Introduction
Russia is living through an important time, one that must have enormous consequences.
The nearness and inevitability of the approaching upheaval is felt, as always happens, most vividly by those classes of society which are by their position exempted from the necessity of a physical labour that absorbs all their time and strength, and which therefore have the possibility of occupying themselves with political questions. These people — noblemen, merchants, officials, doctors, engineers, professors, teachers, artists, students, lawyers, for the most part townsmen, the so-called intelligentsia — now direct the movement that is going on in Russia, and turn all their strength to the alteration of the existing political order and to its replacement by another, held by this or that party to be the most expedient and the one that will secure the freedom and welfare of the Russian people. These people, constantly suffering from every kind of restriction and violence on the part of the government — administrative exile, imprisonment, the prohibition of meetings, the prohibition of books, of newspapers, of strikes, of unions, the limitation of the rights of various nationalities — and at the same time living a life completely foreign to the majority of the Russian agricultural people, naturally see in these restrictions the chief evil, and in liberation from them the chief good of the Russian people.
So think the liberals. So think also the social democrats, who hope, through popular representation and with the help of the state power, to realize, in accordance with their theory, a new social order. So think the revolutionaries too, supposing that, having replaced the existing government by a new one, they will establish laws securing the greatest freedom and welfare of the whole people.
And yet one need only free oneself for a time from the thought rooted in our intelligentsia — that the business before Russia is the introduction at home of those very forms of political life which have been introduced in Europe and America, forms supposed to secure the freedom and welfare of all citizens — and simply consider what is morally bad in our life, in order to see quite clearly that the chief evil from which the whole Russian people unceasingly and cruelly suffers, the evil which it vividly recognizes and of which it unceasingly declares, cannot be removed by any political reforms whatever, just as it has not to this day been removed by any political reforms in Europe and America. This evil, the fundamental evil from which the Russian people suffers exactly as do the peoples of Europe and America, is the depriving of the majority of the people of the unquestionable, natural right of every man to make use of a part of that land on which he was born. One need only understand all the criminality, the sinfulness of this thing, in order to understand that until this constant villainy committed by the owners of land is stopped, no political reforms will give freedom and welfare to the people; and that, on the contrary, only the liberation of the majority of men from that land-slavery in which they find themselves can make political reforms not a plaything and an instrument of personal aims in the hands of politicians, but a real expression of the will of the people.
It is just this thought of mine that I have wished to communicate in this article to those men who, at this moment so important for Russia, wish sincerely to serve not their own personal aims but the true good of the Russian people.
I
I am walking on Palm Saturday along the high road to Tula. The people are going to market in trains of carts, with calves, hens, horses, cows (some of the cows were being carried in the carts, so lean were they). A wrinkled old woman is leading a lean, mangy cow. I know the old woman, and ask why she is leading the cow.
“Why, she is without milk,” says the old woman, “I ought to sell her and buy one with milk. I dare say a ten-ruble note will have to be added, and I have only a five. Where is one to get it? Through the winter we bought eighteen rubles' worth of flour, and there is only one bread-winner. I live alone with my daughter-in-law, four grandchildren, and my son is a house-porter in the town.”
“And why does your son not live at home?”
“There is nothing to live on. What is our land? Just enough for kvass.”
A peasant comes along, his trousers stained with mine clay, thin and pale.
“On what business are you going to town?” I ask.
“To buy a bit of a horse; it is plowing time, and there is no horse. And they say horses are dear.”
“And how much do you mean to buy for?”
“Why, according to my money.”
“How much is that?”
“Well, I have scraped together fifteen rubles.”
“What will you buy nowadays for fifteen rubles? Something for the hide,” puts in another peasant.
“Whose mine do you work in?” he asks, looking at the trousers, baggy at the knees and colored with red clay.
“At Komarov's, at Ivan Maseich's.”
“Why have you earned so little, then?”
“Why, I was working on half shares; half to him.”
“And how much did you earn?” I ask.
“I made about two rubles a week, and sometimes less. What is one to do? The bread did not last till Christmas. There is no buying enough.”
A little farther on a young peasant is leading a well-made, well-fed little horse to sell.
“A fine little horse,” I say.
“It could not be better,” he answered, thinking I was a buyer. “Good both for plowing and for the road.”
“Then why are you selling it?”
“There is no use for it. Why, there are two plots of land. I work the (land) with one (horse), and for the winter I let the other run, and was not glad of it myself. It ate the stock out to the last. And besides, money is needed to pay the rent.”
“And whom do you rent from?”
“From Marya Ivanovna; thank her, she let us have it. Otherwise it would be a noose for us.”
“What do you pay?”
“She skins us at fourteen rubles. But where is one to go? We take it.”
A woman drives by with a little boy in a peaked cap. She knows me, gets down, and offers to let me take the boy into service. The boy is a mere mite, with clever, quick eyes.
“He only looks small, but he can do everything,” she says.
“Why are you giving away such a little one?”
“Well, master, at least it is one mouth off the bread. There are four of them and myself, and only one allotment of land. As God is my witness, we sit without eating. They ask for bread, and there is nothing to give.”
Whoever one speaks with, all complain of want, and all alike, from one side or another, come to one single cause. There is not enough bread, and there is not enough bread because there is no land.
But these are chance meetings on the road; go through the whole of Russia, through the peasant world, and look closely into all the horrors of want and into all the sufferings that come from an obvious cause: the land has been taken away from the agricultural people. Half the Russian peasantry lives so that for it the question is not how to improve its position, but only how not to die of hunger with its family — and only because they have no land.
Go through the whole of Russia and ask all the working people why they live badly, what they need, and all with one voice will say the same thing, that which they all unceasingly desire and await and hope for, of which they unceasingly think.
And they cannot but think, cannot but feel this, because, not to speak of the chief thing, of the lack of land to feed themselves, the majority of them cannot but feel themselves in slavery to those landlords, merchants and landowners who have surrounded their small, insufficient allotments with their own lands; and they cannot but think, cannot but feel this, because at every moment, for a sack of grass, for an armful of firewood without which they cannot live, for a horse that has strayed from their land onto the master's, they unceasingly endure fines, beatings and humiliations.
Once on the road I fell into talk with a blind peasant beggar. Recognizing me by my talk as a literate man who read the newspapers, but not taking me for a gentleman, he stopped and asked with a significant air: “Well, is there any rumour?”
I asked: “About what?”
“Why, about the land, the master's land.”
I said I had heard nothing. The blind man shook his head and asked nothing more.
“Well, what do they say about the land?” I asked lately of a former pupil of mine, a rich, steady and intelligent, literate peasant.
“The people are talking, right enough.”
“Well, and what do you think?”
“Why, it is bound to pass over,” he said.
Of all the events taking place, this one alone is important and interesting for the whole people. And it believes, cannot but believe, that “it will pass over.”
It cannot but believe in this, because it is clear to it that a multiplying people living by agriculture cannot continue to exist when only a small part of the land has been left to it, with which it must feed both itself and all the parasites that have fastened upon it and are breeding upon it.
II
“What is man?” says Henry George in one of his articles.
“First of all he is an earthly animal, which cannot live without land. Everything that is produced by man is taken from the land; all productive labour turns out, in the final analysis, to consist in the working up of the land, of materials taken from the land, into forms adapted to the satisfaction of human needs or desires. And man's very body is taken from the land. We are children of the land. From it we were taken, and to it we must return again. Take from a man everything that belongs to the land, and what will remain to you but a bodiless spirit? Therefore he who owns the land on which and from which another man must live is the master of that man, and that man is his slave. The man who owns the land on which I must live can dispose of my life and death as freely as if my body belonged to him. We talk of the abolition of slavery, but we have not abolished slavery, we have abolished only its cruder form: personal slavery. Now it remains for us to abolish its subtler and more treacherous, its more accursed form — that industrial slavery which makes a man in fact a slave, while at the same time extolling his freedom.”
“One of the most incongruous and absurd phenomena, which does not astonish us only because we are used to it,” says the same Henry George in another place, “consists in this, that the working class in all the countries of the civilized world is the poor class. If some thinking being who had never yet been on the earth were by some miracle to appear upon it, and you were to explain to it our life, to explain how houses, food, clothing and in general all the objects we need for life are created by labour, that being would of course suppose that the very people who produce all this are precisely the people who live in the best houses and have most of all that is created by labour. But in fact in London, Paris, New York, everywhere, even in middling towns, it is precisely the working people who live in the poorest houses.”
The same thing takes place in a still greater degree in the villages, I would add. Idle people live in luxurious houses, in spacious, beautiful dwellings. Those who labour live in dark, dirty hovels.
“This astonishing phenomenon is worth pondering over. We involuntarily despise poverty. And in reality it ought to be despised. Nature rewards labour and labour only. No object of wealth can be produced without the participation of labour, and in the natural order of things the man who works conscientiously and skilfully ought to be rich, and the man who does not work — poor. We have overturned this order of nature, and with us the working people are poor and the idle rich. Why is this? Because we compel the people who work to pay other people for permission to work. You buy a coat, a horse, a house; you pay for the product of labour, for the labour expended by the seller or bought by him from other people. But for what do you pay a man when you pay him for land? You pay him for that which no man produced, which existed before man appeared, for a value that was created not by any man personally, but by the society of which you form a part.”
And from this it comes that he is rich who has seized the land and owns it, and he is poor who works on it or upon its products.
“We talk of overproduction. But what overproduction can there be at a time when the people are in want of the barest necessities? The people need those very objects which turn out to have been produced in excess. Why then do they not acquire them? Not because they do not desire them, but because they have not the means to buy them. And why have they no means? Because they earn too little. And they earn too little because they give up a part of their work to those who own the land. And therefore it is no wonder that a great multitude of various goods remains unsold, when an enormous mass of people has to work on an average for one dollar forty cents a day in America” — and for fifty kopecks in Russia.
“And why do these people have to work for such low pay? Because if they demanded higher pay, there would be others to replace them. There is always a multitude of unemployed people standing ready, and it is precisely this mass of unemployed that lowers wages to the bare possibility of existence. But why are there people who cannot find work for themselves? Do not these words sound strange — that people cannot find work for themselves? Adam experienced no difficulty in finding work, nor did Robinson Crusoe; the finding of work was the very last thing they troubled about.
“If people cannot find an employer for themselves, then why do they not become their own employers? Simply because they are cut off from that without which no labour whatever is conceivable; people are compelled to compete with one another for the wages given out by a master, because they have been forcibly deprived of those natural conveniences by the use of which they might be their own masters, because there is no place for them in God's world where they might work without paying other human beings of some sort for permitting them to work.”
“People pray to God that He may relieve poverty. But poverty does not come from God's laws; to say that would be to utter the vilest blasphemy against God. Poverty comes from man's injustice to his neighbour. Let us suppose that men's prayer were heard by the Almighty; but how could He fulfil their request while keeping the laws established by Himself such as they are? For God gives us nothing of that which constitutes wealth. He gives us only the raw material which man works up, producing wealth. And does He give us little of this raw material now? And if He were to give still more of it, how could He relieve poverty? Let the prayer be heard, and let Him increase the strength of the sun or the fertility of the soil, make plants more fruitful and cause animals to multiply faster. To whom would all this be of use in a country in which the land has been seized by private owners? To the owners of the land alone. And even if God, in answer to men's requests, were to send down straight from heaven the very objects men need, even then it would be of use to the owners of the land alone.
“In the Old Testament it is told how the Israelites, wandering in the desert, suffered hunger, and how God sent them manna from heaven. There was enough of it for all; all took it and were satisfied. But let us suppose that the desert had been recognized as private property. What use would the manna have been to the people, if some Israelites owned square miles of land and others had not a foot of it? However much manna God might send, that manna would become the property of the landowners; they would hire a few men to gather it into heaps for them and would sell it to their starving brothers. And the buying and selling of manna would go on until the majority of the Israelites had eaten up all they had. And then they would begin to starve, while the manna lay in enormous heaps and the landowners complained of its overproduction. It would be exactly the same phenomenon that we see at the present time.”
“I say all this not in order that, having done with this fundamental injustice, we might quietly fold our hands; but I say that the question of the right of property in land lies at the root of all other social questions. I say that we may do anything we like, may introduce any reforms we please, but we shall not be rid of universal poverty so long as that from which all men must live — the land — remains the private property of certain persons; that until then all efforts to improve the position of men will be fruitless. Reform the machinery of government, cut taxes down to a minimum, build railways, set up cooperative stores, divide the profits as you like between employers and workmen — and what will be the result? The result will be that land will rise in its value; that alone will be the result and nothing more. Experience proves this to us. Do not all improvements merely increase the value of land, of that which some men must pay to others for the right to exist in the world?”
The same thing, I would add, we see unceasingly in Russia. All landowners complain of the unprofitableness, the losses of their estates, and the price of land unceasingly rises. It cannot but rise, because the population increases, and land for it is a question of life and death.
And therefore the people gives all it can, not only its labour but its very lives, for the land which is withheld from it.
III
There was cannibalism, there were human sacrifices, there was religious prostitution, there was the killing of weakly children and of girls, there was the blood feud, there was the slaughter of whole populations, judicial tortures, quarterings, burnings at the stake, the knout; within our own memory there were the now vanished running of the gauntlet, and slavery. But if we have outlived these terrible customs and institutions, that does not show that there are not among us institutions and customs of the same kind, become just as repulsive to an enlightened reason and conscience as those which in their time were destroyed and have become for us a terrible memory. The path of humanity's perfecting is endless, and at every moment of historical life there are superstitions, deceptions, harmful, evil institutions which men have already outlived and which have become the past; there are those which appear to us in the far mist of the future; and there are those which we are living through in the present and which make up the task of our life. Such in our time are capital punishment and punishments in general, such is prostitution, such is meat-eating, such is the business of militarism, war — and such is the nearest and most urgent business of all, private property in land.
But as from all injustices that have become habitual men freed themselves not at once, not immediately after the most sensitive people had recognized their perniciousness, but by bursts, stoppages, relapses, and again new bursts of liberation, like the pangs of childbirth — as it was lately with the abolition of slavery, so it is happening now with private property in land.
The evil and injustice of private property in land were pointed out a thousand years ago by the prophets and sages of antiquity. Then the foremost thinkers of Europe pointed to this evil ever more often; the men of the French Revolution expressed it with especial clearness. And of late, in consequence of the increase of population and of the seizure by rich men of a great quantity of free lands, in consequence of general education and the softening of manners, this injustice has become evident to such a degree that not only the foremost men but the most ordinary men can no longer help seeing and feeling it. But men, and especially those who enjoy the advantages of landed property, the owners themselves and those whose interests are bound up with this institution, have so accustomed themselves to this state of things, have so long profited by it, have such need of it, that often they do not themselves see its injustices, and they employ every possible means to hide from themselves and from other men the truth that stands out ever more and more clearly: to smother it, to quench it, to pervert it — and if that does not work, to pass it over in silence.
Striking in this respect is the fate of the work of an extraordinary man who appeared at the end of the last century — Henry George, who devoted all his enormous spiritual powers to the elucidation of the untruth and cruelty of landed property and to the indication of means for correcting this untruth under the state order now existing among all nations. He did this in his books, articles and speeches with such extraordinary force and clearness that a man without preconceived ideas, having read his books, cannot but agree with his arguments, cannot but see that no reforms can improve the position of the people so long as this fundamental injustice is not destroyed, and that the means he proposes for its destruction are rational, just and applicable.
And what then? In spite of the fact that George's English writings, when they first appeared, very quickly spread through the Anglo-Saxon world and could not but be valued according to their high merits, so that it seemed the truth must triumph and find a form of expression — it very soon turned out that in England, and even in Ireland, where all the crying injustice of private property in land showed itself with especial sharpness, the majority of the most influential educated men, in spite of all the convincingness of George's arguments and the applicability of the means he proposed, ranged themselves against his teaching. Radical leaders like Parnell, who at first sympathized with George's project, very soon fell away from it, considering political reforms more important. In England almost all the aristocrats were against him, and among others the famous Toynbee, Gladstone, and Herbert Spencer, who at first had set forth in his Statics, in the most definite way, the whole injustice of landed property, and who afterwards renounced this opinion of his and bought up his old editions in order to exclude from them everything that had been said about the injustice of landed property.
At Oxford the students got up a hostile demonstration during George's lecture. The Catholic party considered Henry George's teaching downright sinful and immoral, dangerous and contrary to the teaching of Christ. In just the same way the orthodox science of political economy rose up against George's teaching. Learned professors from the height of their grandeur refuted this teaching without understanding it, chiefly because it did not accept the fundamental propositions of their supposed science. The socialists too were hostile, having recognized as the most important question of the time not the land question but the complete abolition of private property.
But the chief weapon against Henry George's teaching was that means which is always employed against irrefutable and perfectly clear truths. This means, employed against George to this day, was silence. This silencing was carried on so successfully that a member of the English Parliament, Labouchere, could say publicly, without meeting contradiction, that “he was not such a visionary as Henry George, that he would not propose taking the lands from the landlords in order then to let them out on lease; he would demand only the establishment of a tax on the value of lands.” That is to say, ascribing to George what George could in no way have said, Labouchere, by way of correcting these imaginary fancies, uttered precisely what George really did say.
So that, thanks to the combined efforts of all the people interested in defending the institution of landed property, George's teaching, irresistibly convincing in its simplicity and clearness, remains almost unknown, and in recent years attracts less and less attention to itself.
Here and there in Scotland, in Portugal, in New Zealand, he is remembered, and among hundreds of learned men there appears one who knows and defends George's teaching. But in England and the United States the number of his adherents grows ever smaller and smaller; in France his teaching is almost unknown; in Germany it is preached in a very small circle and is everywhere drowned by the noisy teaching of socialism, so that among the majority of so-called educated people it is known only by name.
IV
People do not dispute George's teaching; they simply do not know it. (One cannot indeed deal otherwise with George's teaching, because whoever comes to know it cannot but agree with it.)
And if they do recall it, it is either by ascribing to it what it does not say, or by again asserting what George has refuted, or — chiefly — they reject it only because it does not agree with those pedantic, arbitrary, frivolous propositions of so-called political economy which are accepted as unshakable truths.
But in spite of this, the truth that land cannot be an object of property has been made plain by the very life of modern men to such a degree, that in order to go on maintaining an order of life in which the right of private property in land is recognized, there is only one means: not to think about it, to ignore this truth and to occupy oneself with other, absorbing affairs. And this is just what the men of the modern world do.
The political leaders of Europe and America occupy themselves, for the good of their peoples, with every kind of business: with tariffs, colonies, income taxes, army and navy budgets, socialist unions, associations, syndicates, presidential elections, diplomatic relations — with everything except the one thing without which there can be no true improvement in the position of the people: the restoration of the violated right of all men to the use of land. And though the political leaders of the Christian world do feel in the depths of their souls, cannot but feel, that all their activity — both the industrial struggle with which they are occupied and the military struggle on which they lay out all their strength — can lead to nothing but the general exhaustion of the peoples' powers, they, without looking ahead, giving themselves up to the demands of the moment, as though with the one desire of forgetting themselves, go on circling in an enchanted ring from which there is no way out.
Strange as this temporary blindness in the political leaders of Europe and America may be, it is explained by the fact that in Europe and America men have already gone too far along a false path, so that a large share of their population has already been torn away from the land (in America it never lived on the land), and lives either in factories or by hired agricultural labour, and desires and demands one thing only — the improvement of its position as a hired workman. It is comprehensible therefore that to the political leaders of Europe and America, attending to the demands of the majority, it may seem that the chief means of improving the position of the people lies in tariffs, trusts, colonies; but to Russians, for Russia, where the agricultural population makes up eighty per cent of the whole people, where this whole people asks one thing only — that it should be given the possibility of remaining in that condition — it would seem that it must be clear that for the improvement of the people's position something else is needed.
The men of Europe and America are in the position of a man who has gone so far along a road which at first seemed the right one, but which the farther he went along it the more it took him away from his goal, that he is afraid to confess his mistake. But the Russians are still standing on the road before the turning, and can, according to the wise proverb, ask about the road while standing on it.
And what do all those Russians do who wish, or at least say that they wish, to arrange a good life for the people? In everything they slavishly imitate what is done in Europe and America.
For the arrangement of a good life for the people they concern themselves about freedom of the press, about religious toleration, about freedom of association, about tariffs, about conditional sentences, about the separation of church from state, about cooperative societies, about the future socialization of the instruments of labour, and chiefly about representation — that very representation which has long existed in the European and American states, but the existence of which has in no way contributed and does not contribute, not only to the solution but even to the raising, of that one land question which resolves all difficulties. And if Russian political leaders do speak of the abuse of land, which for some reason they call the agrarian question — probably supposing that this stupid word will conceal the essence of the matter — they speak of it not in the sense that private property in land is an evil which must be destroyed, but in the sense of somehow, with various patches and palliatives, smearing over, smothering, getting round this chief, old, cruel, obvious, crying injustice, which stands next in the order of destruction not in Russia only but in the whole world.
In Russia, where a mass of a hundred million people unceasingly suffers from the seizure of the land by private owners and unceasingly cries out about it, the attitude of men who supposedly look everywhere for the means of improving the people's life, only not where it is to be found, exactly recalls what happens on the stage, when all the spectators see perfectly well the man who has hidden, and the actors ought to see him but pretend not to, purposely distract one another's attention, and see everything except the one thing that is needed but that they do not wish to see.
V
Men have driven into an enclosure a herd of cows on whose milk products they feed. The cows have eaten down and trampled the fodder in the enclosure; they go hungry, they have chewed their own tails, they low and bellow, begging to be let out of the enclosure to pasture. But the men who feed on the cows' milk have laid out around the fence plantations of mint, of dye-plants, of tobacco, have grown flowers, have made a racecourse, a park, a lawn-tennis ground, and do not let the cows out, lest they should spoil their arrangements. But the cows bellow and grow thin, and the men begin to fear that the cows will cease to give milk, and they devise various means for improving the cows' condition. They devise awnings over the cows, they introduce the rubbing down of cows with wet brushes, they gild their horns, they change the hours of milking, they concern themselves with the care and treatment of sick and old cows, they devise new improved methods of milking, they expect that some extraordinarily nutritious grass which they have sown in the enclosure will grow up, they dispute about these and many other various subjects; but they do not do — cannot do without destroying everything they have arranged around the enclosure — the one thing that is simple and needful both for the cows and for themselves: break down the fence and give the cows the freedom natural to them of using in abundance the pastures that surround them.
In acting thus, men act unwisely; but there is an explanation of their action: they are sorry for all that they have arranged around the enclosure. But what is one to call those men who have nothing around the enclosure, but who, in imitation of those who do not let the cows out for the sake of all they have arranged around it, likewise keep the cows within the fence and assert that they do it for the good of their cows?
It is precisely thus that Russians act, both the governmental and the anti-governmental, arranging for the Russian people, which unceasingly suffers from lack of land, all sorts of European institutions, forgetting and denying the chief thing, the one thing it needs: the liberation of the land from private property, the establishment for all men of equal rights to the land.
It is comprehensible that European parasites, who live not directly and immediately by the labours of their English, French and German workmen, but by the labours of colonial workmen who produce the corn which they exchange for their factory products, may — not seeing the labours and sufferings of those workmen who feed and maintain them — devise for the future a socialist order for which they are supposedly preparing men, and meanwhile amuse themselves with an easy mind with electoral campaigns, party struggles, parliamentary debates, the setting up and overturning of ministries, and all sorts of other amusements which they call sciences and arts.
The real feeders of the European parasites are the workmen in India, Africa, Australia, and partly in Russia; they do not see them. But it is not so for us Russians. We have no colonies where slaves invisible to us might feed us in return for our industrial products. Our feeders, suffering and starving, are always before us, and we cannot transfer the untruth of our life to colonies remote from us, that the slaves there might feed us. Our sins are always before us.
And here we, instead of entering into the needs of our feeders and hearing their cry and trying to answer it — we instead, under the pretext of serving them, in just the same way prepare on the European model a socialist order in the future, and meanwhile occupy ourselves with affairs which amuse and divert us and are supposedly directed to the good of that people out of which the last of its strength is being drawn in order to maintain us, its parasites.
For the good of the people we try to abolish the censorship of books and administrative exile, to set up schools everywhere, both ordinary and agricultural, to increase the number of hospitals, to abolish passports and redemption payments, to establish a strict inspection of factories, to compensate the maimed, to survey and divide the lands, to assist peasant purchases of land through banks, and much else.
One need only enter into those unceasing sufferings of millions of the people: the dying out from want of old men, women and children, and from work beyond their strength and from lack of food; one need only enter into that bondage, those humiliations, those useless wastes of strength, that corruption, all the horrors of the needless calamities of the Russian country people, which all come from the lack of land — and it will become perfectly clear that all these measures for the abolition of the censorship, of administrative exile and so forth, which the supposed defenders of the people strive for, even if they were carried out, would make up only the most insignificant drop in the sea of that want from which the people suffers.
But it is not enough that men concerned for the good of the people, devising insignificant changes, unimportant both in quality and in quantity, leave a hundred million of the people in unceasing slavery from the seizure of the land; it is not enough — many of these men, the most advanced of them, desire that the sufferings of this people, ever increasing and increasing, should bring it to the necessity, leaving on its way millions of victims perished from want and depravity, of exchanging its happy, habitual, beloved, rational agricultural life for that improved factory life which they have devised for it.
The Russian people, by its agricultural position, by its love for this form of life, by the fact that it almost alone among European peoples continues to be an agricultural people and wishes to remain one, has been placed by historical destiny as though on purpose so that, by the solution of what is called the labour question, it should stand at the head of the truly progressive movement of humanity. And it is just this Russian people that is being summoned by its supposed representatives and leaders to walk at the tail of the dying out and entangled European and American peoples, and as quickly as possible to be corrupted and to renounce its calling, in order to be like the European.
Astonishing is the poverty of thought of these men, who do not think with their own minds and only slavishly repeat what their European models say; but still more astonishing is the dryness of heart, the cruelty and the hypocrisy of these men.
VI
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, that you are like whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” Matt. XXIII, 27, 28.
There was a time when in the name of God and of the true faith in Him men were destroyed, tortured, executed, when tens and hundreds of thousands of men were slaughtered. We now look from the height of our grandeur upon those men who did this.
But we are wrong. Among us there are men exactly the same. The difference is only that those men did it then in the name of God, for the sake of true service to Him, while now the men who do the same evil among us do it in the name of “the people,” for the sake of true service to it. And just as among those men there were men insanely, self-confidently convinced that they knew the truth, and there were hypocrites arranging their own position under the pretext of serving God, and there was a crowd following without reflection the more glib and bold — so now the men who do evil in the name of serving the people consist of men insanely, self-confidently convinced that they alone know the truth, of hypocrites, and of a crowd. Much evil was done in their time by the self-appointed servants of God, thanks to the teaching which they called theology; but the servants of the people, thanks to the teaching which they call science, if they have done less, it is only because they have not yet had time — and already there lie on their conscience rivers of blood and a great division and embitterment of men.
And the signs of the one activity and of the other are the same.
The first: the dissolute, bad life of the majority both of the servants of God and of the servants of the people. (Their title of exceptional servants of God and of the people, according to their notions, frees them from restraining themselves in their conduct.)
The second sign: the complete absence of interest, of attention, of love for that which they wish to serve. As God for His servants was and is only a banner, while in reality these servants of His did not love Him, did not seek communion with Him, did not know and did not wish to know Him — so exactly for many servants of the people the people is only a banner, and they not only do not love it, do not seek communion with it and do not know it, but in the depths of their souls look upon it with contempt, disgust and fear.
The third sign: both the one and the other, the ones concerned with the service of always one and the same God, the others with the service of always one and the same people, not only do not agree among themselves as to the means of this service, but recognize the activity of all who disagree with them as false, pernicious, and requiring to be stopped by force. Hence the stakes, the inquisitions, the massacres of the first, and the executions, imprisonments, revolutions, murders of the second.
And, finally, the chief, the most characteristic sign of both — the complete indifference to, the ignoring of, what is wanted and demanded, and what has been declared and is declared, by him whom they serve. God, whom they so zealously served and serve, said directly and clearly, in what they recognize as Divine Revelation, that He is to be served only by loving one's neighbour, by doing to others as you would have them do to you. But it was not this that they recognized as the means of serving God; they demanded something quite different, something they had themselves invented and gave out as the demands of God. Exactly so do the servants of the people act; they utterly refuse to recognize what the people wants and clearly declares, and they wish to serve it with that which it not only does not ask of them, but of which it has not the slightest conception, and which the servants of the people have invented for it — with anything but that one thing which it unceasingly awaits and of which it unceasingly declares.
VII
Of all the necessary changes in the forms of social life there is in the life of the whole world one that is most ripe, one without which not a single step forward towards the improvement of men's life can be taken. The necessity of this change is obvious to every man free from a preconceived theory. And this change is not the business of Russia alone, but the business of the whole world. All the calamities of the humanity of our time are bound up with this business. We in Russia are in the fortunate position that the vast majority of our people, living by labour on the land, does not recognize private property in land, and desires and demands the destruction of this old abuse, and does not cease to declare this.
But no one sees this, no one wishes to see it.
Whence this strange delusion? Why do kind, good, intelligent men, of whom there are many among the liberals, socialists, revolutionaries, not excluding even persons in the government — why do these men, wishing good to the people, not see the one thing it needs, that towards which it unceasingly strives and without which it unceasingly suffers, but are concerned with many and the most various affairs, the accomplishment of which, without the accomplishment of what the people desires, can in no case contribute to its good? The whole activity both of the governmental and of the anti-governmental servants of the people is like what a man would do who, wishing to help a horse stuck fast in a bog, should sit on the cart and shift the load lying on the cart from place to place, imagining that by this he was helping the matter.
Why is this?
The answer to this question is the same as to all questions about why the men of our time, who might live well and happily, live badly and miserably.
It comes from this, that the men, both governmental and anti-governmental, who arrange the good of the people, have no religion. And without religion a man cannot himself live a rational life, and still less can he know what is good and what is bad, what is needful and what is not needful for other men. From this alone it comes that the men of our time in general, and the men of the Russian intelligentsia in particular, completely destitute of religious consciousness and even declaring this with pride, so perversely understand the life and the demands of that people which they wish to serve, and demand for it the most various things — anything but the one thing it needs.
Without religion one cannot truly love men. And not loving men, one cannot know what they need, what is more and what is less needful. Only irreligious men, and therefore men who do not truly love, can devise insignificant improvements in the life of the people without seeing the chief evil from which men suffer and which they themselves in part produce. Only such men can preach more or less skilfully constructed abstract theories which are to make the people happy in the future, and not see the sufferings which the people bears in the present and which demand immediate and possible relief. Something like what a man would do who, having taken food from a hungry man, gives him advice (and very doubtful advice) about how he is to live in the future, not considering it necessary to give him at once a part of his own superfluity out of the food taken from him.
Happily, the great, beneficent movements in humanity are accomplished not by parasites feeding on the people's juices, whatever they may call themselves — governments, revolutionaries, liberals — but by religious men, that is, by men who are serious, simple, labouring, who live not for their own gain, their own vanity, their own ambition, not for the attainment of external results, but in order to fulfil before God their human calling.
Such men, and only such, by their unnoisy but firm activity move humanity forward. Such men will not, striving to distinguish themselves before men, devise this or that improvement in the life of the people (of such improvements there may be a countless number, and they are all insignificant if the chief thing has not been done), but will try to live in accordance with the law of God, with conscience; and, trying so to live, they will naturally come up against the most evident violation of this law, and will seek for themselves and for others the means of being rid of it.
The other day a doctor of my acquaintance, waiting for a train at a large railway station in the third class, was reading a newspaper. A peasant sitting beside him asked about the news. In that number of the paper there was an article about an “agrarian” congress. The doctor translated into Russian the funny word “agrarian,” and when it became clear that the matter concerned the land, the peasant asked him to read it. The doctor began to read, and more peasants came up. A little group gathered: some lay on the backs of others, some sat on the floor, the faces of all were concentrated and solemn. When the reading was over, one of those at the back, an old man, sighed deeply and crossed himself. This man certainly understood nothing of that confused jargon in which the article is written and which is hard to understand even for a man who is able to converse in that jargon. He understood nothing of what was written in the article, but he understood that the matter concerned a great, long-standing sin from which his forefathers suffered and from which he suffers; he understood that the men who commit the sin are beginning to be conscious of it. And, having understood this, he turned in thought to God and crossed himself. And in this one movement of that man's hand there is more sense and content than in all the chatter which now fills the columns of the newspapers. That man understands, as the whole people understands, that the seizure of the land by men who do not work is a great sin, from which his forefathers suffered and perished in body, from which he and those near him suffer in body, from which all those have suffered in spirit who committed this sin and who now commit it, and that this sin, like every sin, like the sin of serfdom within his memory, must be loosed, cannot but be loosed. He knows and feels this, and therefore cannot but turn to God at the thought of the approaching loosing.
VIII
“Great social transformations,” says Mazzini, “have always been and will be only the consequence of great religious movements.”
And such is that religious movement which now lies before the Russian people — before the whole Russian people, both the working people deprived of the land and, in especial, the large, middling and small landowners and all those hundreds of thousands of men who, though they do not directly own land, occupy an advantageous position thanks to the forced labours of the landless people.
The religious movement now lying before the Russian people consists in loosing that great sin which has long tormented and divided men not in Russia alone, but in the whole world.
But this sin can be loosed neither by political reforms, nor by socialist projects in the future, nor by revolutions in the present, and still less by philanthropic donations or by governmental institutions for the purchase and distribution of lands to the peasants.
Such palliative measures only distract attention from the essence of the question and by that very thing delay its solution.
No sacrifices are needed, no care for the people; what is needed only is the consciousness of their sin by all the men who commit it or take part in it, and the desire to be rid of it.
It is needful that that unquestionable truth which the best men of the people have always known and know — that the land cannot be the exclusive property of some, and that to refuse the land to those who need it is a sin — should become the common consciousness of all men; that men should be ashamed to withhold the land from those who wish to feed themselves upon it; that it should be shameful in one way or another to take part in this withholding of the land from the needy; that it should be shameful to own land, shameful to make use of the labours of men compelled to work only because their lawful right to the land has been taken from them.
It is needful that there should be what there was with serfdom, when it became shameful for noblemen and landlords to own serfs, when it became shameful for the government to support these unjust and cruel enactments, when it became evident to the peasants themselves that a lawlessness justified by nothing was being committed upon them. The same must be with landed property. And this is needful not for some one class, however numerous it may be, but it is needful for all classes; not only for all the classes and men of one state, but for the whole of humanity.
IX
“Social reform,” wrote Henry George, “cannot be attained by noise and clamour, by complaints and denunciations, by the formation of parties and the making of revolutions; it can be attained only by the awakening of thought and by a forward movement in the world of ideas. While there is no right thought, there can be no right action either; and when there is right thought, right action will of itself flow from it.
“Therefore the greatest work of every man and of every organization of men striving to improve social conditions is the spreading of ideas. All else can be useful only in so far as it helps this work. And in this work every thinking man can take part: first by working out right conceptions for himself, then by trying to awaken thought in the men with whom he comes into contact.”
This is perfectly true; but in order to serve this great work there must be, besides thoughts, something else as well — a religious feeling, that feeling in consequence of which in the last century the owners of serfs acknowledged themselves guilty and sought means, in spite of personal loss and even ruin, of being rid of the sin that weighed upon them.
It is just this feeling in relation to landed property that must awaken in the men of the well-to-do classes, in order that the great work of the liberation of the land may be accomplished — must awaken to such a degree that men should be ready to sacrifice, if only to be rid of that sin in which they have lived and live.
To own hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dessiatinas, to trade in lands, to make use in one way or another of landed property and to live luxuriously thanks to the crushing of the people which comes from this cruel and evident injustice, and to discourse meanwhile in various committees and assemblies about the improvement of peasant life without sacrificing one's own exceptionally advantageous position, which flows from this injustice — that is a thing not merely not good, but vile and harmful, condemned alike by common sense and honesty and by Christianity. What is needed is not to devise ingenious means of improving the position of men deprived of their lawful right to the land, but to understand one's sin against them and above all to cease taking part in it, whatever it may cost. Only such an inner moral activity of each man can and will contribute to the solution of the question that lies before humanity.
The emancipation of the peasants in Russia was accomplished not by Alexander II, but by those men who understood the sin of serfdom and tried, independently of their own advantage, to be rid of it; and it was accomplished chiefly by such men as Novikov, Radishchev, the Decembrists — those men who were ready to suffer and did suffer themselves (without making anyone else suffer) for the sake of fidelity to what they acknowledged as truth.
The same must be accomplished in relation to the liberation of the land.
I believe that such men exist now, and that they will do that great work, not Russian alone but world-wide, which lies before the Russian people.
The land question has now reached that degree of ripeness which the question of serfdom reached fifty years ago. Exactly the same thing is repeating itself. As then men sought means of curing that general ailment, that discontent which was felt in society, and applied all sorts of external, governmental means, and nothing helped or could help while the ripening and unsolved question of personal slavery remained — so exactly now no external measures help or can help until the ripened question of land slavery is solved. Exactly as now measures are proposed for adding strips of land by means of banks and the like, so then palliative measures were proposed and adopted: inventories, rules about three days' corvée, and much else. Exactly as now the owners of land speak of the injustice of putting an end to a criminal ownership, so then they spoke of the unlawful taking away of serfs. Exactly as then the church justified serfdom, so now (that which takes the place of the church) science justifies landed property. Just as then the slave-owners, feeling their sin more or less, tried by various means to soften it without loosing it, and transferred their serfs from corvée to quit-rent and reduced their dues — so exactly now the most sensitive landowners, feeling their guilt, try to redeem it by giving land to the peasants on the most favourable terms, by selling it through banks, by setting up for the people schools, ridiculous places of amusement, magic lanterns and theatres.
Exactly the same is the indifferent attitude of the government to the question. And as then the question was solved not by those men who devised ingenious means of alleviating and improving the life of the serfs, but by those who, recognizing the urgency of a solution, did not put it off into the future, did not foresee any special difficulty in it, but tried at once, immediately, to put a stop to the evil, and did not admit the thought that there could be conditions under which a recognized evil must continue, and took that solution which under the given circumstances appeared the best — so it is now with the land question.
The question will be solved not by those men who will try to soften the evil, or to devise alleviations for the people, or to put the matter off into the future, but by those who will understand that however much you soften an untruth it will remain an untruth, and that it is insane to devise alleviations for a man whom we are tormenting, and that one cannot put things off while men are suffering, but that one must now take the best method of solution and now apply it to the work. And so much the more must this be, since the method of solving the land question has been worked out by Henry George to such a degree of perfection that, under the existing state order and with compulsory taxes, it is impossible to devise any other better, more just, practical and peaceful solution.
“In order to destroy or stifle the truth which I have tried to make clear,” writes Henry George, “self-love will seek support in ignorance. Yet in this truth there lies a wondrous power of germination, and in the air there is already felt the breath of spring...
“The ground is plowed, the seed is sown, a good tree will grow up. It is still so small, but the eyes of him who believes already see it.”
And I think that Henry George is right, that the loosing of the sin of landed property is near, that the movement called forth by Henry George was the last pang, and that the birth must come at any moment: there must be accomplished the liberation of men from those sufferings which they have borne so long. Besides this, I think (and I wish, and have wished, to contribute at least something to this) that the loosing of this great, world-wide sin — a loosing which will be an era in the history of humanity — lies before precisely the Russian, the Slav people, predestined for this great, world-wide work by its spiritual and economic make-up: that the Russian people ought not to be proletarianized in imitation of the peoples of Europe and America, but on the contrary will solve at home the land question by the abolition of landed property, and will show other peoples the path of a rational, free and happy life outside industrial, factory, capitalist violence and slavery — that in this lies its great historical calling.
I wish to think that we Russian parasites, nourished and given leisure for mental work by the labours of the people, shall understand our sin and, independently of our personal advantage, in the name of the truth which condemns us, shall try to loose it.
July 1905