Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE LAND LAWS OF FINLAND Theee is one great difference between a self-governing people and those who are oppressed by their rulers or by a privileged class; that in the case of the former revolution is unnecessary. Violent change may, for some reason, be necessary in a country, and it may be carried out by a popular movement or by an autocratic decree, but it is always less happy in its consequences than a change due to free natural evolutioai. We see, for example, the immediate effects of the changes produced by the French Revolution; by the Hapsburg monarchy, and by the rulers of Prussia and even more of Russia, which illustrate the difficulty of revolutionising rural institutions; and the advantage possessed by countries where such measures are unnecessary. In Finland natural development is the rule, the only exception to it being that part of the country which was under Russian rule during the last century and was therefore organised according to Russian principles. Throughout the greater part of Finland rural legislation has chiefly concerned itself with enclosures, that is, the abolition of the common property of parishes and villages, and the distribution of the intermixed acres of common village-fields among the several proprietors. These measures, which were essential to every kind of progress, have been of the greatest benefit to the people. " Storskifte," this re-distributioninto compact farms, was decided upon in 1750, a time when philanthropists all over Europe were working for the good of their kind. The work has, however, only recently been finished, and as late as 1848 some parishes in the east had enormous tracts of forests not only undivided among separate proprietors, but held in common by several villages and parishes. The work was, of cour...