Isaac A. Hourwich

“ Thus the play of economic interests is dissolving the village community into, on the one hand, a landless rural proletariat, and, on the other hand, a peasant bourgeoisie, to whom the title to a large portion of communal land is destined to be transferred. ”

“ As the unit for all information is identical with the economic cell—the peasant household—these investigations present us with the true scientific anatomy of Russian economic life. Nevertheless there may be cases in which plain truth is not exceedingly welcome. This holds true even of the most advanced reform parties. Why then should the Russian nobility be among the exceptions, if there are any? If the rent is exorbitant and the earnings of the farmer are scanty, it does not require a genius to draw the conclusion that there must be some connection of cause and sequence between the two facts. ”

“ As appears from this table, in so far as peasant farming has survived on the landlord’s estate, agrarian communism has been almost entirely superseded by individual tenancy.
Should not, however, the few cases of communal tenure be considered, on the contrary, as signs of a budding agrarian communism? Is it not a fact that peasant tenancy has sprung into existence from nothing within recent times, and that in 48 villages agrarian communism has acquired a foothold even in that tenancy which was always considered as being essentially an individualistic form of landholding? ”

“ Among the capitalists we notice the timber speculator, who purchases tracts without ploughland, or, perhaps, sells the latter to the small farmer. Yet, with all that, three-fourths of the total area acquired by the capitalist class are farmed by the owners. Practical business men who invest their money in large estates, would undoubtedly prefer to quietly pocket the enormous rents paid by the peasants, if in reality agriculture on a large scale had proved a loss, as both the nobility and the peasantists claimed. ”

“ Let us take as a unit every male of the revision, (i. e., the official unit of taxation) ; let us then compare with one another the assessments levied upon both exceptional classes of absolute proprietors and donees, on the one hand, and let us again compare with each other the assessments levied upon the remaining classes of the peasantry. We shall see that every male is taxed on the whole at an approximately uniform rate. This is the usual system of taxation in every primitive state, where land is in abundance and human labor is the main source of wealth. ”

“ The unrelenting course of historical development tends to eliminate landlord agriculture in Russia. As land is steadily passing into the control of the peasantry, the time is imminent when land nationalization can easily be carried out through the abolition of rent. Whether the reform will be accomplished through violence, like the emancipation of the slaves in the United States, or in a peaceful way, like the emancipation of the peasants and the redemption of land in Russia, entirely depends on the wisdom of the ruling classes. ”

“ Up to the present day the American farmer has met the Russian peasant on the international market, either as small farmer, or as cultivator of the greater part of the landlords’ property. In this competition the greater economy of labor and the cheaper methods of transportation secured the prize to the American producer. From now on the mortgaged American farmer will have to stand the competition of the Russian capitalist. It hardly needs a prophet to foretell that the breakdown of the Russian peasantry will hasten the decay of small agriculture in America. ”

“ The Russian peasantists labored at the riddle how to reconcile the theory of Karl Marx with the teachings of Tchernyshefsky. If capitalism is the laboratory in which socialism is concocted; if furthermore, capitalism has grown out of the expropriation of the peasant, then the consistent [139] Russian socialist must foster the dissolution of agrarian communism, to which all his sympathies are pledged, and contribute to the development of capitalism, of which he himself is a bitter enemy. ”

“ The awful famine which has lately been raging over an area as large as the territory of the Dreibund, and inhabited by a population as numerous as that of the “allied Republic,” has called the attention of the whole civilized world to the condition of the starving Russian peasant. A movement has been set on foot in this country to relieve the hard need of the sufferers. This has induced me to think that it would perhaps not be without some interest for the American student of economics to cast a glance at the rural conditions which have finally resulted in that tremendous calamity. ”

“ Archaic communism in the production of food and other necessaries, as well as in possession and consumption, is now, I imagine, universally recognized as the primitive form of social life. It is only during the higher stages of development that private ownership by individuals comes into existence; and private property in land was the latest to appear on the historical scene. The dissolution of the land community in Western Europe is a fact of comparatively very recent date. In Russia, where the process of evolution has been less rapid, we see this primeval institution preserved until to-day. ”

“ The labor powers of men being approximately equal, assessment per capita insures a rude equity in taxation. But after the reforms of 1861 and 1866, which added new and sharp distinctions to those already in existence among the peasantry, taxation per capita became a power that accentuated the social inequalities, and hastened, through its extortion, the ruin of the feeble.
Indebtedness of landed property is the inclined plane usually leading toward expropriation of the small farmer, as well as of the aristocratic landlord. ”

“ The surface of the soil has become finally exhausted and the wooden plough of the Russian peasant is unable to reach down to the deeper layers where the soil is yet virgin. Deep ploughing is impossible with only one horse, and that horse fed on straw. It is further not only the peasant land, but also the major part of the landlord’s fields, that is cultivated with the peasant’s stock and implements. Thus the crisis of peasant agriculture is at the same time the crisis of Russian landlord farming. ”

“ The observer, however, was not aware of the economic significance of the phenomenon when he advanced the opinion that alienability of land exhibits the great capacity of adaptation intrinsic in the community.
In reality the contrary is the case. The fact that communal land is disposed of by private agreement, means the displacement of agrarian communism by economic individualism. This was most strikingly demonstrated when the question of the general redivision of the communal land came up before the free mir in the beginning of the eighties. ”

“ Now it was perfectly evident that an extensive system of railways could not possibly be supported out of the resources of agriculture alone, in a country in which nine-tenths of the people were serfs, either of the state or of the landlords, and had to bear out of their scanty income the expenses of a large military state, and of an aristocracy. ”

“ The transitional groups of half farmers, half laborers, by whom the major part of the landlords’ estates were formerly cultivated, have sunk through the famine into the proletarian class. The laborer having become a proletarian, it is by proletarian labor that the estates must be tilled, and agriculture upon a large scale becomes a regular capitalistic pursuit. ”

“ Whatever may have been the effect of permitting the dependence of the peasant to be continued, the support offered to the community by the old fiscal system, which has remained up to this very day, was still more influential.
It would be idle to criticise the Russian financial system from the standpoint of justice in taxation. The law of self-preservation is the first law of all being. To cover her nine hundred million budget, official Russia has got simply to take money wherever it can be found. ”

“ In a word, through the census a picture is drawn of the economic condition of all the households of the community. The number of those who can read, or who are learning to read, is also given in the census. Certainly the material collected appears to be of such a character as to furnish fundamental facts for the formation of a judgment as to the economic condition of the population. ”

“ Thus the dissolution of the old peasant family sapped the productive forces of the peasantry at large and prompted the liquidation of independent farming with a considerable minority of the householders. A distinct group of the village is formed to-day by those peasants who for want of live stock with which to till their plots, are compelled either to hire their neighbors to do the work, or to lease their plots and consequently to stop their farming altogether. The bulk of this class is made up of those families in which there is only one adult male worker. ”

“ Precisely for the same reasons, considering the village community as an integral part of the prevailing system of paternalism, the “occidentalists,” opposed to autocracy and orthodoxy, strove for the abolition of the mir as well as of bond serfdom.
The archaic communism of the mir appeared to them to stand in acute contradiction to Western liberalism or individualism. The “epoch of emancipation,” however, that came to realize the aspirations of the occidentalists, brought about a fundamental change of public opinion in regard to the village community. ”

“ There the landlords do not care to enclose their estates, while the peasants lack the necessary means to do so, having no woods in their possession. Whenever the landlord’s estate adjoins the village, the peasants’ cattle, being innocent of the knowledge of geodesical distinctions, invariably cross the fatal line. ”

“ This rural surplus population, nominally counted as peasant proprietors, is in reality even now severing the bond that has hitherto linked it to its birthplace. Those who year after year spend the summers as farm-laborers in the South or in the East have already said farewell to farming. [89] The case of artisans who leave the village for the summer season is similar. A peasant who has given up his farming for the sake of working outside has very little to gain by returning for the winter, when the supply of labor in the village far exceeds the demand. ”

“ Another reason for the prevalence of large farming over small peasant tenure is to be found in the greater economic dependence of the farm laborer as compared with the tenant, while the laborer, being a farmer himself, saves his employer the investment of fixed capital. ”

“ Semefsky, the famous historian of the Russian peasantry, thinks that the establishment of agrarian communism was due to the initiative of the peasantry, who came to the conclusion that this form of ownership suited their needs better than did quarterly possession. The Government acted only in accordance with the wishes of the peasants, as expressed in numberless petitions and land-suits, and granted the sanction of law to the results of economic development. ”

“ The nobility has proved able to farm only on the largest estates. Where the nobleman would merely distribute his estate in small lots among peasant tenants, the capitalist landholder carries on agriculture on a large scale:
The average holding on which peasant tenure pays the capitalist better than farming, is less than one-half the corresponding size of a noble’s estate. ”

“ In proportion as the offices became hereditary, and the relations growing out of administration of public affairs developed into personal dependence of the common people upon the office holders, the tenure of land by reason of office became hereditary, and subsequently developed into an institution of private law. ”

“ As the process of dissolution is obviously spreading from within, and not from without the village, inalienability of peasant land would simply mean gratuitous expropriation of the poor for the benefit of the wealthy members of the community.
We notice that the percentage of emigrants among the quarterly possessors who have enjoyed the right of alienating their land has been far greater than that among the former state peasants who live in agrarian communism ”

“ As the progress of individualism will not stop in presence of the survivals of the patriarchal compound family, so the lacking labor force will have to be supplied by hire. The dissolution of the patriarchal family brings forth, of necessity, the employing farmer.
The characteristic feature of this class is that the employer is still the tiller of the soil. The laborer is hired only to help the farmer in his work, the average number of laborers employed [102] varying between one and two to one household, so as to constitute the required coöperation of three working men. ”

“ The State in Russia has always been a self-sufficing entity, which claimed the services of everybody, without owing in return anything to anybody. And this still remains to-day the fundamental principle wherein Russian public law differs from constitutional law. ”

“ It might be questioned by individualists whether the peasant, as a human being, was necessarily to be guided in his domestic life solely by regard for the public purse, but from the standpoint of Russian public law, such objections do not hold water. To use an analogy, the stock farmer, when mating his animals, does not take in consideration the possible condition of their mutual affection, his object being solely the maintenance and improvement of the breed. ”

“ Nevertheless a certain outlay of capital for the payment of wages was necessitated by the development of money economy in agriculture. This has drawn the line between the smaller and the larger estates.
While on the smaller estates peasant tenure is practiced to the extent of excluding landlord agriculture, on the larger estates, on the contrary, peasant tenure plays but a subordinate part:
Small peasant tenure is a very ruinous management of large estates, inasmuch as the land allotted in tenure is, as a rule, never manured. ”