Their land is generally taken by a class of small usurers (koulaks) who have grown up in every Russian village since the emancipation. 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 class of comparatively rich peasants, on the one hand, holding and cultivating most of the land, and a larger class 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of Western Europe invading Russia and superseding primitive rural institutions in that country, as it has already superseded them in others.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 class of members and a poor class, 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 assist a neighbour out of a little difficulty of the way than to meet the unremitting claims of a class 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 emancipation. 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 ménage has increased to an embarrassing extent the expenses of the peasant's living at the very time that other circumstances 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 passenger, 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 régime 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 constitute one main cause of their agricultural backwardness and their consequent poverty. Elisée 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 12½ 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 passionate 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 asserting 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 nobility. 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 nobility'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 Emancipation 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 Emancipation 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 nobility, 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 petition 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 nobility, 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 Emancipation 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 Emancipation Act; but it was still a movement of the upper classes, 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 Emancipation League, which prefers peaceful means of agitation, and in March, 1885, published its programme, demanding (1) a constitution, (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 association 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 hitherto 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 classes, 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 competition, unassisted 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 class of society are to be permanently limited to this fund, it is evident, assuming that the progress of its members keeps pace with that of other classes, 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 classes above them, the circumstances 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 classes 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 passu 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 passu with the growth of wealth, because the demand for labour, on which, in the last analysis, the rate of wages depends, is always in an increasing degree supplied by inventions which dispense with labour. He is thus debarred from participating 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 classes lies in effective restraints on population, but he says that "even a very great change in the habits of the labouring classes 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 classes 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.