Contemporary Socialism Part 10

Lavroff, who had been a colonel in the Russian army, and professor in the military college of St. Petersburg, was compromised in the attempt of Karakasoff in 1866 and administratively banished to Archangel; but, as happens so singularly often in Russia, he escaped in 1869, and lived to edit a revolutionary journal in Zurich, and play for a time no inconsiderable part in making trouble in Russia. At present, communications between the active revolutionists who are at work in Russia and their predecessors who have withdrawn to Western Europe are entirely interrupted; but they were still abundant twenty years ago.

Partly in consequence of the reactionary educational policy of the Government, young Russians flocked at that time to Switzerland for their education, and were there conveniently indoctrinated into the new gospel of the International. Bakunin and Lavroff were both in Zurich, and in the year 1872 there were 239 Russian students, male and female, in Zurich alone. These young people were, of course, in continual intercourse with the older refugees. Bakunin and Lavroff both held stated and formal lectures on socialism and revolution, which were always succeeded by open and animated discussions of the subject treated in them. A little later there were, according to Professor Thun, four distinct groups among the Russian revolutionists in Zurich, some of them caused by personal quarrels. But from the first there were always two, one of whom swore by Bakunin, and the other by Lavroff.

Bakunin was an anarchist--an "amorphist" even, as we have seen--and he believed in the propaganda of deeds. Every little village, he thought, should make its own revolution; and if it could not make a revolution, it might always be making a riot, or an explosion, or a fire, or an a.s.sa.s.sination of some official, or something else to raise panic or confusion. All this seemed to Lavroff and his friends to be unmitigated folly. They too believed in revolution; but in their view revolution, to be successful, must be organized and simultaneous; it must, above all, first have the peasantry on its side; and therefore, instead of the mad and premature propaganda of deed, the true policy for the present was manifestly "going into the people," as they termed it--that is, an itinerant mission to indoctrinate the people into the faith of the coming revolution. Then, again, Lavroff, though, like almost all Russian revolutionists, an anarchist, was not, like most of them, prepared to dispense all at once with the State. He thought the new society would eventually be able to do without any central authority, but not at first, nor for a considerable time, the length of which could not now be more precisely determined. In this Lavroff and his party stood much nearer the Social Democrats of Germany than other Russian nihilists, and they have come nearer still since then. They have cast off the Russian commune, of which the early nihilists made so great an idol. They see that it is an old-world inst.i.tution doomed to dissolution, and rapidly undergoing the process.

The two tendencies--diverging both in principle and in tactics--appeared in Russia as well as Zurich. At first the more peaceful method prevailed. Lavroff's idea of "going into the people" was the enthusiasm of the hour, and brought upon the scene the typical nihilist missionary--the young man of good birth who laid down station and prospects, learnt a manual trade, browned his hands with tar and his face by smearing it with b.u.t.ter and lying in the sun, put on the peasant's sheepskin, and then, with a forged pa.s.s, procured at the secret nihilist pa.s.s factory, and a few forbidden books in his wallet, set off "without road" to be a peasant with peasants, if by any means he could win them over to the cause; and the still more remarkable young woman who went through a marriage ceremony to obtain the right of independent action, and the moment the ceremony was over, left father and mother and husband and all in order to work among the peasants of the Volga as a teacher or nurse, and live on milk and groats according to Tchernycheffsky's prescription in "What is to be Done?". Stepniak justly remarks that "the type of propagandist of the first l.u.s.tre of 1870-80 was religious rather than revolutionary. His hope was socialism, his G.o.d the people. Notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, he firmly believed that from one day to the other the revolution was about to break out, as in the middle ages people believed at certain periods in the approach of the day of judgment."

("Underground Russia," p. 30.)

For some years these ascetic devotees might be found in every corner of broad Russia, working as shoemakers or joiners most of them (why these were the favourite trades does not appear), or as hawkers of images or tea, or, perhaps, like Prince Krapotkin, as painters. Some of them went as horse-dealers, from a dreamy idea that the horses might prove useful in the day of revolution. They all belonged to one or other of the secret societies which, as we have seen, began to spring up about 1863, and grew numerous in the next ten or fifteen years. None of these societies, however, was of any great importance. Professor Thun mentions four varieties of them. First, the Malikowsy, a handful of apparently harmless and amiable enthusiasts--a kind of Russian Quakers--who believed in one Malikov, and called themselves "G.o.d-men," because they held every man had a "divine spark" in him, and was therefore every other man's equal and brother. Second, the Bakunists, who adopted Bakunin's programme of "deeds," but did not, till 1875, think of putting it to practice. Third, the Lavrists, who sent the money to print Lavroff's newspaper in Zurich, the _En Avant_, and who seem to have gradually imbibed German socialism to the extent of thinking the Russian commune a reactionary and decaying inst.i.tution not worth stirring a finger to preserve, and who called for the nationalization of land and capital. And fourth,--much the most important society,--the Tchaikowskists, founded in 1869 by one Tchaikowski, who is now a teacher in London, but was then a student at St. Petersburg. Prince Krapotkin belonged to this society, and so did Sophia Perowskaia. It was at first a convivial and mutual improvement club, but from discussing forbidden subjects and circulating among its members forbidden books it grew into natural antagonism to Government, and became a focus of revolutionary agitation. Most of the 193 socialists who were tried in 1874-7 belonged to it, and that protracted trial killed the society and put an end to the mission "into the people."

Government had marked the new propaganda with great jealousy. In Russia, no propaganda among the peasants can remain un.o.bserved. When a stranger arrives at a Russian village, he is immediately the common talk, whatever he says pa.s.ses from mouth to mouth, and he may even be invited to state his views publicly in the _mir_. A mission conducted under these conditions soon attracted the notice of the authorities, who, in 1874, discovered it in thirty-seven different provinces of Russia, and arrested as many as 774 of the propagandists. Some of these were at once banished administratively to Siberia, and of the rest, 193 were, four years afterwards, brought up for trial and condemned. With these apprehensions the nihilist movement collapsed for the moment. Thun states that Lavroff's newspaper during that period adopted a tone of despair, and the revolutionists who escaped arrest recognised very clearly that their scheme of "going into the people" was a complete mistake, and that some safer and more effective system of tactics must be concocted. They fell upon two different expedients. The first was the plan of nihilist colonization. To avoid detection by the authorities, a band of revolutionists settled down in a given district in a body, got personally acquainted with the peasantry about them, and then, after acquiring a sufficient knowledge of their characters, proceeded with due prudence to impart their ideas to those who seemed most trustworthy, hoping in this way to be able, un.o.bserved, eventually to leaven the whole lump. The other plan they now resorted to was an approach to the tactics of Bakunin, and in the very year, 1876, in which that old revolutionist died, they began a series of socialist demonstrations at Odessa, Kasan, and elsewhere, which made a little local sensation at the time. This was the very opposite kind of tactics to the cautious system of colonization that was pursued simultaneously with it, but there is always in revolutionary organization only a step between reticence and rashness. Open demonstrations like those practised at that period were simply suicidal folly in Russia, where the forces of the Government were so immeasurably superior to the forces of the demonstrationists.

In 1878 they changed tactics again, inaugurating that system of terrorism by which they are best known in the West, and which has given them a name there at which the world turns pale. The determination to adopt this system of tactics sprang from an accidental circ.u.mstance. The day after the trial of the 193 ended, one of their comrades, the young woman Vera Sa.s.sulitch, called on General Trepoff, the head of the St.

Petersburg police, on pretence of business, and while he was reading her papers, shot him with a revolver, flung her weapon on the ground, and allowed herself to be quietly arrested; and when she was brought up for trial, pled justification on the ground that her act was merely retaliation on the General for having subjected a friend of hers, a young medical student, to a brutal and causeless flogging while in prison on a political charge. The court having acquitted her, she was received by the public with every demonstration of enthusiasm, and it was this remarkable public sympathy that made the revolutionaries terrorists. They resolved to take up V. Sa.s.sulitch's idea of retaliation, and apply it on a great scale. The whole public of Russia was at that time considerably flushed with indignation against the imperial Government. The war in Turkey had revealed, as wars always do, a great deal of rottenness in the public administration; it had brought nothing but humiliation and debt upon the country, and it had exacted cruel sacrifices from the people merely to confer on the Bulgarians the political and const.i.tutional liberty which was still denied to the Russians themselves. For the moment the old cry for a const.i.tution rose again in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and there was a deep feeling far beyond the circles of the revolutionists that an end should be put to the autocratic _regime_. The revolutionists found powerful encouragement in all this outbreak of displeasure. Stepniak, who was himself one of the most active of them at that period, says their real strength lay, not in their numbers--which he admits to have been few--but in the general sympathy they received from what he calls the revolutionary nation around them. They had however special wrongs of their own to avenge; hundreds of their friends had been transported without trial; and in the case of the 193, whose trial was just over, the few who had been acquitted were nevertheless denied their liberty by the Czar, and banished administratively to Siberia after all; so that while Russian society was clamouring on public grounds for the downfall of the autocratic system, the revolutionists, for revenge, determined upon the death of the autocrat himself. The various secret societies had united into a single body, called first the "Troglodytes," and then "Land and Liberty," for the better prosecution of the nihilist colonization scheme; but in 1879 they broke again into two parties, one of which, the Will of the People party, adopted terrorism as its exclusive business for the time, issued, through its famous executive committee, sentences of death on the Czar and the State officials; and after making ten attempts on high officials, five of them fatal, and four attempts on the Czar himself, finally succeeded in their fifth on the 13th of March, 1881. With this party the political side of their programme overshadowed the socialistic, and their first demand from the new Czar was for a const.i.tution.

The other party--the party of the Black Division--is an agrarian party, living on the growing discontent of the peasantry, and nursing their cry for what in Russia is known as the Black Division. It is an old belief among the Russian people that when the land possessed at any time by the communes should become too small for the increasing population of the communes, there would be a new division of all the land of the country, including, of course, the great estates now owned by the _n.o.blesse_, so that every inhabitant might be once more accommodated with his proper share of the soil. This great secular redistribution is the black division, and it belongs as naturally to the Russian peasants' system of agrarian ideas as the little local and periodical divisions that take place within the communes themselves. The Black Division section of the revolutionists are terrorist in their methods like the other section, but they care nothing about a const.i.tution, which they say is only a demand of the _bourgeoisie_, but of no interest or good to the peasant at all. They have the old aversion to centralized government, which we have seen to be almost the tradition of Russian revolutionists; they are all for strengthening the communes, and for a light federal connection; and of all phases of the Russian revolutionary movement under the reign of the present Czar theirs is the most important, because it is founding itself on real and deepening rural discontent, and becoming substantially a peasants' cry for more land and less rent and taxes.

I have already referred to the astonishing growth of a Russian proletariat since the Emanc.i.p.ation Act. Professor Janson, an eminent Russian statistician, calculated that as many as a fourth of the people of St. Petersburg--229,000 out of 876,000--got public relief in the year 1884. Stepniak, in his recent work on the Russian peasantry, a.s.serts that a third of the rural population, or 20,000,000 souls in all, are in the condition of absolute proletarians, and his account of the situation is entirely supported by the descriptions of a competent and unprejudiced German economist, Professor Alphonse Thun, who speaks partly from the results of official inquiries inst.i.tuted by the Russian Government into the subject, and partly from his own personal observation during a continuous residence of two years in the country.

As the subject is of importance to the student of socialistic inst.i.tutions as well as of the nihilist movement, I shall make no apology for devoting some observations to its explanation.

In the first place, though it has never been well understood in Western Europe, some ten per cent. of the Russian rural population have no legal claim to a share of the land at all; these are old men who are past working, widows with children too young to be able to work, and men who at the time of the Emanc.i.p.ation were personal servants of the great landowners, and consequently not members of any village commune. Men of this last cla.s.s may reside in a village, and may keep a shop or practise a trade there; but not being born villagers, they possess no right to partic.i.p.ate in the distribution of the village land. They are as much outside the communistic system as the n.o.bles or the foreign residents.

Russian citizenship alone is not enough to give a right to the land; local birth in a commune is also an essential pre-requisite, and ability to work is another. A family gets one share for every able-bodied member it contains; the share is therefore called a "soul" of land; and although between one distribution and another the widow may still retain the "soul" that belonged to her husband, and hire a hand to work it, yet on the next redistribution she must give it up unless she has a son who in the meantime has grown to man's estate. The landless widow and orphan must have been an occasional incident of the Russian village system from all times; but the incursion of dismissed domestic menials with no birthright in the commune has arisen only in recent years, when, in consequence of a conspiracy of causes, so many of the n.o.bility have been obliged to reduce their establishments.

In the next place, a communistic tenure which gives every new-comer a right to share in the land of his native village on an equal footing with those who are already in possession could hardly fail to lead to excessive subdivision, and in Russia at this moment scarce one family in a hundred has land enough to furnish its maintenance for half the year.

The usual size of holding is ten acres, of which--cultivated as they are on the old three-field system--one third is always fallow, and the remainder, in consequence of the rude method of agriculture that prevails, yields only two, or at most three, returns of the seed. They have no pasture, because at the time of the emanc.i.p.ation they preferred to take out their whole claim in arable; and, having no pasture, they cannot keep cattle as they formerly did because they cannot get manure.

According to the information of Professor Thun, in 1872 8 per cent. of the families had no cow, and 4 per cent. no horse; and Stepniak says the inventory of horses taken for military purposes in 1882 showed that one-fourth of the peasant families had then no horse. Russia is, in fact, a vast continent of crofters, practising primitive husbandry on mere "cat's-plots" of land, and depending for the greater part of their subsistence on some auxiliary trade. In one respect they have the advantage over our Scotch crofters; they practise, in many cases, skilled trades. Of course they work as ploughmen or fishermen when that sort of work is wanted, or they will hire a piece of waste land from a neighbouring owner and bring it into rude cultivation; but every variety of craft is to be found among them. They are weavers, hatters, cabinet-makers, workers in metals; they make shoes, or images, or candles, or musical instruments, or grindstones; they dress furs, they knit lace, they train singing-birds. According to the official inquiry, most of the goods of some of the best commercial houses of Moscow, trading in Parisian silk hats and Viennese furniture, are manufactured by these peasants in their rural villages. A curious and very remarkable characteristic is mentioned by Thun: not only has every Russian his bye-industry, but every village has a different bye-industry from its neighbour. One is a village of coopers--a very thriving trade, it appears; another a village of tailors--a declining one, in consequence of the compet.i.tion of ready-made stuff from the towns; another--and there are several such--may be a village of beggars, with mendicity for their second staff; and another a village of seamen, going in a body in spring to the Baltic or the Volga, and leaving only their women and children to tend the farm till their return in the autumn. The Russians always work in artels whether at home or abroad, and to work in artels they must of course follow the same industry. Their individual earnings in their auxiliary occupations are comparatively good; they make three-fourths of their annual income from that source; but it seems every trade is now overcrowded, and there is some difficulty in obtaining constant employment.

Then the burdens of the peasantry are very heavy. In Russia the superior cla.s.ses enjoy many exemptions from taxation, and the public revenue is taken mainly from the peasant cla.s.ses. The annual redemption money they have to pay to the State for their land is a most serious obligation, and between one thing and another the burdens on the land in a vast number of cases exceed its net return very considerably. Professor Thun states, that in 2,009 cases of letting holdings which had occurred in the province of Moscow at the time he wrote, the average rent received was only 3 roubles 56 kopecks per "soul" (land-share), while the average taxation was 10 roubles 30 kopecks. Stepniak says that in the thirty-seven provinces of European Russia the cla.s.s who were formerly State peasants pay in taxes of every description no less than 92.75 per cent. of the average net produce of their land; and that the cla.s.s who were formerly serfs of private owners pay as much as 192.25 per cent. of the net produce of theirs. Landowning on these terms is manifestly a questionable privilege, and the _moujik_ pays his land taxes as the Scotch crofter has sometimes to pay his rent, not out of the produce of his holding, but out of the wages of his auxiliary labour; but the Scotch crofter, under his system of individual tenure, has one great resource which is wanting to the other: he can always cut the knot of his troubles by throwing up his holding, if he chooses, and emigrating.

To the Russian peasant emigration brings no relief. He is born a proprietor, and cannot escape the obligation of his position wherever he may go. He may try to let his ground--and in many cases he does--but, as we see, he cannot often get enough rent to meet the dues. He may leave his village, if he will, but his village liabilities travel with him wherever he may settle. He cannot obtain work anywhere in Russia without showing his pa.s.s from his own commune; and since, under the principle of joint liability that rules in the communistic system, the members of the commune who remain at home would have to pay the emigrant's arrears if he failed to pay them himself, they are not likely to renew the pa.s.s to a defaulter. The Russian peasants are thus nearly as much _adstricti glebae_ as they ever were; they are now under the power of the commune as completely as they were before under the power of their masters; and their difficulty is still how they can possibly obtain emanc.i.p.ation.

Sometimes they will defy the commune, forego the advantage of a lawful pa.s.s, crowd the ranks of that large body in Russia who are known as the "illegal men," and sometimes, we are a.s.sured by Professor Thun, a whole village, every man and every family, will secretly disappear in a body and seek refuge from the tax-collector by settling in the steppes. The natural right of every man to the land is thus, in the princ.i.p.al country where any attempt is made to realize it, nothing but a hara.s.sing pecuniary debt.

Now this cla.s.s of worse than landless emigrants--men who carry their land as a perpetual burden on their back from which they can get no respite--is already very numerous in Russia. Thun says there are millions of them. As far back as 1872, nearly half the town population of Moscow and more than a fifth of the population of the landward district were strangers, who were inscribed members of rural communes elsewhere; and in many purely country districts some 14 per cent. of the people have no houses because they are not living in the villages they belong to. Sir Robert Morier says in his report to the Foreign Office in September, 1887, on Pauperism in Russia (p. 2): "It is officially stated that in each of the larger provinces, such as Kursk, Tambow, Kostroma, etc., over 100,000 peasants have abandoned the plot of ground granted to them (8 acres) on one pretext or another in order to seek means of subsistence elsewhere. (This probably means flocking to the larger towns.) The number of beggars in 71 Governments was stated to be 300,000, of which 182,000 were peasant proprietors. This number is, however, far below the mark." But, as we learn from Stepniak, the bulk of the landless peasants, _i.e._ those who no longer cultivate their holdings, do not leave their native villages, but seek employment as hirelings in the village itself or in its neighbourhood, and wander as day labourers from one master to another. Their families continue to live in their old cottage in the village, and the father returns to it when out of employment.

Their land is generally taken by a cla.s.s of small usurers (_koulaks_) who have grown up in every Russian village since the emanc.i.p.ation. These koulaks are in most cases fellow-peasants who have saved some money, but they are frequently strangers who have come and opened a store in the place, and have no right of their own to a share in the land and in the councils of the village. Stepniak mentions one province where as much as from 24 to 36 per cent. of the land is concentrated into the hands of these rich usurers. Even the peasants who still retain their land in their own hands are often deeply indebted to them, and in some cases part with bits of their land without parting with all; and the general tendency of the present economic situation is to divide the peasantry of every village into a cla.s.s of comparatively rich peasants, on the one hand, holding and cultivating most of the land, and a larger cla.s.s of rural proletarians, without land and having nothing to live by but their manual trade. The tendency, in short, is towards the break-up of the communal tenure, and instead of the Russian Commune invading Europe, as Cavour once said there was fear it would do, we are likely to see the individual tenure of Western Europe invading Russia and superseding primitive rural inst.i.tutions in that country, as it has already superseded them in others. "It is quite evident," says Stepniak, "that Russia is marching in this direction. If nothing happens to check or hinder the process of interior disintegration in our villages, in another generation we shall have on one side an agricultural proletariat of sixty or seventy millions, and on the other a few thousand landlords, mostly former koulaks and mir-eaters, in possession of all the land." It is legally permissible at present for a Russian commune, if it so choose, to abolish its communal system of property and adopt individual property instead of it; and although this has been very seldom done as yet, we are told by Thun that the rich peasants and the very poor peasants are both strongly in favour of the step, because it would give the one permanent ownership of the land and the other permanent relief from its burdens. When a commune gets divided in this way into a rich cla.s.s of members and a poor cla.s.s, the old brotherliness and mutual helpfulness of the Russian village are said by the same authority always to disappear and a more selfish spirit to take their place; but then it should be remembered how much easier it is to a.s.sist a neighbour out of a little difficulty of the way than to meet the unremitting claims of a cla.s.s that have sunk into permanent poverty. Anyhow, the temptation is equally strong on both parties to escape from the worries of their present situation through the rich buying out the poor.

Another tendency working in the same direction is the rapid dissolution of the old system of large house-communities that prevailed before the emanc.i.p.ation. The average household has been reduced from seven and a half to five souls, the married children setting up houses of their own instead of dwelling under one roof with their father and grandfather.

The house is a mere hut, with no furniture but a table and a wooden bench used by night for a bed, but still the separate _menage_ has increased to an embarra.s.sing extent the expenses of the peasant's living at the very time that other circ.u.mstances have reduced his resources.

The reason for the break-up of the house-communities has been the desire to escape partly from the tyranny of the head of the household, but chiefly from the incessant quarrels that prevailed between the several members about the amount they each contributed to the common funds as compared with the amount they ate and drank out of them. One of the brothers goes to St. Petersburg during the winter months as a cabman and brings back a hundred roubles, while another gets work as a forester near home, and earns no more than twenty-five. Now, according to an author quoted by Stepniak, who is describing a family among whom he has lived, the question always is: "Why should he (the forester) consume with such avidity the tea and sugar dearly purchased with the cabman's money? And in general, why should this tea be absorbed with such greediness by all the numerous members of the household--by the elder brother, for instance, who alone drank something like eighty cups a day (the whole family consumed about nine hundred cups per diem) whilst he did not move a finger towards earning all this tea and sugar? Whilst the cabman was freezing in the cold night air, or busying himself with some drunken pa.s.senger, or was being abused and beaten by a policeman on duty near some theatre, this elder brother was comfortably stretched upon his belly, on the warm family oven, pouring out some nonsense about twenty-seven bears whom he had seen rambling through the country with their whelps in search of new land for settlement." And so the quarrel goes round; always the old difficulty of _meum_ and _tuum_, so hard to reconcile except under a _regime_ of individual property.

In fact, the shifts to which the Russian peasantry, like other peasantries elsewhere, have been reduced to solve this difficulty in the management of their common land const.i.tute one main cause of their agricultural backwardness and their consequent poverty. Elisee Reclus calculates that if the Russian fields were cultivated like those of Great Britain, Russia could produce, instead of six hundred and fifty million hectolitres of corn annually, about five milliards, which would be sufficient to feed a population of five hundred million souls. A few lessons in good husbandry will do much more for the comfort of a people than many changes of social organization; but good husbandry is virtually impossible under a system of unstable tenure, which turns a man necessarily out of his holding every few years for the purpose of a new distribution of the land, and which compels him to take his holding, when he gets it, in some thirty or forty scattered plots.

Redistributions, it is true, do not occur so very frequently as we might suppose. As Russian land is all cultivated on a three years' rotation, one might be apt to look for a new distribution every three years, but that almost never occurs. Thun states that in the province of Moscow during the twenty years 1858-1878 the average interval of distribution was 12 years, four rotations; that 49 per cent. of the communes had a distribution only once in 15 years, and 37 per cent. only once in 20 years. The dislike to frequent distributions is growing, on the obvious and very reasonable ground that they either discourage a man from doing well by his land, or they inflict on him the grave injustice of depriving him of the ground he has himself improved before he has reaped from it the due reward of his labour. The tendency towards individual property is therefore strongly at work here, and as this system of periodical redistribution is established merely to give every man that natural right by virtue of his birth to a share in the land, which is now in so many cases such a delusive irony, the resistance to the new tendency cannot be expected to be very resolute. The _runrig_ system of cultivation, which prevails in Russia in the same form as it did in the Highlands of Scotland, does not give any similar appearance of decay.

Stepniak says the peasants still prefer that arrangement because it allows room for perfect fairness--perfect reconciliation of the _meum_ and _tuum_--in the distribution of their most precious commodity, the land, which always presents great variety as to quality of soil and situation with respect to roads, water, the village, etc. Under a communal system with many members this method of arrangement is almost indispensable to avoid quarrels and prevent the indolent from shirking their proper share of the work, but its agricultural disadvantages are so great that it never long resists an improving husbandry. Although an owner, the Russian peasant, in consequence of the shifting nature of his subject, is said by Stepniak to have none of that pa.s.sionate feeling of ownership and that profound delight in his land which are characteristic of the peasant proprietors of the West, but he has--what is really the same thing--a deep sense of personal dignity from its possession, and he feels himself to have lost caste if he is forced to give up his holding and become a mere _batrak_, or wage labourer. All the pride of ownership is already there, and in the changes of the immediate future it will have plenty of opportunity for a.s.serting its place.

Under the pressure of this singular economic movement, the nihilist agitation is now developing largely into a peasants' cry for more land and less rent and taxes. As I have said, the Russian peasantry look for the great black division once in an age. The "Old Believers" mix this idea up with their dreams of a great millennial reign, and keep on thinking that the day after to-morrow is to bring in the happy period before the end of the world, when truth is to prevail and the land is to be equally divided among all; and a feeling easily gets about among the peasantry generally that the "black division" is at last coming. Such a feeling was very widespread during the reign of the late Czar, and, indeed, is still so. Rumours fly every now and then from hamlet to hamlet like wildfire, no one knows whence or how, that the division is to be made in a month, or a week, or a year; that the Czar has decreed it, and when it does not come, that the Czar's wishes have for the time been thwarted, as they had so often been thwarted before, by the selfish machinations of the n.o.bility. For the peasant has a profound and touching belief in his Czar. There may be agrarian socialism in his creed, but it is not the agrarian socialism of the schools. The first article of his faith--and it would appear to be the natural faith of the peasant all the world over--is that the earth is the Lord's and not the n.o.bility's; but his second is that the Czar is the Lord's steward, sent for the very purpose of dividing the land justly among his people. If the peasant hopes for the black division, he hopes for it from the Czar.

The Emanc.i.p.ation Act has been far from giving him the land or the liberty he looked for, but he believes--and nothing will shake him out of the belief--that the Emanc.i.p.ation Law which the Czar actually decreed was a righteous law that would have met all the people's wishes and claims, but that this law has been altered seriously to their disadvantage, under the influence of the n.o.bility, in the process of carrying it into execution. But his confidence always is that the Czar will still interfere and put everything to rights. And when, only a few years ago, the revolutionist Stephanovitch stirred up some disturbances in Southern Russia, which were commonly dignified at the time with the name of a peasants' insurrection, he was only able to succeed in doing what he did by first going to St. Petersburg with a pet.i.tion from the peasants of the district to the Czar, and then issuing on his return a false proclamation in the Czar's name, commanding the people to rise against the n.o.bility, who were declared to be persistently obstructing and defeating his Majesty's good and just intentions for his loyal people's welfare. If an imperial proclamation were issued to the contrary effect--a proclamation condemning or repudiating the operations of the peasants--the latter would refuse to believe it to be genuine.

That occurs again and again about this very idea of the black division, which has obtained possession of the brains of the rural population. It often happens that in a season of excitement, like the time of the Russo-Turkish war, or of famine, like the winter of 1880-81, the rumours and expectations of the black division become especially definite and lively, and lead to meetings and discussions and disturbances which the Government think it prudent to stop. In 1879 the Minister of the Interior, with this object in view, issued a circular contradicting the rumours that were spread abroad, which was read in all the villages and affixed to the public buildings. It stated, as plainly as it was possible to state anything, that there would be no redistribution, and that the landlords would retain their property; but it produced no effect. Professor Engelhardt wrote one of his published "Letters from a Village" at that very moment, and states that the _moujiks_ would not understand the circular to mean anything more than a request that they would for a time abstain from gossiping at random about the coming redistribution. One of their reasons for making this odd misinterpretation is curious. The circular warned the people against "evil-intentioned" persons who disseminated false reports, and gave instructions to the authorities to apprehend them. These evil-intentioned persons were, of course, the nihilist agitators, who were making use of these reports to foment an agrarian insurrection; but the peasants took these enemies of the Government to be the landlords and others who had, they believed, set themselves against the redistribution movement and prevented the benevolence and righteous purposes of the Czar from descending upon his people. In some parts of Russia there has sprung up since 1870 a group of peasantry known as "the medalmen," who have persuaded themselves that the Czar not only wants to give them more land, but has long since decreed their exemption from all taxation except the poll tax. They say, moreover, that he struck a medal to commemorate this gracious design of his, which has been, as usual, so wickedly frustrated by his subordinates; and that even, as things are, one has but to get hold of one of these medals and show it to the collector, and the collector is bound to give the holder the exemption he wants. The medals to which so much virtue is ascribed are merely the medals struck to commemorate the Emanc.i.p.ation of the Serfs; but the "medalmen," who are generally men that have parted with their land, sold their houses, and settled at the mines, pay very high prices for one of these medals, wear it constantly about their necks, and think it will secure them a genuine respite from the burden of taxation they have to bear.

The nihilist propagandists think--and the idea seems very remarkable--that this childish and ignorant confidence in the Czar will not be able to stand much longer the strain of the increasing difficulties of the rural situation. The propagandists make it their business to keep alive the idea of the black division in the hearts of the _moujiks_, and make use of every successive disappointment at its continued delay as an instrument of alienating the affections of the people from the throne. A peasantry are very slow to throw over old sentiments, and will suffer long before breaking with the past, but they take a sure grip of their own interest, and they will turn sometimes very decisively and very gregariously to new deliverers. The Russian peasants see themselves settled on plots of ground too small to work with profit, and overburdened with taxes; they have to pay sixty per cent. of all their earnings in dues of all kinds on their land; and they cast their eyes abroad and see two-thirds of the country still unpossessed by the people, one-half still owned by the State, and one-sixth by the greater landowners; and with the communistic ideas in which they have been nursed, they feel that it is time for a new division of the greater order to take place. A gigantic crofter question is impending, and this agrarian agitation for more land is likely enough to make nihilism a more formidable thing in the future than it has been in the past. Hitherto it has taken little hold of the peasantry. At first it was a movement of educated young Russia merely, and might be counted with the ordinary intellectual excesses of youth. It only became a serious political force after the Emanc.i.p.ation Act; but it was still a movement of the upper cla.s.ses, and in spite of immense exertions it has remained so. The situation, however, is rapidly changing, and with the rise--so remarkable in many ways--of a numerous rural proletariat in the country that was supposed to enjoy special protection against it, with the growing distress and discontent of the peasantry, with the louder and more persistent cries for the black division, which their hereditary conception of agrarian justice suggests to them as the only solution of their troubles, who will say what to-morrow may bring forth?

Meanwhile the Will of the People party has continued its activity. We still hear occasionally of murders, and demonstrations, and arrests, and discoveries of nihilist plots on the life of the Czar or of high servants of the Crown, and of alarming discoveries of the hold the movement was taking in the army. But, according to one of the most recent writers on the subject, the author of "Socialismus und Anarchismus, 1883-1886," who admits, however, that it is very difficult to obtain authentic information about it under the rigorous system of repression at present practised by the Russian authorities, a small section of this party, whom he calls the followers of Peter Lavroff, have been developing more in line with German Social Democracy, and have organized themselves into a society called the Labour Emanc.i.p.ation League, which prefers peaceful means of agitation, and in March, 1885, published its programme, demanding (1) a const.i.tution, (2) the nationalization of land, (3) the handing over of factories to the possession of societies of productive labourers, (4) free education, (5) abolition of a standing army, and (6) full liberty of a.s.sociation and meeting. The same writer states, however, that this socialist group are not numerous, and that the various robberies, murders, plots against the Czar's life, incitements of peasant disturbances, seizures of weapons and printing presses that keep on occurring, show that the nihilists, as the others still appear to be called, are much the most active and the most important section of the revolutionary party. He mentions also that in 1884 considerable sensation was produced by the discovery of an anarchist secret society in Warsaw, with several magistrates at its head, which aimed at creating a revolution in Poland,--Prussian and Austrian Poland, as well as Russian,--and rebuilding the Polish nation on a socialist basis. On the apprehension of its leaders it dissolved, but sprang to life again almost immediately in two separate organizations--one directly allied with the Russian Terrorists, and the other, under the influence of a Jew named Mendelssohn, suppressing its Polish nationalism for the present, and linking itself with the Russian socialists--presumably the followers of Lavroff just mentioned.

CHAPTER X.

SOCIALISM AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION.

The renewal of the socialist agitation has not been unproductive of advantage, for it has led to a general recognition that the economic position of the people is far from satisfactory and is not free from peril, and that industrial development, on the lines on which it has. .h.i.therto been running, offers much less prospect than was at one time believed of effecting any substantial, steady, and progressive improvement in their condition. It is only too manifest that the immense increase of wealth which has marked the present century has been attended with surprisingly little amelioration in the general lot of the people, and it is in no way remarkable that this fact should tend to dishearten the labouring cla.s.ses, and fill reflecting minds with serious concern. Under the influence of this experience economists of the present day meet socialism in a very different way from Bastiat and the economists of 1848. They entertain no longer the same absolute confidence in the purely beneficent character of the operation of the principles at present guiding the process of industrial evolution, or in the sovereign virtue of compet.i.tion, una.s.sisted and unconnected, as an agency for the distribution as well as the production of wealth; and they no longer declare that there is not and cannot possibly be a social question. On the contrary, some of them take almost as unfavourable a view of the road we are on as the socialists themselves. Mr. Cairnes, one of the very ablest of them, says: "The fund available for those who live by labour tends, in the progress of society, while growing actually larger, to become a constantly smaller fraction of the entire national wealth. If, then, the means of any one cla.s.s of society are to be permanently limited to this fund, it is evident, a.s.suming that the progress of its members keeps pace with that of other cla.s.ses, that its material condition in relation to theirs cannot but decline. Now, as it would be futile to expect, on the part of the poorest and most ignorant of the population, self-denial and prudence greater than that actually practised by the cla.s.ses above them, the circ.u.mstances of whose life are so much more favourable than theirs for the cultivation of these virtues, the conclusion to which I am brought is this, that unequal as is the distribution of wealth already in this country, the tendency of industrial progress--on the supposition that the present separation between industrial cla.s.ses is maintained--is towards an inequality greater still. The rich will be growing richer; and the poor, at least relatively, poorer. It seems to me, apart altogether from the question of the labourer's interest, that these are not conditions which furnish a solid basis for a progressive social state; but having regard to that interest, I think the considerations adduced show that the first and indispensable step towards any serious amendment of the labourer's lot is that he should be, in one way or other, lifted out of the groove in which he at present works, and placed in a position compatible with his becoming a sharer in equal proportion with others in the general advantages arising from industrial progress." ("Leading Principles," p.

340.) He thinks it beyond question that the condition of the labouring population is not so linked to the progress of industrial improvements that we may count on it rising _pari pa.s.su_ with that progress; because, in the first place, the labourer can only benefit from industrial inventions which cheapen commodities that enter into his expenditure, and the bulk of his expenditure is on agricultural products, which are prevented from being cheapened by the increase of population always increasing the demand for them; and, second, the labourer is practically more and more divorced from the control of capital, and reduced to the position of a recipient of wages, and there is no tendency in wages to grow _pari pa.s.su_ with the growth of wealth, because the demand for labour, on which, in the last a.n.a.lysis, the rate of wages depends, is always in an increasing degree supplied by inventions which dispense with labour. He is thus debarred from partic.i.p.ating in the advantages of industrial progress either as consumer or as producer: as consumer, by over-population; as producer, by his divorce from capital. Mr. Cairnes, like most economists, differs from socialists in thinking that the first requisite for any material improvement in the condition of the labouring cla.s.ses lies in effective restraints on population, but he says that "even a very great change in the habits of the labouring cla.s.ses as bearing upon the increase of population--a change far greater than there seems any solid ground for expecting--would be ineffectual, so long as the labourer remains a mere receiver of wages, to accomplish any great improvement in his state; any improvement at all commensurate with what has taken place and may be expected hereafter to take place in the lot of those who derive their livelihood from the profits of capital" (p.

335). Here he is entirely at one with socialists in believing that the only surety for a sound industrial progress lies in checking the further growth of capitalism by the encouragement of co-operative production, which, by furnishing the labouring cla.s.ses with a share in the one fund that grows with the growth of wealth, the fund of capital, offers them "the sole means of escape from a harsh and hopeless destiny" (p. 338).

Mr. Cairnes, then, agrees with the socialists in declaring that the position of the wage-labourer is becoming less and less securely linked with the progressive improvement of society, and that the only hope of the labourer's future lies in his becoming a capitalist by virtue of co-operation; only, of course, he is completely at issue with them in regard to the means by which this change is to be effected, believing that its introduction by the direct intervention of the State would be unnecessary, ineffectual, and pernicious.

I am disposed to think that Mr. Cairnes takes too despondent a view of the possibilities of progress that are comprised in the position of the wage-labourer, but it is precisely that view that has lent force to the socialist criticism of the present order of things, and to the socialist calls for a radical transformation by State agency. The main charges brought by socialists against the existing economy are the three following, all of which, they allege, are consequences of the capitalistic management of industry and unregulated compet.i.tion:--1st, that it tends to reduce wages to the minimum required to give the labourer his daily bread, and that it tends to prevent them from rising above that minimum; 2nd, that it has subjected the labourer's life to innumerable vicissitudes, made trade insecure, mutable and oscillatory, and created relative over-population; and, 3rd, that it enables and even forces the capitalist to rob the labourer of the whole increase of value which is the fruit of his labour. These are the three great heads of their philippic against modern society: the hopeless oppression of the "iron and cruel law" of necessary wages, the mischief of incessant crises and changes and of the chaotic _regime_ of chance, and the iniquity of capital in the light of their doctrine of value. Let us examine them in their order.

I. Socialists found their first charge partly on their interpretation of the actual historical tendency of things, and partly on the teaching of Ricardo and other economists on natural wages. Now, to begin with the question of historical fact, the effect which has been produced by the large system of production on the distribution of wealth and the general condition of the working cla.s.s is greatly misconceived by them. So far as the distribution of wealth is concerned, the princ.i.p.al difference that has occurred may be described as the decadence of the lower middle cla.s.ses, a decline both in the number of persons in proportion to population who enjoy intermediate incomes, and also in the relative amount of the average income they enjoy. Their individual income may be higher than that of the corresponding cla.s.s 150 or 200 years ago, but it bears a less ratio to the average income of the nation. The reason of this decline is, of course, obvious. The yeomanry, once a seventh of our population, and the small masters in trade have gradually given way before the economic superiority of the large capital or other causes, and modern industry has as yet produced no other cla.s.s that can, by position and numbers, fill their room; for though, no doubt, the great industries call into being auxiliary industries of various kinds, which are still best managed on the small scale by independent tradesmen, the number of middling incomes which the greater industries have thus contributed to create has been far short of the number they have extinguished. The same causes have, of course, exercised very important effects on the economic condition of the working cla.s.s. They have reduced them more and more to the permanent position of wage-labourers, and have left them relatively fewer openings than they once possessed for investing their savings in their own line, and fewer opportunities for the abler and more intelligent of them to rise to a competency. This want may perhaps be ultimately supplied under existing industrial conditions by the modern system of co-operation, which combines some of the advantages of the small capital with some of the advantages of the large, though it lacks one of the chief advantages of both, the energetic, uncontrolled initiative of the individual capitalist. But at present, at any rate, it is premature to expect this, and as things stand, many of the old pathways that linked cla.s.s with cla.s.s are now closed without being replaced by modern subst.i.tutes, and working men are more purely and permanently wage-labourers than they used to be. But while the wage-labourer has perhaps less chance than before of becoming anything else, it is a mistake to suppose, as is sometimes done, that he is worse off, or even, as is perhaps invariably imagined, that he has a less share in the wealth of the country than he had when the wealth of the country was less. On the contrary, the position of the wage-labourer is really better than it has been for three hundred years. If we turn to the period of the English Revolution, we find that the income which the labourer and his family together were able to earn was habitually insufficient to maintain them in the way they were accustomed to live.

Sir M. Hale, in his "Discourse Touching the Poor," published in 1683, says the family of a working man, consisting of husband, wife, and four children, could not be supported in meat, drink, clothing, and house-rent on less than 10s. a week, and that he might possibly be able to make that amount, if he got constant employment, and if two of his children, as well as their mother, could earn something by their labour too. Gregory King cla.s.sifies the whole labouring population of the country in his time, except a few thousand skilled artisans, among the cla.s.ses who decrease the wealth of the country, because, not earning enough to keep them, they had to obtain occasional allowances from public funds. We do well to grieve over the pauperism that exists now in England. A few years ago, one person in every twenty received parochial support, and one in thirty does so yet. These figures, of course, refer to those in receipt of relief at one time, and not to all who received relief during a year. But for Scotland we have statistics of both, and the latter come as nearly as possible to twice as many as the former. If the same proportion rules in England, then every fifteenth person receives relief in the course of the year.[4] But in King's time, out of a population of five millions and a half, 600,000 were in receipt of alms, _i.e._, more than one in ten; and if their children under 16 years of age were included, their number would amount to 900,000, or one in six. Now, while the labourers' wages were then, as a rule, unequal to maintain them in the way they lived, we know that their scale of living was much below that which is common among their cla.s.s to-day. The only thing which was much cheaper then than now was butcher meat, mutton being only 2d. a lb., and beef, 1d.; but half the population had meat only twice a week, and a fourth only once. The labourer lived chiefly on bread and beer, and bread was as dear as it is now. Potatoes had not come into general use. b.u.t.ter and milk were cheaper than now, but were not used to the same extent. Fuel, light, and clothing were all much dearer, and salt was so much so as to form an appreciable element in the weekly bill. When so many of the staple necessaries of life were high in price, the labourer's wages naturally could not afford a meat diet. Nothing can furnish a more decisive proof of the rise in the real remuneration of the wage-labourer since the Revolution than the fact that the wages of that period were insufficient to maintain the lower standard of comfort prevalent then, without parochial aid, while the wages of the same cla.s.ses to-day are generally able to maintain their higher standard of comfort without such supplementary a.s.sistance. Then the hours of labour were, on the whole, longer; the death rate in London was 1 in 27, in place of 1 in 40 now; and all those general advantages of advancing civilization, which are the heritage of all, were either absent or much inferior.

These facts sufficiently show that if the rich have got richer since the Revolution, the poor have not got poorer, and that the circ.u.mstances of the labouring cla.s.s have substantially improved with the growth of national wealth. As far as their mere money income is concerned there is some reason for thinking that the improvement has been as near as may be proportional with the increase of wealth. The general impression is the reverse of this. It is usual to hear it said that while the labourers'

circ.u.mstances have undoubtedly improved absolutely, they have not improved relatively, as compared with the progress in the wealth of the country and the share of it which other cla.s.ses have succeeded in obtaining. But this impression must be qualified, if not entirely rejected, on closer examination. Data exist by which it can be to some extent tested, and these data show that while considerable alterations have been made in the distribution of wealth since the rise of the great industries, these alterations have not been unfavourable to the labouring cla.s.ses, but that the proportion of the wealth of the country which falls to the working man to-day is very much the same--is indeed rather better than worse--than the proportion which fell to his share two hundred years ago. Gregory King made an estimate of the distribution of wealth among the various cla.s.ses of society in England in 1688, founded partly on the poll-books, hearth-books, and other official statistical records, and partly on personal observation and inquiry in the several towns and counties of England; and Dr. C. Davenant, who says he had carefully examined King's statistics himself, checking them by calculations of his own and by the schemes of other persons, p.r.o.nounces them to be "very accurate and more perhaps to be relied on than anything that has been ever done of a like kind." Now, a comparison of King's figures with the estimate of the distribution of the national income made by Mr. Dudley Baxter from the returns of 1867, will afford some sort of idea--though of course only approximately, and perhaps not very closely so--of the changes that have actually occurred. King takes the family income as the unit of his calculations. Baxter, on the other hand, specifies all bread-winners separately--men, women, and children; but to furnish a basis of comparison, let us take the men as representing a family each, and if so, that would give us 4,006,260 working-cla.s.s families in the country in 1867. This is certainly a high estimate of their number, because in 1871 there were only five million of families in England; and according to the calculations of Professor Leone Levi, the working cla.s.s comprises no more than two-thirds of the population, and would consequently consist in 1871 of no more than 3,300,000 families. If we were to take this figure as the ground of our calculations, the result would be still more striking; but let us take the number of working-cla.s.s families to have been four millions in 1867.

The average income of a working-cla.s.s family in King's time was 12 12s.

(including his artisan and handicraft families along with the other labourers); the average income of a working cla.s.s family now is 81. The average income of English families generally in King's time was 32; the average income of English families generally now is 162. The average income of the country has thus increased five-fold, while the average income of the working cla.s.s has increased six and a half times. The ratio of the working cla.s.s income to the general income stood in King's time as 1:2, and now as 1:2. In 1688, 74 per cent. of the whole population belonged to the working cla.s.s, and they earned collectively 26 per cent. of the entire income of the country; in 1867--according to the basis we have adopted, though the proportion is doubtless really less--80 per cent. of the whole population belonged to the working cla.s.s, and they earned collectively 40 per cent. of the entire income of the country. Their share of the population has increased 6 per cent.; their share of the income 14 per cent.

Now, I am far from adducing these considerations with the view of suggesting that the present condition of the working cla.s.ses or the present distribution of wealth is even approximately satisfactory, but I think they ought to be sufficient to disperse the gloomy apprehensions which trouble many minds as if, with all our national prosperity, the condition of the poorer cla.s.ses were growing ever worse and could not possibly, under existing industrial conditions, grow any better; to prevent us from prematurely condemning a system of society, whose possibilities for answering the legitimate aspirations of the working cla.s.s are so far from being exhausted, that it may rather be said that a real beginning has hardly as yet been made to accomplish them; and to give ground for the hope that the existing economy, which all admit to be a most efficient instrument for the production of wealth, may, by wise correction and management, be made a not inadequate agency for its distribution.

The socialists are not more fortunate in their argument from the teaching of economists than in their account of the actual facts and tendency of history. The "iron and cruel law" of necessary wages is, as expounded by economists, neither so iron nor so cruel as La.s.salle represented it to be. They taught that the price of labour, like the price of everything else, tended to settle at the level of the relative cost of its production, and that the cost of its production meant the cost of producing the subsistence required to maintain the labourer in working vigour and to rear his family to continue the work of society after his day; but they always represented this as a minimum below which wages would not permanently settle, but above which they might from other causes remain for a continuity considerably elevated, and which, even as a minimum, was in an essential way ruled by the consent of the labouring cla.s.ses themselves, and dependent on the standard of living they chose habitually to adopt. If the rate of wages were forced down below the amount necessary to maintain that customary standard of living, the marriage rate of the labouring cla.s.ses would tend to fall and the rate of mortality to rise till the supply of labour diminished sufficiently to restore the rate of wages to its old level. And conversely, if the price of labour rose above that limit, the marriage rate among the labouring cla.s.s would tend to rise and the rate of mortality to fall, till the numbers of the working population increased to such an extent as to bring it down again. But the rate of marriage depended on the will and consent of the labouring cla.s.s, and their consent was supposed to be given or withheld according as they themselves considered the current wages sufficient or insufficient to support a family upon. The amount of the labourer's "necessary"

subsistence was never thought to be a hard and fast limit inflexibly fixed by physical conditions. It was not a bare living; it was the living which had become customary or was considered necessary by the labourer. Its amount might be permanently raised, if in consequence of a durable rise of wages a higher standard of comfort came to be habitual and to be counted essential, and the addition so made to it would then become as real an element of natural or necessary wages in the economic sense as the rest. Its amount might also permanently fall, if the labourers ceased to think it necessary and contentedly accommodated their habits to the reduced standard, and there might thus ensue a permanent degradation of the labourer, such as took place in Ireland in the present century, when the labouring cla.s.s adjusted themselves to reduction after reduction till their lower standard of living served, in the first place, to operate as an inducement to marriage instead of a check on it, because marriage could not make things worse, and at least lightened the burdens of life by the sympathy that shared them; and served, in the second place, to impair the industrial efficiency of the labourer till he was hardly worth better wages if he could have got them. So far then was the doctrine of economists from involving any "iron or cruel" limit that they always drew from it the lesson that it was in the power of the labouring cla.s.ses to elevate themselves by the pleasant, if somewhat paradoxical, expedient of first enlarging their scale of expenditure. "Pitch y