Mr. Harris-Gastud in his late report to the British Foreign Office on Prussia, after mentioning the north-eastern provinces of that country, and the immorality, drunkenness and thieving propensities of its peasantry, thus continues (p. 361): "The system of contract laborers, under obligation to bring one or two other laborers into the field, is in some measure responsible for the immorality, inasmuch as the one or two, so to speak, gang-laborers, are usually girls, who live in the same room as the family. Children are not carefully tended and reared. The wives are obliged to work daily throughout summer and autumn, and on many properties in winter also. They go very early to work, are free half an hour before midday to prepare the dinner and do other household work, and return to work till sunset. The children come badly off. Often there is no older child to take charge of the little ones, who are consequently left to themselves in the house. A direct result is the great mortality of children. From 1858 to 1861 there died in the province of Prussia, out of a total population of 2,190,072, an annual average of 21,290 children under one year, and of 40,845 children under ten years, being 0.97 and 1.86 per cent. of the population; whereas in the Rhine province, with a population of 2,112,959, the percentages were 0.57 and 1.12 respectively."
In 1870 in the United States, with a total population in town and country of 38,558,371, the number of deaths of children under one year was 110,445, and under ten years 229,542, being 0.29 and 0.59 respectively. In other words, where one child dies in the United States, two die in the Rhenish provinces of Prussia, and more than three in one of the north-eastern provinces.
I was in Berlin in the autumn of 1872, when there was a meeting there of the emperors of Germany, Russia and Austria. Every preparation had been made for this august convocation, among others that of banishing from the streets all unpleasant sights. Yet on that occasion, when Unter den Linden was crowded with carriages and horsemen and well-dressed people, when Russia and Austria were dashing about in open barouches, with outriders before and guardsmen behind, and the eye encountered on all sides the bravery of military uniforms and arms and waving pennants, I saw in a side-street a woman drawing a hand-cart laden with some heavy substance that was piled up to the height of four or five feet above the rails of the cart. Beside this poor slave, who withal carried an infant upon her back which could not have been more than a few weeks old, struggled a dog, with whom she was harnessed to the cart. Poor wretch! I thought, and the husband recently dead, too! I could not think of her as a widow, for, in truth, she did not look human enough. She was not over thirty years of age, but a coarser-looking hag I never saw the picture of. Presently a man in crossing the street indulged in some pleasantry at her expense, when she threatened to call her husband to chastise him. Husband? Yes, sure enough, there he was, walking leisurely behind the cart, with his hands in his pockets, smoking his pipe and gazing at the sights along the route.
If we would know the origin of this brutality to women wherever it is practiced, we must look for it in the history of slavery, for there we shall always find it. It was not the peasant-man who first brutalized his wife and daughter, but the lord. If the ancient rights of the peasantry had not been molested, and an oppressive system of feudal exactions forced upon men who once were free and owners of the soil they tilled, the slavery of women could hardly have occurred. It is now nearly seventy years since the first decree that eventually resulted in the abolition of serfdom in Prussia was promulgated, and time is rapidly effacing many of the social evils which that institution entailed. But this is not the case with Russia, where emancipation was only declared ten years ago, and is not completed even yet. The causes that superinduce the degradation and debasement of women can therefore still be seen at work in that country, and are thus depicted by an eye-witness. He is speaking of the condition of the peasantry of Russia subsequent to the decree of emancipation, and so far as my own observation in that country goes, I can corroborate all that he says: "Their food begins to get scantier and scantier, and toward spring they get more and more famished. The officer of government (who since the act of emancipation replaces the officer of the lord of the manor) comes and energetically demands the payment of arrears. Driven to desperation, the peasant acknowledges to the mayor of the village the cause of his want of punctuality—viz., the demands made upon him by his family, and particularly by his wife. 'Give her a good thrashing,' is the advice of the mayor. The mujik goes home, ties his wife by her hair to the tail of a cart, and flogs her unmercifully with a whip. At a convenient opportunity he will give his mother a knock or two on the head with a log of wood. If any member of the family should die from privation, his death is attributed to fate." Passing to the description of a village community of higher civilization, the author continues: "The chief features of such a village are fewer thrashings, a more perceptible tendency to personal adornment on the part of the women, a larger number of bachelors, and the existence even of old maids—i. e., in the sense only of unmarried women. In such villages fêtes are held each Sunday, and all the village games, accompanied by much kissing, terminate in the coarsest sensuality. Immorality prevails, followed by infanticide." (Condition of the Laboring Classes of Russia, by N. Flerofski, 1869.)
For the sake of obtaining an additional laborer in the family it was customary for the Russian serf to marry his son of tender years to a woman of riper age, particularly in households where the father had become a widower, and where, consequently, the family had lost a female laborer. The son was then sent out to work in the fields, and this circumstance, together with the subjection and degradation of women in a social organization in which even the man was a mere chattel, favored the existence of a crime that greatly complicated the relations of blood in a peasant family, and often led to the brutal treatment of helpless wives by infuriated husbands. Nor did the evil stop even with a partial amelioration of the cause, but tended for a time to reproduce itself; for the son, grown to a ripe age and bound to a wife now old and wrinkled, would revenge himself by treating his own son in the manner in which he had been treated himself.
Says Flerofski: "Women who assist in floating barges down the rivers from the province of Vologda (in North-eastern Russia, three hundred to five hundred miles above Nijni-Novgorod) to Nijni-Novgorod receive two and a half roubles (about $2) for the journey. Both men and women work until they become exhausted, and return back to their villages on foot. Their master, the contractor, who is bound to support them until they return, hastens as much as possible their homeward tramp, in order to save expense, compelling them to walk eighty versts (fifty-five miles) a day along village roads and byways. They will sometimes have to wade for twenty miles through water and mud up to their knees.... The peasant is ready to carry any burden, to suffer anything, to impose any privations on his family, provided his principal object be attained, which is to obtain means of paying his quit-rent and taxes. For that purpose he will not unfrequently send his young daughter alone to float timber down the rivers. Bending under the weight of labor unfitted for her age or sex, the unhappy creature becomes the object of every form of bad usage. Without sufficient experience or force of will, compelled to spend days and nights among dissolute men, she falls an unwilling victim.... The laborer is so poor, miserable and debased that he cannot save his daughter from exposure to positions in which she must voluntarily or involuntarily be drawn into a course of immorality. His principal care is to place her where she can earn some money."
In some of the industrial districts of Russia villages may still be found populated at certain seasons of the year exclusively by women and children. The women plough the land, sow, reap, work on the roads and pay the taxes. They fill the offices of starosta (policeman) and tax-gatherer; in short, conduct the entire communal administration. On the shores of the White Sea women often drive the post-carts, whence that branch of the service has taken the name of sarafannaya or "petticoat post." Where are the men who should be seen in these villages of Amazons—the fathers, husbands, brothers, sons of these hard-worked women? Drafted into the army or gone to seek work in the adjacent towns.
The terrible burdens which the government and social system of Russia heap upon the peasant-man can best be realized from a description of its effects upon the unhappy creature whom this man, himself a slave in all but name, may treat—nay, almost must treat—as a slave. To pay the quit-rent and taxes the peasant hires himself to the neighboring lord to mow his corn at sixty-five cents an acre—a price which falls to forty cents an acre before the harvest is completed. At the most, he can earn an average of twenty-five cents a day, for his food has been poor, his body is weak, his hands tremble, his scythe is antiquated and blunders at its work. Yet swath after swath marks the sweep of his arms, and his poor dull mind is filled with the thought of the day of liberation that is drawing nigh. Still, he has not earned by a good deal the sum that will save him from starvation. Starvation! Why? Because should he fail to pay, the lord has the power, and will not fail, to seize every piece of property which the peasant has in the world—his cow, his bed, his clothing, even the uncut corn upon his little field, the very bread from off his table. Where is that lord? Has he no heart, no mercy? Alas! he is far away, in Vienna, in Rome, in Paris. He is at the Carnival, the opera, the club-house. He has presented a diamond necklace to Schneider, he has bought a new race-horse, he has lost fifty thousand francs at rouge et noir. Meanwhile, his agent and the law do his cruel bidding far away at home upon the bleak plains of Russia, and the peasant works under them as Damocles sat under the sword.
In such peril and fear shall the woman stand idle? Idle she never is, even from inclination, her household duties, the care of the young, the ministration to the sick and feeble, the preparation of the daily meal, being sufficient to keep her fully employed. But shall she stop at these when failure on the man's part may to-morrow sweep away not only the few articles of clothing and the one or two of furniture they possess, but also the food which is to last them during the coming year? The thought is death itself. She must go to the fields. No matter how young her child, nor how near to death her aged mother or father; no matter how rigorous the climate or deficient her clothing: she must go to the fields. They are miles away, perhaps—for in Russia, serfdom, the communal system and other circumstances have forced the peasantry to live in villages—but go she must, with the child on her back or left ailing and uncared-for in the hut, with the sick or dying behind her and misery all around. Arrived at the scene of her unnatural labors, she applies herself to them with an energy which despair alone could engender, and which ends in completely unsexing her. She becomes weatherbeaten, coarse and repulsive. Her hands are like knots of wood; she is covered with dirt; her bones have grown large; her step is ungainly; she speaks in husky tones; she swears, drinks and fights. Meanwhile the corn ripens. After gigantic efforts she succeeds in harvesting it. At best it would have repaid the seed but three times, but gathered and threshed with insufficient skill or barbarous tools, it scarcely more than doubles the perilous investment. Then this poor creature casts herself upon the earth and weeps, for are not both parent and child dead from exposure, from insufficient food, from the lack of that attention which she alone could have conferred? The links that bound her poor, rugged, but still woman's heart to both the sad past and the hopeful future are severed, and she is almost alone in the world. But her husband returns, and his joyful looks reanimate her. He has succeeded. The tax is paid, and they are free for another year. But at what a cost!
This sketch is far from being exaggerated. Too often does it happen that despite these sacrifices the tax is not paid. Says Flerofski: "Along that road walks a peasant's family in sorrowful procession, shedding bitter tears. Is it a funeral? No, it is only the last calf being led for sale with the aid of the local authorities. It is necessary to levy rents with strictness, for are not the proprietors already ruined?" (He means, ironically, by the emancipation of the serfs.) "And, in fact, were it not for the deep impression thus made on the peasant, did he not know that his last food-giving beast would be taken from him, his last pot of milk carried out of his hut, although wanted for his newborn child, which would perish without it, the landed proprietors could not collect the tenth part of their rents."