Books: Mutual Aid

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Very much the same must be said of Germany. Wherever the
peasants could resist the plunder of their lands, they have
retained them in communal ownership, which largely prevails in
Wurttemberg, Baden, Hohenzollern, and in the Hessian province of
Starkenberg.(29) The communal forests are kept, as a rule, in an
excellent state, and in thousands of communes timber and fuel
wood are divided every year among all inhabitants; even the old
custom of the Lesholztag is widely spread: at the ringing of the
village bell all go to the forest to take as much fuel wood as
they can carry.(30) In Westphalia one finds communes in which
all the land is cultivated as one common estate, in accordance
with all requirements of modern agronomy. As to the old communal
customs and habits, they are in vigour in most parts of Germany.
The calling in of aids, which are real fetes of labour, is known
to be quite habitual in Westphalia, Hesse, and Nassau. In
well-timbered regions the timber for a new house is usually taken
from the communal forest, and all the neighbours join in building
the house. Even in the suburbs of Frankfort it is a regular
custom among the gardeners that in case of one of them being ill
all come on Sunday to cultivate his garden.(31)

In Germany, as in France, as soon as the rulers of the people
repealed their laws against the peasant associations--that was
only in 1884-1888--these unions began to develop with a
wonderful rapidity, notwithstanding all legal obstacles which
were put in their way(32) "It is a fact," Buchenberger says,
"that in thousands of village communities, in which no sort of
chemical manure or rational fodder was ever known, both have
become of everyday use, to a quite unforeseen extent, owing to
these associations" (vol. ii. p. 507). All sorts of labour-saving
implements and agricultural machinery, and better breeds of
cattle, are bought through the associations, and various
arrangements for improving the quality of the produce begin to be
introduced. Unions for the sale of agricultural produce are also
formed, as well as for permanent improvements of the land.(33)

From the point of view of social economics all these efforts
of the peasants certainly are of little importance. They cannot
substantially, and still less permanently, alleviate the misery
to which the tillers of the soil are doomed all over Europe. But
from the ethical point of view, which we are now considering,
their importance cannot be overrated. They prove that even under
the system of reckless individualism which now prevails the
agricultural masses piously maintain their mutual-support
inheritance; and as soon as the States relax the iron laws by
means of which they have broken all bonds between men, these
bonds are at once reconstituted, notwithstanding the
difficulties, political, economical, and social, which are many,
and in such forms as best answer to the modern requirements of
production. They indicate in which direction and in which form
further progress must be expected.

I might easily multiply such illustrations, taking them from
Italy, Spain, Denmark, and so on, and pointing out some
interesting features which are proper to each of these
countries. The Slavonian populations of Austria and the
Balkan peninsula, among whom the "compound family," or "undivided
household," is found in existence, ought also to be
mentioned.(34) But I hasten to pass on to Russia, where the same
mutual-support tendency takes certain new and unforeseen forms.
Moreover, in dealing with the village community in Russia we have
the advantage: of possessing an immense mass of materials,
collected during the colossal house-to-house inquest which was
lately made by several zemstvos (county councils), and which
embraces a population of nearly 20,000,000 peasants in different
parts of the country.(35)

Two important conclusions may be drawn from the bulk of
evidence collected by the Russian inquests. In Middle Russia,
where fully one-third of the peasants have been brought to utter
ruin (by heavy taxation, small allotments of unproductive land,
rack rents, and very severe tax-collecting after total failures
of crops), there was, during the first five-and-twenty years
after the emancipation of the serfs, a decided tendency towards
the constitution of individual property in land within the
village communities. Many impoverished "horseless" peasants
abandoned their allotments, and this land often became the
property of those richer peasants, who borrow additional incomes
from trade, or of outside traders, who buy land chiefly for
exacting rack rents from the peasants. It must also be added that
a flaw in the land redemption law of 1861 offered great
facilities for buying peasants' lands at a very small
expense,(36) and that the State officials mostly used their
weighty influence in favour of individual as against communal
ownership. However, for the last twenty years a strong wind of
opposition to the individual appropriation of the land blows
again through the Middle Russian villages, and strenuous efforts
are being made by the bulk of those peasants who stand between
the rich and the very poor to uphold the village community. As to
the fertile steppes of the South, which are now the most populous
and the richest part of European Russia, they were mostly
colonized, during the present century, under the system of
individual ownership or occupation, sanctioned in that form by
the State. But since improved methods of agriculture with the aid
of machinery have been introduced in the region, the peasant
owners have gradually begun themselves to transform their
individual ownership into communal possession, and one finds now,
in that granary of Russia, a very great number of spontaneously
formed village communities of recent origin.(37)

The Crimea and the part of the mainland which lies to the
north of it (the province of Taurida), for which we have detailed
data, offer an excellent illustration of that movement. This
territory began to be colonized, after its annexation in 1783, by
Great, Little, and White Russians--Cossacks, freemen, and
runaway serfs--who came individually or in small groups from
all corners of Russia. They took first to cattle-breeding, and
when they began later on to till the soil, each one tilled as
much as he could afford to. But when--immigration continuing,
and perfected ploughs being introduced--land stood in great
demand, bitter disputes arose among the settlers. They lasted for
years, until these men, previously tied by no mutual bonds,
gradually came to the idea that an end must be put to disputes by
introducing village-community ownership. They passed decisions to
the effect that the land which they owned individually should
henceforward be their common property, and they began to allot
and to re-allot it in accordance with the usual village-community
rules. The movement gradually took a great extension, and on a
small territory, the Taurida statisticians found 161 villages in
which communal ownership had been introduced by the peasant
proprietors themselves, chiefly in the years 1855-1885, in lieu
of individual ownership. Quite a variety of village-community
types has been freely worked out in this way by the
settlers.(38) What adds to the interest of this transformation
is that it took place, not only among the Great Russians, who are
used to village-community life, but also among Little Russians,
who have long since forgotten it under Polish rule, among Greeks
and Bulgarians, and even among Germans, who have long since
worked out in their prosperous and half-industrial Volga colonies
their own type of village community.(39) It is evident that the
Mussulman Tartars of Taurida hold their land under the Mussulman
customary law, which is limited personal occupation; but even
with them the European village community has been introduced in a
few cases. As to other nationalities in Taurida, individual
ownership has been abolished in six Esthonian, two Greek, two
Bulgarian, one Czech, and one German village. This movement is
characteristic for the whole of the fertile steppe region of the
south. But separate instances of it are also found in Little
Russia. Thus in a number of villages of the province of Chernigov
the peasants were formerly individual owners of their plots; they
had separate legal documents for their plots and used to rent and
to sell their land at will. But in the fifties of the nineteenth
century a movement began among them in favour of communal
possession, the chief argument being the growing number of pauper
families. The initiative of the reform was taken in one village,
and the others followed suit, the last case on record dating from
1882. Of course there were struggles between the poor, who
usually claim for communal possession, and the rich, who usually
prefer individual ownership; and the struggles often lasted for
years. In certain places the unanimity required then by the law
being impossible to obtain, the village divided into two
villages, one under individual ownership and the other under
communal possession; and so they remained until the two coalesced
into one community, or else they remained divided still As to
Middle Russia, its a fact that in many villages which were
drifting towards individual ownership there began since 1880 a
mass movement in favour of re-establishing the village community.
Even peasant proprietors who had lived for years under the
individualist system returned en masse to the communal
institutions. Thus, there is a considerable number of ex-serfs
who have received one-fourth part only of the regulation
allotments, but they have received them free of redemption and in
individual ownership. There was in 1890 a wide-spread movement
among them (in Kursk, Ryazan, Tambov, Orel, etc.) towards putting
their allotments together and introducing the village community.
The "free agriculturists" (volnyie khlebopashtsy), who were
liberated from serfdom under the law of 1803, and had bought
their allotments--each family separately--are now nearly all
under the village-community system, which they have introduced
themselves. All these movements are of recent origin, and
non-Russians too join them. Thus the Bulgares in the district of
Tiraspol, after having remained for sixty years under the
personal-property system, introduced the village community in the
years 1876-1882. The German Mennonites of Berdyansk fought in
1890 for introducing the village community, and the small peasant
proprietors (Kleinwirthschaftliche) among the German Baptists
were agitating in their villages in the same direction. One
instance more: In the province of Samara the Russian government
created in the forties, by way of experiment, 1O3 villages on the
system of individual ownership. Each household received a
splendid property of 105 acres. In 1890, out of the 103 villages
the peasants in 72 had already notified the desire of introducing
the village community. I take all these facts from the excellent
work of V.V., who simply gives, in a classified form, the facts
recorded in the above-mentioned house-to-house inquest.

This movement in favour of communal possession runs badly
against the current economical theories, according to which
intensive culture is incompatible with the village community. But
the most charitable thing that can be said of these theories is
that they have never been submitted to the test of experiment:
they belong to the domain of political metaphysics. The facts
which we have before us show, on the contrary, that wherever the
Russian peasants, owing to a concurrence of favourable
circumstances, are less miserable than they are on the average,
and wherever they find men of knowledge and initiative among
their neighbours, the village community becomes the very means
for introducing various improvements in agriculture and village
life altogether. Here, as elsewhere, mutual aid is a better
leader to progress than the war of each against all, as may be
seen from the following facts.

Under Nicholas the First's rule many Crown officials and
serf-owners used to compel the peasants to introduce the communal
culture of small plots of the village lands, in order to refill
the communal storehouses after loans of grain had been granted to
the poorest commoners. Such cultures, connected in the peasants'
minds with the worst reminiscences of serfdom, were abandoned as
soon as serfdom was abolished but now the peasants begin to
reintroduce them on their own account. In one district
(Ostrogozhsk, in Kursk) the initiative of one person was
sufficient to call them to life in four-fifths of all the
villages. The same is met with in several other localities. On a
given day the commoners come out, the richer ones with a plough
or a cart and the poorer ones single-handed, and no attempt is
made to discriminate one's share in the work. The crop is
afterwards used for loans to the poorer commoners, mostly free
grants, or for the orphans and widows, or for the village church,
or for the school, or for repaying a communal debt.(40)

That all sorts of work which enters, so to say, in the
routine of village life (repair of roads and bridges, dams,
drainage, supply of water for irrigation, cutting of wood,
planting of trees, etc.) are made by whole communes, and that
land is rented and meadows are mown by whole communes--the work
being accomplished by old and young, men and women, in the way
described by Tolstoi--is only what one may expect from people
living under the village-community system.(41) They are of
everyday occurrence all over the country. But the village
community is also by no means averse to modern agricultural
improvements, when it can stand the expense, and when knowledge,
hitherto kept for the rich only, finds its way into the peasant's
house.

It has just been said that perfected ploughs rapidly spread
in South Russia, and in many cases the village communities were
instrumental in spreading their use. A plough was bought by the
community, experimented upon on a portion of the communal land,
and the necessary improvements were indicated to the makers, whom
the communes often aided in starting the manufacture of cheap
ploughs as a village industry. In the district of Moscow, where
1,560 ploughs were lately bought by the peasants during five
years, the impulse came from those communes which rented lands as
a body for the special purpose of improved culture.

In the north-east (Vyatka) small associations of peasants,
who travel with their winnowing machines (manufactured as a
village industry in one of the iron districts), have spread the
use of such machines in the neighbouring governments. The very
wide spread of threshing machines in Samara, Saratov, and Kherson
is due to the peasant associations, which can afford to buy a
costly engine, while the individual peasant cannot. And while we
read in nearly all economical treatises that the village
community was doomed to disappear when the three-fields system
had to be substituted by the rotation of crops system, we see in
Russia many village communities taking the initiative of
introducing the rotation of crops. Before accepting it the
peasants usually set apart a portion of the communal fields for
an experiment in artificial meadows, and the commune buys the
seeds.(42) If the experiment proves successful they find no
difficulty whatever in re-dividing their fields, so as to suit
the five or six fields system.

This system is now in use in hundreds of villages of Moscow,
Tver, Smolensk, Vyatka, and Pskov.(43) And where land can be
spared the communities give also a portion of their domain to
allotments for fruit-growing. Finally, the sudden extension
lately taken in Russia by the little model farms, orchards,
kitchen gardens, and silkworm-culture grounds--which are
started at the village school-houses, under the conduct of the
school-master, or of a village volunteer--is also due to the
support they found with the village communities.

Moreover, such permanent improvements as drainage and
irrigation are of frequent occurrence. For instance, in three
districts of the province of Moscow--industrial to a great
extent--drainage works have been accomplished within the last
ten years on a large scale in no less than 180 to 200 different
villages--the commoners working themselves with the spade. At
another extremity of Russia, in the dry Steppes of Novouzen, over
a thousand dams for ponds were built and several hundreds of deep
wells were sunk by the communes; while in a wealthy German colony
of the south-east the commoners worked, men and women alike, for
five weeks in succession, to erect a dam, two miles long, for
irrigation purposes. What could isolated men do in that struggle
against the dry climate? What could they obtain through
individual effort when South Russia was struck with the marmot
plague, and all people living on the land, rich and poor,
commoners and individualists, had to work with their hands in
order to conjure the plague? To call in the policeman would have
been of no use; to associate was the only possible remedy.

And now, after having said so much about mutual aid and
support which are practised by the tillers of the soil in
"civilized" countries, I see that I might fill an octavo volume
with illustrations taken from the life of the hundreds of
millions of men who also live under the tutorship of more or less
centralized States, but are out of touch with modern civilization
and modern ideas. I might describe the inner life of a Turkish
village and its network of admirable mutual-aid customs and
habits. On turning over my leaflets covered with illustrations
from peasant life in Caucasia, I come across touching facts of
mutual support. I trace the same customs in the Arab djemmaa and
the Afghan purra, in the villages of Persia, India, and Java, in
the undivided family of the Chinese, in the encampments of the
semi-nomads of Central Asia and the nomads of the far North. On
consulting notes taken at random in the literature of Africa, I
find them replete with similar facts--of aids convoked to take
in the crops, of houses built by all inhabitants of the village--
sometimes to repair the havoc done by civilized filibusters--
of people aiding each other in case of accident, protecting the
traveller, and so on. And when I peruse such works as Post's
compendium of African customary law I understand why,
notwithstanding all tyranny, oppression, robberies and raids,
tribal wars, glutton kings, deceiving witches and priests,
slave-hunters, and the like, these populations have not gone
astray in the woods; why they have maintained a certain
civilization, and have remained men, instead of dropping to the
level of straggling families of decaying orang-outans. The fact
is, that the slave-hunters, the ivory robbers, the fighting
kings, the Matabele and the Madagascar "heroes" pass away,
leaving their traces marked with blood and fire; but the nucleus
of mutual-aid institutions, habits, and customs, grown up in the
tribe and the village community, remains; and it keeps men united
in societies, open to the progress of civilization, and ready to
receive it when the day comes that they shall receive
civilization instead of bullets.

The same applies to our civilized world. The natural and
social calamities pass away. Whole populations are periodically
reduced to misery or starvation; the very springs of life are
crushed out of millions of men, reduced to city pauperism; the
understanding and the feelings of the millions are vitiated by
teachings worked out in the interest of the few. All this is
certainly a part of our existence. But the nucleus of
mutual-support institutions, habits, and customs remains alive
with the millions; it keeps them together; and they prefer to
cling to their customs, beliefs, and traditions rather than to
accept the teachings of a war of each against all, which are
offered to them under the title of science, but are no science at
all.

NOTES:

1. A bulky literature, dealing with this formerly much neglected
subject, is now growing in Germany. Keller's works, Ein Apostel
der Wiedertaufer and Geschichte der Wiedertaufer, Cornelius's
Geschichte des munsterischen Aufruhrs, and Janssen's Geschichte
des deutschen Volkes may be named as the leading sources. The
first attempt at familiarizing English readers with the results
of the wide researches made in Germany in this direction has been
made in an excellent little work by Richard Heath--"Anabaptism
from its Rise at Zwickau to its Fall at Munster, 1521-1536,"
London, 1895 (Baptist Manuals, vol. i.)--where the leading
features of the movement are well indicated, and full
bibliographical information is given. Also K. Kautsky's Communism
in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation, London, 1897.

2. Few of our contemporaries realize both the extent of this
movement and the means by which it was suppressed. But those who
wrote immediately after the great peasant war estimated at from
100,000 to 150,000 men the number of peasants slaughtered after
their defeat in Germany. See Zimmermann's Allgemeine Geschichte
des grossen Bauernkrieges. For the measures taken to suppress the
movement in the Netherlands see Richard Heath's Anabaptism.

3. "Chacun s'en est accommode selon sa bienseance... on les a
partages.. pour depouiller les communes, on s'est servi de dettes
simulees" (Edict of Louis the Fourteenth, of 1667, quoted by
several authors. Eight years before that date the communes had
been taken under State management).

4. "On a great landlord's estate, even if he has millions of
revenue, you are sure to find the land uncultivated" (Arthur
Young). "One-fourth part of the soil went out of culture;" "for
the last hundred years the land has returned to a savage state;"
"the formerly flourishing Sologne is now a big marsh;" and so on
(Theron de Montauge, quoted by Taine in Origines de la France
Contemporaine, tome i. p. 441).

5. A. Babeau, Le Village sous l'Ancien Regime, 3e edition. Paris,
1892.

6. In Eastern France the law only confirmed what the peasants had
already done themselves. See my work, The Great French Revolution,
chaps. xlvii and xlviii, London (Heinemann), 1909.

7. After the triumph of the middle-class reaction the communal
lands were declared (August 24, 1794) the States domains, and,
together with the lands confiscated from the nobility, were put
up for sale, and pilfered by the bandes noires of the small
bourgeoisie. True that a stop to this pilfering was put next year
(law of 2 Prairial, An V), and the preceding law was abrogated;
but then the village Communities were simply abolished, and
cantonal councils were introduced instead. Only seven years later
(9 Prairial, An XII), i.e. in 1801, the village communities were
reintroduced, but not until after having been deprived of all
their rights, the mayor and syndics being nominated by the
Government in the 36,000 communes of France! This system was
maintained till after the revolution of 1830, when elected
communal councils were reintroduced under the law of 1787. As to
the communal lands, they were again seized upon by the State in
1813, plundered as such, and only partly restored to the communes
in 1816. See the classical collection of French laws, by Dalloz,
Repertoire de Jurisprudence; also the works of Doniol, Dareste,
Bonnemere, Babeau, and many others.

8. This procedure is so absurd that one would not believe it
possible if the fifty-two different acts were not enumerated in
full by a quite authoritative writer in the Journal des
Economistes (1893, April, p. 94), and several similar examples
were not given by the same author.

9. Dr. Ochenkowski, Englands wirthschaftliche Entwickelung im
Ausgange des Mittelalters (Jena, 1879), pp. 35 seq., where the
whole question is discussed with full knowledge of the texts.

10. Nasse, Ueber die mittelalterliche Feldgemeinschaft und die
Einhegungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts in England (Bonn, 1869), pp. 4,
5; Vinogradov, Villainage in England (Oxford, 1892).

11. Fr. Seebohm, The English Village Community, 3rd ed., 1884,
pp. 13-15.

12. "An examination into the details of an Enclosure Act will
make clear the point that the system as above described [communal
ownership] is the system which it was the object of the Enclosure
Act to remove" (Seebohm, l.c. p. 13). And further on, "They were
generally drawn in the same form, commencing with the recital
that the open and common fields lie dispersed in small pieces,
intermixed with each other and inconveniently situated; that
divers persons own parts of them, and are entitled to rights of
common on them... and that it is desired that they may be divided
and enclosed, a specific share being let out and allowed to each
owner" (p. 14). Porter's list contained 3867 such Acts, of which
the greatest numbers fall upon the decades of 1770-1780 and
1800-1820, as in France.

13. In Switzerland we see a number of communes, ruined by wars,
which have sold part of their lands, and now endeavour to buy
them back.

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