Cultivation by corvees was very far from being as happy an invention. No doubt it gave to the peasantry a kind of property, an interest in life; but it reduced them to see their domestic economy disturbed every moment, by the vexatious demands of a landlord or his stewards. The peasant could not perform the operations of his husbandry at the day fixed upon; the landlord's work must always be done before his own; the rainy days constantly fell to the share of the weaker party. Under this system, the labourer performs every service for his master with repugnance, without care for its success, without affection, and without reward. In the landlord's fields, he works as badly as he can without incurring punishment. The steward, on the other hand, declares it absolutely necessary that corporal penalties be employed; and the infliction of them is abandoned to his own discretion. Servitude of the soil has nominally been abolished in several countries, which have adopted the system of cultivation by corvees; but so long as this general system of agriculture is in force, there cannot be any liberty for the peasant. And although the abolition of servitude has given vassals a property and right, which the landlord did not formerly acknowledge, it has hardly at all bettered their conditions. They are as constantly thwarted and disturbed in their own operations as before; they work quite as ill during the landlord's day's; they are quite as miserable within their huts; and the master, who had been flattered with hopes that the abolition of slavery would increase his revenue, has derived no advantage from it. On the contrary, he is ever an object of hatred and distrust to his vassals; and social order, threatened so incessantly, cannot be maintained except by violent means.
The ground of the metayer's contract is every way the same, as that of a contract with the cultivator by corvees. The landlord in Hungary, as in Italy. has given up his land to the peasant, on condition of receiving half its fruits in return. In both countries, the other half has been reckoned sufficient for supporting the cultivator, and repaying his advances. A single error in political economy has rendered what is highly advantageous for one of these countries disastrous for the other.
The Hungarian has not inspired the labourer with any interest in his own industry. by sharing the land and the days of the week, he has made an enemy of the man, who should have been his coadjutor. The labour is performed without zeal or intelligence; the master's share, inferior to what it would have been according to the other system, is collected with fear; the peasant's share is so reduced, that he lives in constant penury; and some of the most fertile counties in the world have already been for ages doomed to this state of wretchedness and oppression.
But the legislator's interference, which we claimed for the metayer, has, in some of the countries cultivated by corvees, actually taken place in favour of the vassal, peasant, or serf.
In the German provinces of the Austrian monarchy, contracts between the landlord and peasant are, by law, made irrevocable, and most of the corvees have been changed into a fixed and perpetual rent of money, or of fruits in a raw state. By this means, the peasant has acquired a true property in his house and land: only, it continues to be charged with rents, and some feudal services. Still farther to protect the peasantry from being afterwards oppressed or gradually expelled from their properties, by the opulent lords living among them, the law does not allow any noble to buy a vassal's land; or, if he does buy any, he is obliged to sell it, on the same conditions, to some other family of peasants; so that the property of the nobles can never increase, or the agricultural population diminish.
These regulations of the Austrian government in behalf of an order, which, if left to itself, must needs be oppressed, are almost sufficient to redeem the errors of its general system, by this increase of happiness to the subject, and of stability to the system itself. In a country deprived of liberty, where the finances have at all times been wretchedly administered, where wars are eternal - and still disastrous, obstinacy there being always joined with incapacity; the great mass of the population, composed almost wholly of peasant-proprietors living in easy circumstances, have been rendered happy; and this mass of subjects, feeling their own happiness, and dreading every change, have mocked all the projects of revolution or of conquest directed against their country, the government of which is so little able to defend itself.
The system of cultivating land by capitation, could be adopted only among a people scarcely emerged from barbarism. It is, in fact, nearly a modern farm-lease, the parties to which, in fixing the rent, pay no regard to the greater or smaller extent of the ground, to its comparative fertility or barrenness, to the improvements which labour has already made it undergo. Be the nature of those circumstances what it may, each proprietor of a whole Russian province pays thirty roubles yearly to the lord of it. Doubtless when the capitation was imposed, all those circumstances were equal; there was more fertile land for each than each could cultivate, and no part of it had yet been improved by labour.
