A great many different sciences are grouped under the name "anthropology," but they all have their rallying point in man, whose nature and history they seek to explore. The fact is that all sciences should have the same rallying point; and we trust that the greater interest which is visibly being taken year by year in anthropological studies will tend to humanize in a beneficial degree the whole circle of human knowledge.
AN EXAMPLE OF SOCIAL DECADENCE.
That the incessant encroachment of the Government upon the rights of the individual will produce social decadence is a truth that most Americans have yet to learn. With a light heart they are constantly approving scheme after scheme for social regeneration that involves some restriction upon freedom, or an increase of taxation, or both. It is not perhaps singular that the history of similar schemes in the past should possess no lesson for them. When President Eliot, of Harvard University, says that the experience of the Italian republics has no value for us, it is not to be expected that persons with less capacity to interpret the records of other times should attach little or no importance to them. But they ought not most certainly to maintain the same attitude toward the experience of the nations of to-day. It is to blind their eyes to what does not rest upon hearsay or upon dubious documents—to what admits of the clearest demonstration at the hands of living witnesses.
For this reason we urge upon all students of social science the study of the condition of the inhabitants of the black-earth region of Russia. In that field, one of the largest and most fruitful in the world for investigation, they will find the amplest evidence of the frightful havoc wrought by the abridgment of individual freedom and the seizure of private property in the form of taxes for public purposes. If it be said that Russia is an autocracy, and can not therefore furnish instruction to a democracy like the United States, the answer is easy, if not obvious. Despotism, like gravitation, is the same all over the world. It makes no difference in the long run whether a law abridging freedom issues from the palace of a czar or from the legislative halls of a popular assembly. The individual objecting to it is obliged to regulate his life, not in accordance with his own notions, but in accordance with the notions of some one else. It makes no difference, either, whether taxation is imposed by an imperial edict or by a legislative vote. The citizens that have to bear it against their will contribute money for purposes that some one else only approves of. The only difference between Russia and the United States is that this kind of despotism has been carried to much greater lengths in one country than in the other. If, therefore, we can find out what the effect has been in Russia, we will be able to predict what the effect will be in the United States.
As every person familiar with Russia knows, the black-earth region is one of the richest and most productive in the world. It ought to be inhabited by one of the wealthiest and happiest of peoples. Yet such is not the case. According to Count Tolstoi, who contributed recently a letter to the London Times on the subject, the inhabitants are among the poorest and most miserable in the world. They are in a state of chronic starvation. They are obliged to content themselves with nearly a third less food than is sufficient to maintain normal health. The physical effect of this insufficiency of food is a decrease in vitality, a diminished stature, and a check to the growth of population. It is proved, first, by the failure of the peasants of the region to meet the requirements for military service, and, second, by the statistics of population, which show that the increase of births over deaths has fallen from the maximum reached twenty years ago to zero.
But the mental effects of the destitution wrought by the robberies of the Government are more distressing even than the physical. It gives birth to a stolidity and despair that tend to paralyze all effort toward betterment. The people subjected to it come to feel that there is no use of making any struggle beyond the maintenance of mere existence. Whatever they get in excess of this requirement will be taken from them. "A peasant," says Tolstoi, illustrating this fact, "feels that his position as an agriculturalist is bad, but he believes that it can not be improved; and, consequently, adapting himself to this hopeless position, he no longer fights against it, but lives and acts only in so far as he is stirred by the instinct of self-preservation. Moreover, the very wretchedness of his condition increases still more his depression of spirit. The lower the economic condition of a population sinks, like a weight on a lever, the more difficult it becomes to raise it again; the peasants feel this, and, as it were, throw away the helve after the hatchet. 'Why should we trouble ourselves?' they say. 'We sha'n't get fat. If we can only keep alive.'"
The fruits of this mental state are as palpable as those of the lack of food. They are to be found in every direction. In manners, habits, and customs the peasants are hopelessly conservative. They belong, not to the nineteenth century, but to the ninth. Instead of adopting new and improved methods of agriculture, they cling to those of the subjects of Rurik. They use the old plow, distribute tillage in three crops, and divide their fields into long, narrow strips. So slowly do they toil with primitive implements and debilitated animals, and so indifferent are they to what they are doing, that it takes them a day to do the work that a well-fed and alert peasant would do in half the time. A more deplorable sign of demoralization is the prevalence of family discord and loss of interest in a higher life. The aggressions of the state have stimulated selfishness, bad temper, and incipient rebellion. The children disobey their parents, the younger brothers reject the primacy of the older, and money earned elsewhere is kept from the family treasury. With the decadence of family life there is a decadence of religious life. Although the peasants are nominally orthodox, they care nothing for religion. Even the clergy confirm the fact that they are becoming more and more indifferent to the church. What they seek is not to penetrate the mysteries of life, but to obliterate consciousness of them. "Under these circumstances," says Tolstoi, alluding to the economic and mental decadence, "the craving for forgetfulness is natural, and accordingly spirits and tobacco are being consumed in ever greater and greater quantities." He adds that "even quite young boys drink and smoke."
Since the loss of freedom due to the seizure of property is the same in the last analysis as that due to an abridgment of the right to think and act, the evils of ecclesiastical and bureaucratic despotism do not differ from those of excessive taxation. Nevertheless, they receive separate attention at the hands of Tolstoi. As a proof of the blight of a church that the peasants have no part in directing, he points to the profound and beneficent change wrought the moment they fall in with a sect of dissenters. "Their spirits at once rise," he says, "and at the same time the foundation of their material prosperity is laid." A blight of the same kind can be traced to the attempt of the state to play the paternal rôle. "Nominally," says Tolstoi again, "there exist for the peasants special laws with regard to the possession and division of land, to inheritance, and to all the duties connected with it, but in reality there is a kind of hodge-podge of regulations, explanation, customary laws, decrees of courts of cassation, and so on, which naturally makes the peasants feel their absolute dependence on the will of innumerable officials." Knowing that they are powerless to resist the Government, which is constantly flogging them for disobedience or stupidity, they comply as best they can with the thousand rules and regulations made for them. Seldom do they think of acting upon their own responsibility. Thus they lose the power of private initiative. What the impoverishment of taxation has not done to ruin them is left to ecclesiastical and bureaucratic despotism to complete.
It is curious to note that Tolstoi's remedy for these evils is the one that Herbert Spencer himself might have suggested. With one stroke he dismisses the prescriptions that the social reformer in the United States as well as in Russia attaches so much importance to. It is not, in his opinion, "the ministry of agriculture, with all its contrivances," that will reclaim the peasants, nor is it "exhibitions nor schools for rural economy," nor that "unfailing" remedy "for all evils," i. e., parish schools. The thing they need is freedom. "It is necessary," says Tolstoi, "to give them religious liberty, to subject them to common instead of special laws—the will of rural officials; it is necessary to give them liberty of education, liberty of reading, liberty of moving about, and, above all, to remove the power to torture brutally by flogging grown-up people simply because they belong to the peasant class." But to give them such freedom means to deliver them not only from excessive taxation but from vexatious rules and regulations. It is to apply to them the same remedy that must be applied in the United States to save the American people, now so heavily taxed and so oppressed by countless laws, from the same social decadence that afflicts Russia.