1.

A vast question presents itself at this moment to the European continent. It is the agrarian question, the question of knowing what new form of possession and cultivation of the soil the near future reserves for us. To whom will the land belong? Who will cultivate it and how will it be cultivated? Nobody fails to understand the gravity of the problem. Even less does he fail to understand, if he has been following attentively what has been going on in Ireland, in England, in Spain, in Italy, in some parts of Germany and in Russia, and this question indeed stands forward at this moment in all its magnitude. In the wretched villages, in the midst of that class of landworkers so despised up to the present, an immense revolution is under way.

The strongest objection that up to now has been made to socialism consists of the argument that if the social question interests the city workers, it does not have the same attraction for country dwellers; that if the town workers willingly accept the ideas of the abolition of individual property and become stirred up about the expropriation of the manufacturers and factory owners, it is not the same with the peasants; the latter, we are told, distrust the socialists and if -- one day -- the city workers try to realize their plans, the peasants will soon make them see reason.

We must grant that, thirty or forty years ago, this objection had at least an appearance of validity in certain countries. A degree of well- being in some regions, and a good deal of resigned apathy in others, resulted in the peasants making little or no manifestation of discontent. But today this is no longer the case. The concentration of property in the hands of the wealthiest individuals, and the steady growth of a proletariat of the fields, the heavy taxation with which the States bear down on agriculture; the introduction into farming of widescale machine production on an industrial scale; the competition from America and Australia; and finally the rapid exchange of ideas that today penetrate even the most isolated hamlets; all these circumstances have meant that the conditions of farming have changed for all to see over the past thirty years. At this moment Europe finds itself in the presence of a vast agrarian movement that will soon embrace it entirely and give the growing revolution a greater and quite different significance than if it had been limited solely to the towns.

Who does not read the news from Ireland, always the same? Half the country is in revolt against the landlords. The peasants no longer pay their rents to the owners of the land; even those who wish to do so dare not, for fear of being targeted by the Land League, a powerful secret organization that extends its ramifications through the villages and punishes those who fail to obey its dictate: "Refusal of Rents." The landowners are powerless to continue demanding rent. If they wanted to recover the rents owed to them at this moment, they would have to mobilize a hundred thousand policemen, and this would provoke a revolt. If some landowner decides to evict a non-paying tenant, he has to hurl into the fray at least a hundred policemen, for it will become a matter or resistance, sometimes passive and sometimes armed, by several thousand neighbouring peasants. And if he succeeds, he will not find a farmer willing to take the risk of occupying the property. Even if he should find one, the latter will soon be forced to decamp, for his cattle will have been exterminated, his crops burnt, and he himself condemned to death by the League The Land League was founded by Michael Davitt in October 1879 with aims of fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale of the right to occupancy. When Charles Stewart Parnell was arrested for inflammatory nationalist speeches, the League called on tenants to refuse payment of rents. Thereupon the British government suppressed it as a legal organization in October 1881, but it continued as a powerful secret society. Trans. ³⁴ or some other secret society. The situation becomes untenable for the landowners themselves; in certain districts the value of land has fallen by two-thirds; in others the landowners are proprietors only in name; they can only live on their own land under the protection of a squad of police camped at their doors in iron pillboxes. The soil lies fallow; during 1879 alone the area of cultivated lands diminished by 33,000 hectares; the reduction in income for the proprietors, according to the Financial Reformer, was not less than 250 million francs.

The situation is so grave that Mr. Gladstone, after coming to power, made a formal agreement with the Irish M.R's to present a bill, according to which the great landowners would be expropriated in the public interest, and the land, after being declared national property, would be sold to the people in parcels that might be paid for in twenty-five years in annual instalments. But it is evident that such a bill will never be voted by the British Parliament, since it would at the same time deal a mortal blow to landed property in England itself. Thus there is no reason for us to assume that the conflict can peacefully be brought to an end. It is certainly possible that a general uprising of the peasants might be launched once again as in 1846; even if the situation merely remains the same, or, rather, steadily grows worse, we can foresee that the day is not far distant when the people of Ireland will finally reach the end of their patience after so many sufferings and so many broken promises. Let a propitious occasion appear, such as a momentary disorganization of power in England, and the Irish peasant, invited by the secret societies, upheld by the village merchants who would very much like to create for their profit a new 1793, will at last emerge from his hovel to do what so many agitators advise him to do today; he will take his torch to the mansions, gather for himself the lords' wheat, and, expelling their agents and demolishing their boundaries, seize on the lands he has coveted so many years.

If we transport ourselves to the other extremity of the continent, to Spain, we find an analogous situation. In some areas, like Andalusia and the province of Valencia, where landed property is concentrated in a few hands, legions of hungry peasants have formed leagues and carry on an unceasing guerilla war against the owners. At night the mansions of the landlords are destroyed, the plantations are incinerated over hundreds of acres at a time, the crops burn, and whoever denounces the perpetrators of such acts to the authorities, as well as the alcalde who dares to pursue them, falls under the knives of the League. Presumably Kropotkin is talking here of the terrorist group known as Los Desheredados (The Disinherited). The majority of the anarchists in Spain expressed disapproval of their methods. Trans. ³⁵

In the province of Andalusia there is a permanent strike among small farmers who refuse to pay their rents; let anyone look out who dares break this mutual agreement! A strong secret organization whose proclamations are fixed at night to the trees, constantly reminds those who have taken their oaths that if they betray the general cause they will be heavily punished by the destruction of their crops and herds and often also by death.

In regions where property is more broken up, it is the Spanish State itself that sets about provoking discontent. It crushes the small proprietor with taxes -- national, provincial, municipal, ordinary and extraordinary -- to such an extent that one can count in tens of thousands the small farms confiscated by the State and put up for sale without finding buyers. The population of the countryside is completely ruined in more than one province, and under the pressure of famine bands of peasants assemble and rebel against the taxes.

The situation is the same in Italy. In many provinces the farmers are completely ruined. Reduced to poverty by the State, the small peasant proprietor no longer pays his taxes and the State pitilessly seizes his plot of land. During a single year, some 6,644 small properties, with an average value of 99 francs, have been seized. Is it astonishing that in these provinces rebellion has become a permanent condition? Sometimes it is a fanatic preaching religious communism who is followed by thousands of peasants, and these sectarians only disperse under the soldier's bullets; sometimes it is a village that goes en masse to seize the uncultivated lands of some proprietor and cultivate them on its own account; sometimes it is the bands of hungry villagers who present themselves before the town halls and demand bread and work under the threat of revolt.

Let nobody make much of the fact that these incidents are isolated! Were the revolts of the French peasants up to May 1789 any more numerous? Few in the beginning, and hardly conscious of their own nature, they sketched out the basis of the later revolution in the great cities.

Finally, at the eastern extremity of Europe, in Russia, the agrarian question appears under an aspect that in many ways reminds us of the situation in France before 1789. Personal serfdom is abolished there, and each agrarian commune now possesses some lands; but for the most part they are so poor or so scanty in area, the rates the commune pays the landlord in redemption or rent are so disproportionate to the value of the land, and the taxes which the State imposes are so heavy that now three-quarters at least of the peasants are reduced to the most frightful poverty. There is not enough bread to go round, and a single bad crop is enough for famine to rage over vast regions and to decimate their populations.

But the peasant does not suffer this situation without a murmur. New ideas and aspirations for a better future are germinating in the rural areas that have been brought into contact with the great centres by the network of railways. From one day to another the peasant waits for the day when some event will abolish both rent and redemption, and leave him in possession of all the lands that he considers his by right. If an Arthur Young were to travel today in Russia, as he travelled in France on the eve of 1789, he would hear the same vows and the same words of hope he noted in his Travels. Arthur Young (1741-1820) was an agricultural writer who travelled extensively in the rural areas of England, Wales, Ireland and France and described them in his published journals. His Travels during the Years 1787,1788,1789 is an extremely valuable document on peasant France immediately before the Revolution. Trans. ³⁶ In certain provinces an underground agitation has developed into a kind of guerilla warfare against the landlords. If political events were to expose the disorganization of the State and to excite popular passions, the starving villagers -- helped and perhaps provoked by the rural middle class which is rapidly emerging -- would embark on a whole series of agrarian revolts. Such revolts, breaking out without plan or organization over a large territory, but emerging and interconnecting on all sides, harassing armies and the government, and carrying on for years, might inaugurate and give strength to an immense revolution, with all its consequences for Europe as a whole.

But if the agrarian question is posed on such a grandiose scale in the countries we have just considered, if one day old Europe finds itself surrounded, as if in a circle of fire, by these peasant revolts, and the expropriation of the owners goes on widely in such countries, will not the centre of the continent and the so-called civilized countries feel the effect? The answer cannot be in doubt. And when we have analyzed later on the agrarian situation in England, France, Germany, and Switzerland, when we have studied the powerful influence of a new element which is already provoking cries of alarm in England, the production of wheat on a large industrial scale in America and Australia; when finally we glance over the new ideas invading the minds of peasants in the countries which consider themselves the strongholds of civilization, we shall see that the agrarian question emerges in various forms before the whole of Europe, in England as much as in Russia and in France as much as in Italy. We shall see that the present situation is becoming untenable and cannot last for long; that the day is not far off when society will be changed down to its very foundations and give place to a new order of things: an order in which the systems of property and culture will undergo deep modifications and the cultivator of the soil will no longer be, as he is today, the pariah of society; when he will come to his place at the banquet of life and intellectual development beside the rest of us, when the village will cease to be a den of ignorance and will become a centre from which life and well-being will radiate over the land.