Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

^ Alfred Baudrillart, in H. Baudrillart's Les Populations Ruraks de la France, 3rd series (Paris, 1893), p. 479. ^ The Journal des £conomistes (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 grains of sand, coloured so as to deceive 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 1 1 per cent, of a poisonous grass, {nielle) ; a flour for cattle-fattening contained 36 per cent, of sulphates ; and so on ad infinitum.

^ A. Baudrillart, I.e. p. 309. Originally one grower would under- take to supply water, and several others would agree to make use of it. " What especially characterises such associations," A. Bau- from inundations, for irrigation purposes, and for main- taining canals are continually formed, and the unanimity of all peasants of a neighbourhood, which is required by law, is no obstacle. Elsewhere we have the fruitihres, or dairy associations, in some of which all butter and cheese is divided in equal parts, irrespective of the yield of each cow. In the Ari^ge we find an association of eight separate communes for the com- mon culture of their lands, which they have put together ; syndicates for free medical aid have been formed in 172 communes out of 337 in the same department ; associations of consumers arise in con- nection with the syndicates ; and so on.^ " Quite a revolution is going on in our villages," Alfred Bau- drillart writes, " through these associations, which take in each region their own special characters."

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 Wiirttemberg, Baden, HohenzoUern, and in the Hessian province of Starkenberg.2 The communal forests are kept, as a drillart lemarks, " 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."

^ A. Baudrillart, /. c. pp. 300, 341, etc. M. Terssac, president of the St. Gironnais syndicate (Ari^ge), 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 j 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."

rule, in an excellent state, and in thousands of com- munes 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.^ 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 re.a\.fites. 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 build- ing 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 culti- vate his garden.^

In Germany, as in France, as soon as the rulers of the people repealed their laws against the peasant associations — that was only in 1 884-1 888 — these unions began to develop with a wonderful rapidity, notwithstanding all legal obstacles which were put in Baden 1,256 communes out of 1,582 have commTinal 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 (SchmollePs Jahrbiich, 1886, p. 359). In HohenzoUern nearly two-thirds of all meadow land, and in HohenzoUern-Hechingen 41 per cent, of all landed property, are owned by the village communities (Buchenberger, Agrarwesen, vol. i. p. 300).

^ See K. Biicher, who, in a special chapter added to Laveleye's Ureigenthum, has collected all information relative to the village community in Germany. their way.^ " 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 unfore- seen 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 arrange- ments 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.^

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 import- ance 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

1 For this legislation and the numerous obstacles which were put in the way, in the shape of red-tapeism and supervision, see Buchen- berger's Agrarwesen und Agrarpolitik, Bd. ii. pp. 342-363, and p. 506, note. 2 Buchenberger, I.e. 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.

in such forms as best answer to the modern require- ments of production. They indicate in which direc- tion 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.^ 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.^

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 2 For the Balkan peninsula see Laveleye's Propritti Primitive. ^ 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.

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,^ 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 tp 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

^ 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. gradually begun themselves to transform their in- dividual 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.^

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-breed- ing, 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-com- munity 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 pro- prietors themselves, chiefly in the years 1855-1885, in

^ Mr. V. v., in his Feasant Community, has grouped together all facts relative to this movement. About the rapid agricultural develop- ment of South Russia and the spread of machinery English readers will find information in the Consular Reports (Odessa, Taganrog). lieu of individual ownership. Quite a variety of village- community types has been freely worked out in this way by the settlers.^ 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.^ It is evident that the Mussulman Tartars of Taurida hold their land under the Mussul- man customary law, which is limited personal occupa- tion ; but even with them the European village com- munity 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

1 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. 2 On the Mennonite village community see A. Klaus, Our Colonies (Nashi Kolonit), St. Petersburg, 1869.

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, it is 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 1 890 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 liber- ated 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 intro- ducing 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, 103 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 agri- culture 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 com- moners. 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.^

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 accom- plished by old and young, men and women, in the way described by Tolstoir — is only what one may expect ^ Such communal cultures are known to exist in 159 villages out of 195 in the Ostrogozhsk district ; in 150 out of 187 in Slavyano- serbsk; in 107 village communities in Alexandrovsk, 93 in Niko- layevsk, 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

from people living under the village-community system.^ 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 manu- facture 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

1 Lists of such works which came under the notice of the zemstvo statisticians will be found in V. V.'s Feasant Community, pp. 459-600. it the peasants usually set apart a portion of the com- munal fields for an experiment in artificial meadows, and the commune buys the seeds.^ 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.^ 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 con- duct 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 drain- age 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 1 In the government of Moscow the experiment was usually made on the field which was reserved for the above-mentioned communal culture. 2 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 has grown out of their endeavours.

scale in no less than i8o to 200 diflferent 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, [T' come across touching facts of mutual support. I trace the same customs in the Arab djemmda 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, notwith- standing 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 le^gl of straggling families of decaying orang-outans. iThe 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 buUetsJ

The same applies to our civilized world. The natural and social calamities pass away. Whole popu- lations 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 teach- ings 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