earlier times, and the peasant communes retained in the form of allotments, for the most part, all the land of which they had enjoyed the use before.
In the next place, within the limits of the village communes, in localities populated by Great Russians, the new laws preserved the ancient common usufruct of land, which probably originated in the tribal communities of early times, when all the members of the tribe  or  family  had  equal  rights in the common land.
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