For, the chief prop or basis of the municipal
authority is, of course, the Holy Stick;
whose glorious, pious, and immortal memory,
will, no doubt, be drunk by Russian tories
of the old school, and with nine times nine,
a century hence. As I intend hereafter
to speak of the H. S. in its institutional
point of view, and to show that, like the
tchinn, it has a pyramidal and mutually
cohering and supporting formation; I have
only to hint, in this place, that the happy
villagers get an intolerable amount of it,
both from the Bourmister and the Starosta.
The Bourmister is the great judge—Minos,
Rhadamanthus, and Æacus combined—under
the Pluto of this Tartarus, the absent M. de
Katerichassoff. The Bourmister has power
to order his adjoint the Starosta, for all his
long beard and venerable aspect, to undergo
the discipline of the stick; he has the power
to order the Starosta's great-grandmother to
be flogged; were it possible for that old lady
to be alive. The young men of the village,
the young maidens thereof, the children,
and the idiots, and the sick people, can all at
the word of command from the north German
intendant, be lashed like hounds; or, at his
pleasure, he can send them—thirty miles
distance, if he chooses—to a police-station,
with a little note to the nadziratelle or
polizie-kapitan; which note is at once
honoured by that functionary, who takes care
that, as far as there is any virtue in the
battogues or split-canes, the person entitled
to receive the amount of toco for which the
bill is good, shall have no cause to
complain of the police rate of discount.
Discount! the generous nadziratelle will oft-
times give the moujik an odd dozen for
luck.

The Bourmister's authority, then, is almost
as awful and irresponsible as that of the
captain of a man-of-war thirty years ago (the
nearest approach to the Grand Seigneur I
can think of), and he can order the gratings
to be rigged, and the hands to be turned
up for punishment, whenever things are not
going shipshape, or he is out of temper. The
Starosta more closely resembles the boatswain.
He has no special authority, under
the articles of war, to beat, but he does most
consumedly. The Bourmister can cause any
slave man or woman to be stripped, tied
up, and flogged; but he does it officially, and
with a grim mocking semblance of executing
justice. The Starosta kicks, cudgels,
punches, and slaps—not officially, but
officiously. The one state of things resembles
the punishment inflicted by Dr. Broomback,
the schoolmaster,—the other, the thrashing
administered by the fourth-form boy to his
fag. But there is not much to choose between
the two inflictions, as far as the amount of
pain suffered. The dorsal muscles are as
easily contused by the bully-boy's hockey-
stick as by the schoolmaster's cane; and a
whip, as long as it is a whip, will hurt,
whether it be wielded by a police-corporal, or
by a brutal peasant.

Among a people so constantly beaten as are
the Russians, it would naturally be expected
that whenever the beaten had the power, they
would become themselves the beaters, and
that their wives and children, their cattle
and domestic animals would lead a terrible
time of it. This is not the case. Haxthausen,
with an apologetic shrug for the abominations
of the stick régime, says, "Tout le
monde donne des coups en Russie," and goes
on to say that, the father beats his son, the
husband his wife, the mother her daughter,
the child his playfellow, and so forth. I am
thoroughly disinclined to believe this. From
all I have seen of the common people, they
appear to treat each other with kindness and
forbearance. A father may occasionally pitch
into his drunken son; but the Russians at
home are far removed from being
systematically violent and cruel. There is this
one grand protection to the married ladies,
that the Russian husband when drunk, is,
instead of a tiger, the most innocent of ba-a
lambs. It never by any chance occurs to
him to jump upon the wife of his bosom, or
to knock her teeth down her throat, or to
kneel on her chest, or to chastise her with a
poker. When most drunk he is most
affectionate. We have all of us heard the stock
Russian story, stating it to be the custom for
a Russian bride to present her future lord
and master with a whip on the wedding-day,
and to be afterwards known to express
discontent if her husband was lax in the
exercise of the thong on her marital shoulders.
Such an event, I have good reason to believe,
is as common in Russia as is the sale of a
wife in Smithfield, and with a halter round
her neck, among us in England. Yet
Muscovite husbands will lie quite as long under
the imputation of wife-whipping as the
English husbands do under the stigma of
wife-selling, and as unjustly. In this case
the saddle is placed on exactly the wrong
horse. A Russian peasant has really no
objection to sell his wife; and for a schtoff
or demi-John of vodki will part with his
Tatiana or Ekateriana cheerfully. The
Englishman will not barter away his moiety, but
he keeps her, and bruises her. To their
horses and cattle the Russians are singularly
merciful, preferring far more to drive them
by kind words than by blows. In general,
too, the women seem to treat the babies and
little children with all desirable kindness and
affection; the only exceptional case I can
recal was narrated to me by a Russian
gentleman, who told me that in some villages of
the government of Tchernigoff there was a
perfect epidemic among the women (only) for
beating their children; and that they were
in the habit of treating them with such
ferocious brutality, that the severest punishments
had to be applied to the unnatural parents,
and in many cases the children had to be