Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

When we cast a broad glance on the present constitution of European society we are struck at once with the fact that, although so much has been done to get rid of the village community, this form of union continues to exist to the extent we shall presently see, and that many attempts are now made either to reconstitute it in some shape or another or to find some substitute for it. The current theory as regards the village community is, that in Western Europe it has died out by a natural death, because the communal possession of the soil was found inconsistent with the modern requirements of agriculture. But the truth is that nowhere did the village community disappear of its own accord ; everywhere, on the contrary, it took the ruling classes several centuries of persistent but not always successful efforts to abolish it and to confiscate the communal lands, -j^

In France, the village communities began to be deprived of their independence, and their lands began to be plundered, as early as the sixteenth century. However, it was only in the next century, when the mass of the peasants was brought, by exactions and wars, to the state of subjection and misery which is vividlj' depicted by all historians, that the plundering of their lands became easy and attained scandalous proportions. " Every one has taken of them according to his powers . . . Imaginary debts have been claimed, in order to seize upon their lands ; " so we read in an edict promulgated by Louis the Fourteenth in 1667.^ Of course the State's remedy for such evils was to render the communes still more subservient to the State, and to plunder them itself. In fact, two years later all money revenue of the communes was con- fiscated by the King. As to the appropriation of communal lands, it grew worse and worse, and in the next century the nobles and the clergy had already taken possession of immense tracts of land — one-half of the cultivated area, according to certain estimates

^ " Chacun s'en est accommod^ selon sa bienseance . . . on les a partagds . . . pour d^pouiller les communes, on s'est servi de dettes simuldes " (Edict of Louis the Fourteenth, of 1667, quoted by several authors. Eight years before that date the communes had been taken under State management). — mostly to let it go out of culture.^ But the peasants still maintained their communal institutions, and until the year 1 787 the village folkmotes, composed of all householders, used to come together in the shadow of the bell-tower or a tree, to allot and re-allot what they had retained of their fields, to assess the taxes, and to elect their executive, just as the Russian mir does at the present time. This is what Babeau's researches have proved to demonstration. ^

The Government found, however, the folkmotes "too noisy," too disobedient, and in 1787, elected councils, composed of a mayor and three to six syndics, chosen from among the wealthier peasants, were in- troduced instead. Two years later the Revolutionary Assemblee Constituante, which was on this point at one with the old regime, fully confirmed this law (on the 14th of December, 1789), and the bourgeois du village had now their turn for the plunder of communal lands, which continued all through the Revolutionary period. Only on the i6th of August, 1792, the Convention, under the pressure of the peasants' insurrections, decided to return the enclosed lands to the communes ; ^ but it ordered at the same time that they should be divided in equal parts among the wealthier peasants only — a measure which pro-

1 " 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 (Thdron de Montaug4 quoted by Taine in Origines de la France Coniemporaine, tome i. p. 441). ^ A. Babeau, Le Village sous FAmien Mgitne, 3° Edition. Paris,

' In Eastern France the law only confirmed what the peasants had already done themselves ; in other parts of France it usually remained a dead letter. voked new insurrections and was abrogated next year, in 1793, when the order came to divide the communal lands among all commoners, rich and poor alike, " active " and " inactive. " These two laws, however, ran so much against the conceptions of the peasants that they were not obeyed, and wherever the peasants had retaken possession of part of their lands they kept them undivided. But then came the long years of wars, and the communal lands were simply confiscated by the State (in 1794) as a mortgage for State loans, put up for sale, and plundered as such ; then returned again to the com- munes and confiscated again (in 18 13); and only in 1 8 16 what remained of them, i. e. about 15,000,000 acres of the least productive land, was restored to the village communities.^ Still this was not yet the end of the troubles of the communes. Every new rigime saw in the communal lands a means for gratifying its supporters, and three laws (the first in 1837 and the last under Napoleon the Third) were passed to induce the village communities to divide their estates. Three

1 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, Bonnemfere, Babeau, and many others.-

times these laws had to be repealed, in consequence of the opposition they met with in the villages ; but something was snapped up each time, and Napoleon the Third, under the pretext of encouraging perfected methods of agriculture, granted large estates out of the communal lands to some of his favourites. As to the autonomy of the village communities, what could be retained of it after so many blows? The mayor and the syndics were simply looked upon as unpaid functionaries of the State machinery. Even now, under the Third Republic, very little can be done in a village community without the huge State machinery, up to the prifet and the ministries, being set in motion. It is hardly credible, and yet it is true, that when, for instance, a peasant intends to pay in money his share in the repair of a communal road, instead of himself breaking the necessary amount of stones, no fewer than twelve different functionaries of the State must give their approval, and an aggregate of fifty-two different acts must be performed by them, and exchanged between them, before the peasant is permitted to pay that money to the communal council. All the remainder bears the same character.^

1 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 ^lithor. seizure of the communal lands by the lords also began in the fifteenth century, after the defeat of the peasant insurrection of 1380 — as seen from Rossus's Historia and from a statute of Henry the Seventh, in which these seizures are spoken of under the heading of " enormitees and myschefes as be hurtfull ... to the common wele."^ Later on the Great Inquest, under Henry the Eighth, was begun, as is known, in order to put a stop to the enclosure of communal lands, but it ended in a sanction of what had been done.^ The communal lands continued to be preyed upon, and the peasants were driven from the land. But it was especially since the middle of the eighteenth century that, in England as everywhere else, it became part of a systematic policy to simply weed out all traces <^ of communal ownership ; and the wonder is not that it has disappeared, but that it could be maintained, even in England, so as to be " generally prevalent so late as the grandfathers of this generation."^ The very object of the Enclosure Acts, as shown by Mr. Seebohm, was to remove this system,* and it was so

1 Dr. Ochenkowski, Englands wirthschafiliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des Mittelalters (Jena, 1879), pp. 35 seq., where the whole question is discussed with full knowledge of the texts. ^ Nasse, Ueber die tnittelalterliche Feldgemeinschaft und die Einhe- gungen des XVI. Jahrkunderts in England (Bonn, 1869), pp. 4, s; Vinogradov, Villainage in England {OxSoid, 1892). ^ Seebohm, TAe English Village Community, 3rd edition, 1884, pp. * "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, Lc. 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, inter- mixed 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

well removed by the nearly four thousand Acts passed between 1760 and 1844 that only faint traces of it remain now. The land of the village communities was taken by the lords, and the appropriation was sanctioned by Parliament in each separate case. Tn_ Qprmany^ jfi Austria, in Belgium the village community was also destroyed by the State. Instances of commoners themselves dividing their lands were rare,^ while everywhere the States coerced them to enforce the division, or simply favoured the private appropriation of their lands. The last blow to com- munal ownership in Middle Europe also dates from the middle of the eighteenth century. In Austria sheer force was used by the Government, in 1768, to compel the communes to divide their lands — a special commission being nominated two years later for that purpose. In Prussia Frederick the Second, in several of his ordinances (in 1752, 1763, 1765, and 1769), recommended to the Justizcollegien to enforce the division. In Silesia a special resolution was issued to serve that aim in 1771. The same took place in Belgium, and, as the communes did not obey, a law was issued in 1847 empowering the Government to buy communal meadows in order to sell them in retail, and to make a forced sale of the communal land when there was a would-be buyer for it.^

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. ^ 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. 2 A. Buchenberger, " Agrarwesen und Agrarpolitik," in A. Wagner's Handbuch der politischen Oekonotnie, 1892, Band i. pp. 280 seq.

However, the village-community institutions so well respond to the needs and conceptions of the tillers of the soil that, in spite of all, Europe is up to this date covered with living survivals of the village communi- ties, and European country life is permeated with customs and habits dating from the community period. Even in England, notwithstanding all the drastic measures taken against the old order of things, it prevailed as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century. Mr. Gomme — one of the very few English scholars who have paid attention to the subject — shows in his work that many traces of the communal possession of the soil are found in Scotland, " runrig " tenancy having been maintained in Forfarshire up to 1813, while in certain villages of Inverness the custom was, up to 1 80 1, to plough the land for the whole community, without leaving any boundaries, and to allot it after the ploughing was done. In Kilmorie the allotment and re-allotment of the fields was in

full vigour " till the last twenty-five years," and the Crofters' Commission found it still in vigour in certain islands.^ In Ireland the system prevailed up to the great famine ; and as to England, Marshall's works, which passed unnoticed until Nasse and Sir Henry Maine drew attention to them, leave no doubt as to the village-community system having been widely spread, in nearly all English counties, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.^ No more than twenty years ago Sir Henry Maine was " greatly surprised at the number of instances of abnormal property rights, necessarily implying the former existence of collective ownership and joint cultivation," which a compara- tively brief inquiry brought under his notice.^ And, communal institutions having persisted so late as that, a great number of mutual-aid habits and customs would undoubtedly be discovered in English villages if the writers of this country only paid attention to village life.*

^ 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. ^ " In almost aU 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 North- amptonshire 89 are in this condition; more than 100 in Oxfordshire; about 50,000 arces 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 Cotn- munities in the East and West, New York edition, 1876, pp. 88, 89).

* Ibid.j^. 88; also Fifth Lecture. The wide extension of "com- mons " in Surrey, even now, is well known. * 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. As to the Continent, we find the communal institu- tions fully alive in many parts of France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the Scandinavian lands, and Spain, to say nothing of Eastern Europe ; the village life in these countries is permeated with communal habits and customs ; and almost every year the Continental literature is enriched by serious works dealing with this and connected subjects. I must, therefore, limit my illustrations to the most typical instances. Switzer- land is undoubtedly one of them. Not only the five republics of Uri, Schwytz, Appenzell, Glarus, and Unterwalden hold their lands as undivided estates, and are governed by their popular folkmotes, but in all other cantons too the village communities remain in possession of a wide self-government, and own large parts of the Federal territory.^ Two-thirds of all the Alpine meadows and two-thirds of all the forests of Switzerland are until now communal land ; and a considerable number of fields, orchards, vine- yards, peat bogs, quarries, and so on, are owned in common. In the Vaud, where all the householders continue to take part in the deliberations of their elected communal councils, the communal spirit is especially alive. Towards the end of the winter all the young men of each village go to stay a few days in the woods, to fell timber and to bring it down the steep slopes tobogganing way, the timber and the

^ 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. (See, for instance, Dr. A. Miaskowski, in Schmoller's Forschungen, Bd. ii. 1879, pp. I a seg) 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.

fuel wood being divided among all households or sold for their benefit. These excursions are real fetes of manly labour. On the banks of Lake Leman part of the work required to keep up the terraces of the vine- yards is still done in common ; and in the spring, when the thermometer threatens to fall below zero before sunrise, the watchman wakes up all house- holders, who light fires of straw and dung and protect their vine-trees from the frost by an artificial cloud. In nearly all cantons the village communities possess so-called Biirgernutzen — that is, they hold in common a number of cows, in order to supply each family with butter ; or they keep communal fields or vineyards, of which the produce is divided between the burghers ; or they rent their land for the benefit of the community.^ It may be taken as a rule that where the communes have retained a wide sphere of functions, so as to be living parts of the national organism, and where they have not been reduced to sheer misery, they never fail to take good care of their lands. Accordingly the com- munal estates in Switzerland strikingly contrast with the miserable state of " commons " in this country. The communal forests in the Vaud and the Valais are admirably managed, in conformity with the rules of modern forestry. Elsewhere the " strips " of com- munal fields, which change owners under the system ot re-allotment, are very well manured, especially as there is no lack of meadows and cattle. The high- level meadows are well kept as a rule, and the rural roads are excellent.^ And when we admire the Swiss

2 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. Biicher has added to the German translation of Laveleye's Primitive Ownership. Also Meitzen, " Das Agrar- und Forst-Wesen, chalet, the mountain road, the peasants' cattle, the terraces of vineyards, or the school-house in Switzer- land, we must keep in mind that without the timber for the chalet being taken from the communal woods and the stone from the communal quarries, without the cows being kept on the communal meadows, and the roads being made and the school-houses built by communal work, there would be little to admire.

It hardly need be said that a great number of mutual-aid habits and customs continue to persist in the Swiss villages. The evening gatherings for shelling walnuts, which take place in turns in each household ; the evening parties for sewing the dowry of the girl who is going to marry ; the calling of "aids" for building the houses and taking in the crops, as well as for all sorts of work which may be required by one of the commoners ; the custom of exchanging children from one canton to the other, in order to make them learn two languages, French and German ; and so on — all these are quite habitual ; ^ while, on the other side, divers modern requirements are met in the same spirit. Thus in Glarus most of the Alpine meadows have been sold during a time of calamity ; but the communes still continue to buy field land, and after the newly-bought fields have been left in the possession of separate commoners for ten, twenty, or thirty years, as the case might be, they return to the common stock, which is re-allotted

die AUmenden und die Landgemeinden der Deutschen Schweiz," in Jahrbuch fiir Staatswissenschqft, 1880, iv. (analysis of Miaskowsky's works); O'Brien, "Notes in a. Smssv\\\3%e" in Maanillan's Magazine, October 1885. 1 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. according to the needs of all.J A great number of small associations are formed t6 produce some of the necessaries for life — bread, cheese, and wine — by common work, be it only on a limited scale ; and agricultural co-operation altogether spreads in Switzer- land with the greatest ease. Associations formed between ten to thirty peasants, who buy meadows and fields in common, and cultivate them as co-owners, are of common occurrence ; while dairy associations for the sale of milk, butter, and cheese are organized everywhere. In fact, Switzerland was the birthplace of that form of co-operation. It offers, moreover, an immense field for the study of all sorts of small and large societies, formed for the satisfaction of all sorts of modern wants. In certain parts of Switzerland one finds in almost every village a number of associ- ations— for protection from fire, for boating, for main- taining the quays on the shores of a lake, for the supply of water, and so on ; and the country is covered with societies of archers, sharpshooters, topo- graphers, footpath explorers, and the like, originated from modern militarism.

Switzerland is, however, by no means an exception in Europe, because the same institutions and habits are found in the villages of France, of Italy, of Germany, of Denmark, and so on. We have just seen what has been done by the rulers of France in order to destroy the village community and to get hold of its lands ; but notwithstanding all that one- tenth part of the whole territory available for culture, i.e. 13,500,000 acres, including one- half of all the natural meadows and nearly a fifth part of all the forests of the country, remain in communal possession. The woods supply the communers with fuel, and the

timber wood is cut, mostly by communal work, with all desirable regularity ; the grazing lands are free for the commoners' cattle ; and what remains of com- munal fields is allotted and re-allotted in certain parts of France — namely, in the Ardennes — in the usual way.^ These additional sources of supply, which aid the poorer peasants to pass through a year of bad crops without parting with their small plots of land and without running into irredeemable debts, have cer- tainly their importance for both the agricultural labourers and the nearly three millions of small peas- ant proprietors. It is even doubtful whether small peasant proprietorship could be maintained without these additional resources. But the ethical importance of the communal possessions, small as they are, is still greater than their economical value. They maintain in village life a nucleus of customs and habits of mutual aid which undoubtedly acts as a mighty check upon the development of reckless individualism and greediness, which small land-ownership is only too prone to develop. Mutual aid in all possible circum- stances of village life is part of the routine life in all parts of the country. Everywhere we meet, under different names, with the charroi, i. e. the free aid of the neighbours for taking in a crop, for vintage, or for building a house; everywhere we find the same evening gatherings as have just been mentioned in Switzerland ; and everywhere the commoners associate for all sorts of work. Such habits are mentioned by

nearly all those who have written upon French village life. But it will perhaps be better to give in this place some abstracts from letters which I have just received from a friend of mine whom I have asked to com- municate to me his observations on this subject. They come from an aged man who for years has been the mayor of his commune in South France (in Ariege) ; the facts he mentions are known to him from long years of personal observation, and they have the advantage of coming from one neighbour- hood instead of being skimmed from a large area. Some of them may seem trifling, but as a whole they depict quite a little world of village life.

" In several communes in our neighbourhood," my friend writes, "the old custom of Vemprount is in vigour. When many hands are required in a mdtairie for rapidly making some work — dig out potatoes or mow the grass — the youth of the neighbourhood is convoked ; young men and girls come in numbers, make it gaily and for nothing ; and in the evening, after a gay meal, they dance. "In the same communes, when a girl is going to marry, the girls of the neighbourhood come to aid in sewing the dowry. In several communes the women still continue to spin a good deal. When the winding off has to be done in a family it is done in one even- ing— all friends being convoked for that work. In many communes of the Ariege and other parts of the south-west the shelling of the Indian corn-sheaves is also done by all the neighbours. They are treated with chestnuts and wine, and the young people dance after the work has been done. The same custom is practised for making nut oil and crushing hemp. In the commune of L. the same is done for bringing in

the corn crops. These days of hard work become fite days, as the owner stakes his honour on serving a good meal. No remuneration is given ; all do it for each other.^ " In the commune of S. the common grazing-land is every year increased, so that nearly the whole of the land of the commune is now kept in common. The shepherds are elected by all owners of the cattle, including women. The bulls are communal. " In the commune of M. the forty to fifty small sheep flocks of the commoners are brought together and divided into three or four flocks before being sent to the higher meadows. Each owner goes for a week to serve as shepherd.

"In the hamlet of C. a threshing machine has been ^ bought in common by several households ; the fifteen to twenty persons required to serve the machine being supplied by all the families. Three other threshing machines have been bought and are rented out by their owners, but the work is performed by outside helpers, invited in the usual way. " In our commune of R. we had to raise the wall of the cemetery. Half of the money which was required for buying lime and for the wages of the skilled workers was supplied by the county council, and the other half by subscription. As to the work of carry- ing sand and water, making mortar, and serving the masons, it was done entirely by volunteers [just as in the Kabyle djemmda]. The rural roads were repaired in the same way, by volunteer days of work given by the commoners. Other communes have built in

1 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. the same way their fountains. The wine-press and other smaller appliances are frequently kept by the commune." Two residents of the same neighbourhood, questioned by my friend, add the following : — "At O. a few years ago there was no mill. The commune has built one, levying a tax upon the com- moners. As to the miller, they decided, in order to avoid frauds and partiality, that he should be paid two francs for each bread-eater, and the corn be ground free.

" At St. G. few peasants are insured against fire. When a conflagration has taken place — so it was lately — all give something to the family which has suffered from it — a chaldron, a bed-cloth, a chair, and so on — and a modest household is thus reconstituted. All the neighbours aid to build the house, and in the meantime the family is lodged free by the neighbours." Such habits of mutual support — of which many more examples could be given — undoubtedly account for the easiness with which the French peasants associate for using, in turn, the plough with its team of horses, the wine-press, and the threshing machine, when they are kept in the village by one of them only, as well as for the performance of all sorts of rural work in common. Canals were maintained, forests were cleared, trees were planted, and marshes were drained by the village communities from time immemorial ; and the same continues still. Quite lately, in La Borne of Lozere barren hills were turned into rich gardens by communal work. " The soil was brought on men's backs ; terraces were made and planted with chestnut trees, peach trees, and orchards, and water was brought for irrigation in canals two or three miles

long." Just now they liave dug a new canal, eleven miles in length.^ To the same spirit is also due the remarkable suc- cess lately obtained by the syndicats agricoles, or peasants' and farmers' associations. It was not until 1 884 that associations of more than nineteen persons were permitted in France, and I need not say that when this "dangerous experiment" was ventured upon — so it was styled in the Chambers — all due "precautions" which functionaries can invent were taken. Notwithstanding all that, France begins to be covered with syndicates. At the outset they were only formed for buying manures and seeds, falsification having attained colossal proportions in these two branches ; ^ but gradually they extended their functions in various directions, including the sale of agricultural produce and permanent improvements of the land. In South France the ravages of the phylloxera have called into existence a great number of wine-growers' associations. Ten to thirty growers form a syndicate, buy a steam-engine for pumping water, and make the necessary arrangements for inundating their vineyards in turn.^ New associations for protecting the land