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14. A. Buchenberger, "Agrarwesen und Agrarpolitik," in A.
Wagner's Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie, 1892, Band i. pp.
280 seq.

15. G.L. Gomme, "The Village Community, with special reference to
its Origin and Forms of Survival in Great Britain" (Contemporary
Science Series), London, 1890, pp. 141-143; also his Primitive
Folkmoots (London, 1880), pp. 98 seq.

16. "In almost all parts of the country, in the Midland and
Eastern counties particularly, but also in the west--in
Wiltshire, for example--in the south, as in Surrey, in the
north, as in Yorkshire,--there are extensive open and common
fields. Out of 316 parishes of Northamptonshire 89 are in this
condition; more than 100 in Oxfordshire; about 50,000 acres in
Warwickshire; in Berkshire half the county; more than half of
Wiltshire; in Huntingdonshire out of a total area of 240,000
acres 130,000 were commonable meadows, commons, and fields"
(Marshall, quoted in Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities in the
East and West, New York edition, 1876, pp. 88, 89). See also Dr. G.
Slater's The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields,
London, 1907.

17. Ibid. p. 88; also Fifth Lecture.

18. In quite a number of books dealing with English country life
which I have consulted I have found charming descriptions of
country scenery and the like, but almost nothing about the daily
life and customs of the labourers.

19. In Switzerland the peasants in the open land also fell under the
dominion of lords, and large parts of their estates were
appropriated by the lords in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. (cf. A. Miaskowski, in Schmoller's Forschungen, Bd. ii.
1879, pp. 12 seq.) But the peasant war in Switzerland did not end in
such a crushing defeat of the peasants as it did in other countries,
and a great deal of the communal rights and lands was retained. The
self-government of the communes is, in fact, the very foundation of
the Swiss liberties. (cf. K. Burtli, Der Ursprung der
Eidgenossenschaft aus der Markgenossenschaft, Zurich, 1891.)

20. Dr. Reichesberg, Handworterbuch des Schweiz. Volkswirthschaft,
Bern, 1903.

21. See on this subject a series of works, summed up in one of
the excellent and suggestive chapters (not yet translated into
English) which K. Bucher has added to the German translation of
Laveleye's Primitive Ownership. Also Meitzen, "Das Agrar-und
Forst-Wesen, die Allmenden und die Landgemeinden der Deutschen
Schweiz," in Jahrbuch fur Staatswissenschaft, 1880, iv. (analysis
of Miaskowsky's works); O'Brien, "Notes in a Swiss village," in
Macmillan's Magazine, October 1885.

22. The wedding gifts, which often substantially contribute in
this country to the comfort of the young households, are
evidently a remainder of the communal habits.

23. The communes own, 4,554,100 acres of woods out of 24,813,000
in the whole territory, and 6,936,300 acres of natural meadows
out of 11,394,000 acres in France. The remaining 2,000,000 acres
are fields, orchards, and so on.

24. In Caucasia they even do better among the Georgians. As the
meal costs, and a poor man cannot afford to give it, a sheep is
bought by those same neighbours who come to aid in the work.

25. Alfred Baudrillart, in H. Baudrillart's Les Populations
Rurales de la France, 3rd series (Paris, 1893), p. 479.

26. The Journal des Economistes (August 1892, May and August
1893) has lately given some of the results of analyses made at
the agricultural laboratories at Ghent and at Paris. The extent
of falsification is simply incredible; so also the devices of the
"honest traders." In certain seeds of grass there was 32 per
cent. of gains of sand, coloured so as to Receive even an
experienced eye; other samples contained from 52 to 22 per cent.
only of pure seed, the remainder being weeds. Seeds of vetch
contained 11 per cent. of a poisonous grass (nielle); a flour for
cattle-fattening contained 36 per cent. of sulphates; and so on
ad infinitum.

27. A. Baudrillart, l.c. p. 309. Originally one grower would
undertake to supply water, and several others would agee to make
use of it. "What especially characterises such associations," A.
Baudrillart remarks, "is that no sort of written agreement is
concluded. All is arranged in words. There was, however, not one
single case of difficulties having arisen between the parties."

28. A. Baudrillart, l.c. pp. 300, 341, etc. M. Terssac, president
of the St. Gironnais syndicate (Ariege), wrote to my friend in
substance as follows:--"For the exhibition of Toulouse our
association has grouped the owners of cattle which seemed to us
worth exhibiting. The society undertook to pay one-half of the
travelling and exhibition expenses; one-fourth was paid by each
owner, and the remaining fourth by those exhibitors who had got
prizes. The result was that many took part in the exhibition who
never would have done it otherwise. Those who got the highest
awards (350 francs) have contributed 10 per cent. of their
prizes, while those who have got no prize have only spent 6 to 7
francs each."

29. In Wurttemberg 1,629 communes out of 1,910 have communal
property. They owned in 1863 over 1,000,000 acres of land. In
Baden 1,256 communes out of 1,582 have communal land; in
1884-1888 they held 121,500 acres of fields in communal culture,
and 675,000 acres of forests, i.e. 46 per cent. of the total area
under woods. In Saxony 39 per cent. of the total area is in
communal ownership (Schmoller's Jahrbuch, 1886, p. 359). In
Hohenzollern nearly two-thirds of all meadow land, and in
Hohenzollern-Hechingen 41 per cent. of all landed property, are
owned by the village communities (Buchenberger, Agrarwesen, vol.
i. p. 300).

30. See K. Bucher, who, in a special chapter added to Laveleye's
Ureigenthum, has collected all information relative to the
village community in Germany.

31. K. Bucher, ibid. pp. 89, 90.

32. For this legislation and the numerous obstacles which were
put in the way, in the shape of red-tapeism and supervision, see
Buchenberger's Agrarwesen und Agrarpolitik, Bd. ii. pp. 342-363,
and p. 506, note.

33. Buchenberger, l.c. Bd. ii. p. 510. The General Union of
Agricultural Co-operation comprises an aggregate of 1,679
societies. In Silesia an aggregate of 32,000 acres of land has
been lately drained by 73 associations; 454,800 acres in Prussia
by 516 associations; in Bavaria there are 1,715 drainage and
irrigation unions.

34. For the Balkan peninsula see Laveleye's Propriete Primitive.

35. The facts concerning the village community, contained in
nearly a hundred volumes (out of 450) of these inquests, have
been classified and summed up in an excellent Russian work by
"V.V." The Peasant Community (Krestianskaya Obschina), St.
Petersburg, 1892, which, apart from its theoretical value, is a
rich compendium of data relative to this subject. The above
inquests have also given origin to an immense literature, in
which the modern village-community question for the first time
emerges from the domain of generalities and is put on the solid
basis of reliable and sufficiently detailed facts.

36. The redemption had to be paid by annuities for forty-nine
years. As years went, and the greatest part of it was paid, it
became easier and easier to redeem the smaller remaining part of
it, and, as each allotment could be redeemed individually,
advantage was taken of this disposition by traders, who bought
land for half its value from the ruined peasants. A law was
consequently passed to put a stop to such sales.

37. Mr. V.V., in his Peasant Community, has grouped together all
facts relative to this movement. About the rapid agricultural
development of South Russia and the spread of machinery English
readers will find information in the Consular Reports (Odessa,
Taganrog).

38. In some instances they proceeded with great caution. In one
village they began by putting together all meadow land, but only
a small portion of the fields (about five acres per soul) was
rendered communal; the remainder continued to be owned
individually. Later on, in 1862-1864, the system was extended,
but only in 1884 was communal possession introduced in full.--
V.V.'s Peasant Community, pp. 1-14.

39. On the Mennonite village community see A. Klaus, Our Colonies
(Nashi Kolonii), St. Petersburg, 1869.

40. Such communal cultures are known to exist in 159 villages out
of 195 in the Ostrogozhsk district; in 150 out of 187 in
Slavyanoserbsk; in 107 village communities in Alexandrovsk, 93 in
Nikolayevsk, 35 in Elisabethgrad. In a German colony the communal
culture is made for repaying a communal debt. All join in the
work, although the debt was contracted by 94 householders out of
155.

41. Lists of such works which came under the notice of the
zemstvo statisticians will be found in V.V.'s Peasant Community,
pp. 459-600.

42. In the government of Moscow the experiment was usually made
on the field which was reserved for the above-mentioned communal
culture.

43. Several instances of such and similar improvements were given
in the Official Messenger, 1894, Nos. 256-258. Associations
between "horseless" peasants begin to appear also in South
Russia. Another extremely interesting fact is the sudden
development in Southern West Siberia of very numerous
co-operative creameries for making butter. Hundreds of them
spread in Tobolsk and Tomsk, without any one knowing wherefrom
the initiative of the movement came. It came from the Danish
co-operators, who used to export their own butter of higher
quality, and to buy butter of a lower quality for their own use
in Siberia. After a several years' intercourse, they introduced
creameries there. Now, a great export trade, carried on by a
Union of the Creameries, has grown out of their endeavours and
more than a thousand co-operative shops have been opened in the
villages.

CHAPTER VIII

MUTUAL AID AMONGST OURSELVES (continued)

Labour-unions grown after the destruction of the guilds by the
State. Their struggles. Mutual Aid in strikes.
Co-operation. Free associations for various purposes. Self-sacrifice.
Countless societies for combined action under all possible aspects.
Mutual Aid in slum-life. Personal aid.

When we examine the every-day life of the rural populations
of Europe, we find that, notwithstanding all that has been done
in modern States for the destruction of the village community,
the life of the peasants remains honeycombed with habits and
customs of mutual aid and support; that important vestiges of the
communal possession of the soil are still retained; and that, as
soon as the legal obstacles to rural association were lately
removed, a network of free unions for all sorts of economical
purposes rapidly spread among the peasants--the tendency of
this young movement being to reconstitute some sort of union
similar to the village community of old. Such being the
conclusions arrived at in the preceding chapter, we have now to
consider, what institutions for mutual support can be found at
the present time amongst the industrial populations.

For the last three hundred years, the conditions for the
growth of such institutions have been as unfavourable in the
towns as they have been in the villages. It is well known,
indeed, that when the medieval cities were subdued in the
sixteenth century by growing military States, all institutions
which kept the artisans, the masters, and the merchants together
in the guilds and the cities were violently destroyed. The
self-government and the self-jurisdiction of both, the guild and
the city were abolished; the oath of allegiance between
guild-brothers became an act of felony towards the State; the
properties of the guilds were confiscated in the same way as the
lands of the village communities; and the inner and technical
organization of each trade was taken in hand by the State. Laws,
gradually growing in severity, were passed to prevent artisans
from combining in any way. For a time, some shadows of the old
guilds were tolerated: merchants' guilds were allowed to exist
under the condition of freely granting subsidies to the kings,
and some artisan guilds were kept in existence as organs of
administration. Some of them still drag on their meaningless
existence. But what formerly was the vital force of medieval life
and industry has long since disappeared under the crushing weight
of the centralized State.

In Great Britain, which may be taken as the best illustration
of the industrial policy of the modern States, we see the
Parliament beginning the destruction of the guilds as early as
the fifteenth century; but it was especially in the next century
that decisive measures were taken. Henry the Eighth not only
ruined the organization of the guilds, but also confiscated their
properties, with even less excuse and manners, as Toulmin Smith
wrote, than he had produced for confiscating the estates of the
monasteries.(1) Edward the Sixth completed his work,(2) and
already in the second part of the sixteenth century we find the
Parliament settling all the disputes between craftsmen and
merchants, which formerly were settled in each city separately.
The Parliament and the king not only legislated in all such
contests, but, keeping in view the interests of the Crown in the
exports, they soon began to determine the number of apprentices
in each trade and minutely to regulate the very technics of each
fabrication--the weights of the stuffs, the number of threads
in the yard of cloth, and the like. With little success, it must
be said; because contests and technical difficulties which were
arranged for centuries in succession by agreement between
closely-interdependent guilds and federated cities lay entirely
beyond the powers of the centralized State. The continual
interference of its officials paralyzed the trades; bringing most
of them to a complete decay; and the last century economists,
when they rose against the State regulation of industries, only
ventilated a widely-felt discontent. The abolition of that
interference by the French Revolution was greeted as an act of
liberation, and the example of France was soon followed
elsewhere.

With the regulation of wages the State had no better success.
In the medieval cities, when the distinction between masters and
apprentices or journeymen became more and more apparent in the
fifteenth century, unions of apprentices (Gesellenverbande),
occasionally assuming an international character, were opposed to
the unions of masters and merchants. Now it was the State which
undertook to settle their griefs, and under the Elizabethan
Statute of 1563 the Justices of Peace had to settle the wages, so
as to guarantee a "convenient" livelihood to journeymen and
apprentices. The Justices, however, proved helpless to conciliate
the conflicting interests, and still less to compel the masters
to obey their decisions. The law gradually became a dead letter,
and was repealed by the end of the eighteenth century. But while
the State thus abandoned the function of regulating wages, it
continued severely to prohibit all combinations which were
entered upon by journeymen and workers in order to raise their
wages, or to keep them at a certain level. All through the
eighteenth century it legislated against the workers' unions, and
in 1799 it finally prohibited all sorts of combinations, under
the menace of severe punishments. In fact, the British Parliament
only followed in this case the example of the French
Revolutionary Convention, which had issued a draconic law against
coalitions of workers-coalitions between a number of citizens
being considered as attempts against the sovereignty of the
State, which was supposed equally to protect all its subjects.
The work of destruction of the medieval unions was thus
completed. Both in the town and in the village the State reigned
over loose aggregations of individuals, and was ready to prevent
by the most stringent measures the reconstitution of any sort of
separate unions among them. These were, then, the conditions
under which the mutual-aid tendency had to make its way in the
nineteenth century.

Need it be said that no such measures could destroy that
tendency? Throughout the eighteenth century, the workers' unions
were continually reconstituted.(3) Nor were they stopped by the
cruel prosecutions which took place under the laws of 1797 and
1799. Every flaw in supervision, every delay of the masters in
denouncing the unions was taken advantage of. Under the cover of
friendly societies, burial clubs, or secret brotherhoods, the
unions spread in the textile industries, among the Sheffield
cutlers, the miners, and vigorous federal organizations were
formed to support the branches during strikes and
prosecutions.(4) The repeal of the Combination Laws in 1825 gave
a new impulse to the movement. Unions and national federations
were formed in all trades.(5) and when Robert Owen started his
Grand National Consolidated Trades' Union, it mustered half a
million members in a few months. True that this period of
relative liberty did not last long. Prosecution began anew in the
thirties, and the well-known ferocious condemnations of 1832-1844
followed. The Grand National Union was disbanded, and all over
the country, both the private employers and the Government in its
own workshops began to compel the workers to resign all
connection with unions, and to sign "the Document" to that
effect. Unionists were prosecuted wholesale under the Master and
Servant Act--workers being summarily arrested and condemned
upon a mere complaint of misbehaviour lodged by the master.(6)
Strikes were suppressed in an autocratic way, and the most
astounding condemnations took place for merely having announced a
strike or acted as a delegate in it--to say nothing of the
military suppression of strike riots, nor of the condemnations
which followed the frequent outbursts of acts of violence. To
practise mutual support under such circumstances was anything but
an easy task. And yet, notwithstanding all obstacles, of which
our own generation hardly can have an idea, the revival of the
unions began again in 1841, and the amalgamation of the workers
has been steadily continued since. After a long fight, which
lasted for over a hundred years, the right of combining together
was conquered, and at the present time nearly one-fourth part of
the regularly-employed workers, i.e. about 1,500,000, belong to
trade unions.(7)

As to the other European States, sufficient to say that up to
a very recent date, all sorts of unions were prosecuted as
conspiracies; and that nevertheless they exist everywhere, even
though they must often take the form of secret societies; while
the extension and the force of labour organizations, and
especially of the Knights of Labour, in the United States and in
Belgium, have been sufficiently illustrated by strikes in the
nineties. It must, however, be borne in mind that, prosecution
apart, the mere fact of belonging to a labour union implies
considerable sacrifices in money, in time, and in unpaid work,
and continually implies the risk of losing employment for the
mere fact of being a unionist.(8) There is, moreover, the
strike, which a unionist has continually to face; and the grim
reality of a strike is, that the limited credit of a worker's
family at the baker's and the pawnbroker's is soon exhausted, the
strike-pay goes not far even for food, and hunger is soon written
on the children's faces. For one who lives in close contact with
workers, a protracted strike is the most heartrending sight;
while what a strike meant forty years ago in this country, and
still means in all but the wealthiest parts of the continent, can
easily be conceived. Continually, even now, strikes will end with
the total ruin and the forced emigration of whole populations,
while the shooting down of strikers on the slightest provocation,
or even without any provocation,(9) is quite habitual still on
the continent.

And yet, every year there are thousands of strikes and
lock-outs in Europe and America--the most severe and protracted
contests being, as a rule, the so-called "sympathy strikes,"
which are entered upon to support locked-out comrades or to
maintain the rights of the unions. And while a portion of the
Press is prone to explain strikes by "intimidation," those who
have lived among strikers speak with admiration of the mutual aid
and support which are constantly practised by them. Every one has
heard of the colossal amount of work which was done by volunteer
workers for organizing relief during the London dock-labourers'
strike; of the miners who, after having themselves been idle for
many weeks, paid a levy of four shillings a week to the strike
fund when they resumed work; of the miner widow who, during the
Yorkshire labour war of 1894, brought her husband's life-savings
to the strike-fund; of the last loaf of bread being always shared
with neighbours; of the Radstock miners, favoured with larger
kitchen-gardens, who invited four hundred Bristol miners to take
their share of cabbage and potatoes, and so on. All newspaper
correspondents, during the great strike of miners in Yorkshire in
1894, knew heaps of such facts, although not all of them could
report such "irrelevant" matters to their respective papers.(10)

Unionism is not, however, the only form in which the worker's
need of mutual support finds its expression. There are, besides,
the political associations, whose activity many workers consider
as more conducive to general welfare than the trade-unions,
limited as they are now in their purposes. Of course the mere
fact of belonging to a political body cannot be taken as a
manifestation of the mutual-aid tendency. We all know that
politics are the field in which the purely egotistic elements of
society enter into the most entangled combinations with
altruistic aspirations. But every experienced politician knows
that all great political movements were fought upon large and
often distant issues, and that those of them were the strongest
which provoked most disinterested enthusiasm. All great
historical movements have had this character, and for our own
generation Socialism stands in that case. "Paid agitators" is, no
doubt, the favourite refrain of those who know nothing about it.
The truth, however, is that--to speak only of what I know
personally--if I had kept a diary for the last twenty-four
years and inscribed in it all the devotion and self-sacrifice
which I came across in the Socialist movement, the reader of such
a diary would have had the word "heroism" constantly on his lips.
But the men I would have spoken of were not heroes; they were
average men, inspired by a grand idea. Every Socialist newspaper--
and there are hundreds of them in Europe alone--has the same
history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward, and, in
the overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal
ambition. I have seen families living without knowing what would
be their food to-morrow, the husband boycotted all round in his
little town for his part in the paper, and the wife supporting
the family by sewing, and such a situation lasting for years,
until the family would retire, without a word of reproach, simply
saying: "Continue; we can hold on no more!" I have seen men,
dying from consumption, and knowing it, and yet knocking about in
snow and fog to prepare meetings, speaking at meetings within a
few weeks from death, and only then retiring to the hospital with
the words: "Now, friends, I am done; the doctors say I have but a
few weeks to live. Tell the comrades that I shall be happy if
they come to see me." I have seen facts which would be described
as "idealization" if I told them in this place; and the very
names of these men, hardly known outside a narrow circle of
friends, will soon be forgotten when the friends, too, have
passed away. In fact, I don't know myself which most to admire,
the unbounded devotion of these few, or the sum total of petty
acts of devotion of the great number. Every quire of a penny
paper sold, every meeting, every hundred votes which are won at a
Socialist election, represent an amount of energy and sacrifices
of which no outsider has the faintest idea. And what is now done
by Socialists has been done in every popular and advanced party,
political and religious, in the past. All past progress has been
promoted by like men and by a like devotion.

Co-operation, especially in Britain, is often described as
"joint-stock individualism"; and such as it is now, it
undoubtedly tends to breed a co-operative egotism, not only
towards the community at large, but also among the co-operators
themselves. It is, nevertheless, certain that at its origin the
movement had an essentially mutual-aid character. Even now, its
most ardent promoters are persuaded that co-operation leads
mankind to a higher harmonic stage of economical relations, and
it is not possible to stay in some of the strongholds of
co-operation in the North without realizing that the great number
of the rank and file hold the same opinion. Most of them would
lose interest in the movement if that faith were gone; and it
must be owned that within the last few years broader ideals of
general welfare and of the producers' solidarity have begun to be
current among the co-operators. There is undoubtedly now a
tendency towards establishing better relations between the owners
of the co-operative workshops and the workers.

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