Two very mischievous consequences result from these ill-assorted marriages. In the first place, the woman is approachingthe decline of life, when the husband arrives at the flower of his age. In the second place, the head of the family neglects hisown superannuated wife, and abuses the influence which he exercises over the wife of his son, who is too young either toenjoy his rights or to protect them. an incestuous promiscuousness is thus introduced as a consequence of serfage, just asother kinds of immorality resulted from slavery in antiquity and in America. Since the emancipation, this evil, they tell us, isbecoming less frequent, because the young couples refuse to submit any longer to the ultra-patriarchial preprogativeexercised by the head of the family.
Although the village festivals usually terminate in games and debauches, in which drunkenness and gross lasciviousnesshave full career, the number of illegitimate births is smaller in Russia than elsewhere; for it does not rise above 3.5 per cent.
From this we may conclude that the immorality is not such as depicted by certain authors; but they assert that theconsequences of misconduct are prevented by practices even more reprehensible. (4)It is evident that the increase of the population, to which the partition of land seems calculated to be favourable, is onlychecked by causes which will cease to operate with the progress of liberty, morality and comfort. To make room for the newfamilies which a more advanced civilization would call into being, there would then remain but one resource-emigration andcolonization.
The system of the mir was, in fact, formerly a powerful agent of colonization. This is a fact recognized at the present day,and brought prominently forward by M. Julius Faucher. (5) When the mother village became overcrowded, a group wasdetached, which advanced towards the east, into the profound forest and vast steppes, where they found themselves face toface with nomadic hunting-tribes. The individual was too weak to clear the woods, or to resist the barbarians: united effortsand the strictest combination were required. It is, therefore, due to the principle of collectivity that all central and EasternRussia was peopled. The mir executed exactly the same work of agricultural conquest that the monasteries accomplished incertain parts of Germany and the Low Countries. There was the same principle of community producing the same result ofcolonization.
While the Germans and even the Western Slavs gradually passed away from primitive community, the Russians preserved it,because they could continually occupy new territories as they advanced into the immense plains of the East. So that, as iswell said by M. Faucher, the law of progress has been for them not change, but expansion, as it is among the Chinese, withwhom they came in contact in Asia.
To sum up briefly the disadvantages charged against the agrarian organization of the mir:
The system is opposed to the progress of intensive agriculture, because it prevents capital being sunk in the land.
The intermingling of the various parcels assigned to each family in the partition leads to compulsory agriculture, or the Flurzwang ; and so favours routine, and maintains the old methods of cropping.
The joint responsibility of all the members of the commune for recruits and for the payment of the taxes, tends to make theindustrious pay the share of the idle, and so weakens the motive of individual interest. The moment this motive is weakened,it must be replaced by constraint, that the social life may not stop. It is thus that the commune exercises so large adiscretionary authority over its members, that the peasant, as it has been said, if no longer the serf of the lord, is still the serfof the commune. Individual interest not being sufficiently brought into play, men become idle; and the whole social body isin a state of stagnation. Hence the extreme slowness of progress in Russia. To estimate the relative value of the collectiveprinciple and of the principle of individualism, we need only compare Russia and the United States.
The partizans of the system of the Russian commune reply: --Granted that the joint responsibility of the villagers to the government is a bad thing; but it is not inherent in the agrarianorganization of the mir . Suppress this, and it will no longer be necessary to grant the commune despotic authority over itsmembers. If great works of improvement are necessary, there is nothing to prevent the assembly of heads of families fromvoting them, or the communal authority from executing them, as is the custom in towns.
Instead of assigning to each family several scattered parcels, they might form compact shares, sufficiently equal in value.
Moreover, the majority of cultivators are able to adopt for the whole territory a systematic rotation of crops; and then theabsence of enclosures and visible divisions would allow of the whole surface being cultivated by means of powerfulmachines, as if it only formed a single farm.
According to M. Schedo-Ferroti, the advantages which the partizans of the mir claim for their system are five in number.
First, every able labourer having the right to claim a share in the land of the commune, a proletariat with all its miseries anddangers cannot arise.
Secondly, the children do not suffer for the idleness, the misfortune, or the extravagance of their parents.
Thirdly, each family being proprietor, or, more strictly speaking, an usufructuary of a portion of the soil, there exists anelement of order, of conservatism and tradition, which preserves the society from social disorders.
Fourthly, the soil remaining the inalienable patrimony of all the inhabitants, there is no ground to fear the struggle betweenwhat is elsewhere known as capital and labour.
