Agrarian society

“ The unprecedented prosperity, especially among the farmers, which began with the closing years of the nineteenth century and has continued with little reaction down to the present has removed many causes for agrarian discontent ”

“ Any one who turns over the Statutes and State Papers of the sixteenth century will be aware that statesmen were much exercised with an agrarian problem, which they thought to be comparatively new, and any one who follows the matter further will find the problem to have an importance at once economic, legal, and political. ”

“ The history of the agrarian problem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—indeed its history ever since—is largely the story of the small cultivator’s struggle to protect his interests against the changes caused by the growth of the great estate. ”

“ Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated, two ways, to make one part of society more affluent, and the other part more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state. ”

“ Thus a collision of interests, a weakening of communal restrictions before the enterprise of the capitalist farmer, the strengthening of some kinds of property and the weakening of others, and the growth of new sorts of social relations in the villages, were consequences to be expected from the increasing predominance of the large farm, and especially of the large pasture farm. ”

“ They are to be carefully distinguished from the sweeping innovations of the sixteenth century, which alone deserve the name of an Agrarian Revolution. But they are closely connected with that revolution. ”

“ Almost everywhere, certainly in England, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, and the United States, the agriculturists, formerly so instinctively conservative, are becoming fiercely discontented, declare they gained less by civilization than the rest of the community, and are looking about for remedies of a drastic nature. ”

“ What made the new methods of agriculture not simply an important technical advance in the utilisation of the soil, but the beginning of a social revolution, was the insecurity of the tenure of large numbers of the peasantry, in the absence of which they might gradually have adapted themselves to the altered conditions, without any overwhelming shock to rural life such as was produced by the evictions and by the loss of rights of common. ”

“ Fourth, as the lynchpin of our efforts to lift the mass of our people from poverty, we must implement agrarian reform with greater vigor, doing our best to combine speed with the necessary caution. I would like to stress again the aim of agrarian reform. ”

“ The agrarian revolution introduced by the transfer of church properties to laymen was accompanied by enclosures and a widespread tendency to shift from an uneconomical crop economy to an agriculture governed by business principles. ”

“ If we cast our eye over the agrarian changes of our period, with a view to grouping their main elements under a few easily distinguishable categories, we do not find that they present themselves as a simple series of economic sequences. Behind them all there is, it is true, the fundamental economic fact of the decay of subsistence husbandry. ”

“ Even if the political and economic environment had remained unchanged, the mere formation of commercial capital and of a moneyed class could hardly have failed to work a slow revolution in agrarian relationships. ”

“ The achievement of the agrarian reform objectives implies the establishment by rural workers and small and medium-sized farmers, with the support of the State, of cooperatives for production, buying, selling, processing and services, as well as of other forms of collective exploitation by workers. ”

“ If we carefully study the significance of these things, we shall soon discover, that in reality those farms were practically, combined agricultural and manufacturing institutions, which were self-supporting and self-sustaining to such an extent, that farm people were the most independent on the face of the globe. As such, these small farm centers were potent factors, in swiftly advancing the permanent wealth and civilization of rural society. ”

“ To carry out an integral agrarian reform, which responds to the natural right of private property, taking into account efficiency in the utilization of resources and the utility of giving land to those who work it ”

“ It is interesting to note, in view of the subsequent political activity in which the movement for agricultural organization became inevitably involved, that the founders of the Grange looked for 5 advantages to come to the farmer through intellectual and social intercourse, not through political action. ”

“ In forming any estimate, however, of rural conditions, the hand to mouth economy of the poorer peasants, and their consequent helplessness in the face of any unexpected catastrophe, such as an unusually bad harvest, a cattle plague, and (in the fifteenth century) the destruction of crops by civil disturbances, must not be forgotten. ”

“ At the beginning of the sixteenth century forces both political—the restriction of the territorial sovereignty of the landlords—and economic—the growth in the demand for wool—were working to produce a change in the methods of agriculture ”

“ All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes, on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came. ”

“ When we turn from the agricultural arrangements described in previous chapters to examine these large farms, we enter a new world, a world where economic power is being slowly organised for the exploitation of the soil, and where the methods of cultivation and the standards of success are quite different from those obtaining on the small holdings of the peasantry. ”

“ For by making a breach in the walls of custom they bring us to the edge of two great problems, the growth of competitive rents, and the formation of large pasture farms out of the holdings of evicted tenants.
ToList II. PART OF THE MANOR OF EDGEWARE, IN MIDDLESEX (1597.)
We have spoken at length of the prosperity of the peasants, because it is necessary to appreciate it in order to sympathise with the point of view from which they and their contemporaries regarded the agrarian problem. But evil days are coming upon the rural middle classes. Indeed they have already come. ”

“ But who can be expected to say a word for Agrarian? One might as well look to find a sane man ready to do battle for the Jacobin, which is all but a convertible term for Agrarian, though in its proper sense the latter word is of exactly the opposite meaning to the former. Under the term Agrarians is included, in common usage, all that class of men who exhibit a desire to remove social ills by a resort to means which are considered irregular and dangerous by the great majority of mankind. ”

“ But it can hardly be doubted that such irregularities were sometimes a deliberate attempt to worry the weaker members of the village community into throwing up their lands, by making profitable cultivation impossible. ”

“ The contrast between the prevalence of organised agrarian revolts in the middle of the sixteenth century, dragging on in small sporadic agitations for nearly one hundred years, with their comparative rarity two hundred years later, when similar causes were at work to produce them, marks the new grouping of social classes and economic forces which was going on apace in our period. ”

“ I will not multiply evidence, but I draw attention to the fact that this evidence of the means of subsistence of man being derived from agricultural produce comes from the most backward races of the world. So that, from this stage up to the stage when ancestor-worship, and therefore tribal society, had become fully developed, we have the suggestion of a continued succession of agricultural people without the intervention of a hunting or pastoral stage. ”

“ No one who reads the writers by whom the agrarian problem is discussed can fail to notice that the official view of the proper system of agrarian relationships was on the whole favourable to the small man, and was, indeed, not very different from that expressed in the demands of the peasants themselves. ”

“ Without homesteads, with no prospect of anything but unsatisfying labor, with scarce the surety of earning a scanty subsistence,—there is, among the common people, a lack of interest in agricultural efforts. Thousands of laborers leave this land, the fairest on which God's impartial sun shines; few are left to care for the soil; and so, as the shortest cut across this field of deliberately created difficulty, nearly all the land is laid down to grass. In our ride of more than one hundred miles, hardly one fruit-tree was seen, or one nice garden. ”

“ Few of those who live in cities, villages, or other places than those where agricultural pursuits prevail; few of those, indeed, who have been tillers only of the subdued and time-mellowed soils of the old States and countries, have any adequate conception of the immense amount of hard labor required to clear off the primitive forest, and prepare the land for the first crop ”

“ Their fancies in this respect have, however, until the present time, been mocked by the actual conditions of agriculture, which have combined to make the lot of the farmer, the sustainer of all the world, the saddest, most difficult, and most hopeless endured by any class of men. From the beginning of the world until the last century the tiller of the soil has been the most pathetic figure in history. In the ages of slavery his was the lowest class of slaves. ”

“ Here again, as with cotton, it might be thought that we possess an industry of rare economic strength, able to supply wealth, at any rate in a modest degree, to the rural community. Yet the history of our agriculture during the last half-century is rife with tragic disaster to all the parties interested, and teems with the histories of ruined men.
Those, however, through whose eyes we should do well to look at the agriculture of this country, are not so much the landlords, or even the farmers, both of whom may have other resources to assist them in a crisis, as the labourers. ”

“ Please bear these facts in mind, for, in order to show positively how the free and slave States do stand upon the great and important subject of rural economy, we intend to take an account of all the other products of the soil, of the live-stock upon farms, of the animals slaughtered, and, in fact, of every item of husbandry of the two sections ”

“ Speculation in land has been creating a class of non-resident agricultural capitalists and tenant cultivators, and has been transforming the type of agricultural population over large sections of country. Soil exhaustion is leading to abandonment of the poorest land and is compelling methods of scientific agriculture on the remainder. These conditions are producing their own social problems for the rural community. ”

“ In the Middle States and in the North where general farming was practised, there was no genuinely rural proletariat, for the reason that the lands were cheap and the undeveloped West was open to every man who had sufficient knowledge of agriculture and enough energy to devote himself to the conquest of the soil. ”

“ Our first settler’s land, being the center of population, the store, the blacksmith’s forge, the wheelwright’s shop, are set up on it, or on its margin, where soon arises a village, which rapidly grows into a town, the center of exchanges for the people of the whole district. With no greater agricultural productiveness than it had at first, this land now begins to develop a productiveness of a higher kind. To labor expended in raising corn, or wheat, or potatoes, it will yield no more of those things than at first ”

“ Agrarian reform should not merely subdivide misery, it must raise living standards. Ownership raises the farmer from his but productivity will keep him on his feet. ”

“ Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows which lie between the giant city and the villages get covered over like a river-bed with a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots in the windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the agricultural population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no state allows within its boundaries ”

“ And so it has happened that those lands which the shepherds who founded the city taught their children to cultivate are now, by their later descendants, converted again from corn fields back to pastures, thus in their greed of gain violating even the law, since they fail to distinguish the difference between agriculture and grazing. ”

“ The farm produce alone yielded six or seven thousands a year, while the plantation crops of cotton, sugar, and rice were clear profit. Rows of white cabins were the homes of the colored citizens of the community. ”

“ Is it because the villages are insanitary or is there any other reason for that? Thus we find that an adequate discussion of politics will involve a consideration of agricultural questions as well as the questions of village-sanitation. At the same time we shall have to consider whether we can improve our material condition even by bringing under tillage all the available culturable land of the country. If we can't, then we shall have to consider the question of industry and trade as well. ”

“ The abolition of rural servitude gave a vigorous impulse to agriculture, and secured to it its present high social significance; and now the old [Pg 232] nobility all over Europe are proud to be agriculturists. Agriculture is now a science, and it is by freedom that it has thus reached the highest honor in the hierarchy of knowledge and labor. ”