458 Peasantry and * proletariate' 



consideration 1 wholly irrelevant. For it is promised that the new 

 civilization, recast on the Bolshevik model, will leave no room for 

 wage-service of one man to another. 



I am not to criticize this scheme of social and economic life, but 

 to look at it coolly as an illustrative fact. It is surely a significant 

 thing that, while slavery and serfdom are now reckoned as virtually 

 obsolete phenomena of the past, the old distinction, between the man 

 who works himself for himself and the man who works for another, is 

 still before us as the vital line of division in labour-questions. Blood- 

 shed and torture as means of enforcing the dogma may be confined to 

 Russia, but the distinction is at the bottom of industrial unrest all over 

 the world. Most significant of all is the admission that peasant land- 

 holders are not a ' proletariate.' Of course they are not. But to philo- 

 sophers and statesmen of antiquity they appeared as an all-important 

 class, not only as producers of food but as a solid element of population, 

 promoting the stability of state governments. This stability was favour- 

 able to continuity of policy and enabled all interests to thrive in peace. 

 Have the development of machinery and transport in recent times so 

 far altered the conditions of agriculture that this is no longer the case? 

 In other words, is the agricultural labourer, the present wage-earner, 

 to supersede the peasant landholder as the dominant figure of rustic 

 life? Is the large-scale farmer to survive only as the impotent figure- 

 head of rural enterprises? Is a political proletariate competent to 

 regulate the conduct of an industry directly dependent on soil climate 

 and seasons ? Wherever man is in immediate contact with forces of 

 nature, in farm-life as in seafaring, the bodily energies of many can 

 only be effective through subordination to the mind of one. How far, 

 under the modern factory system, where the mill goes on as usual in 

 all weathers, direction by wage-earners may be a practicable proposi- 

 tion, I cannot tell. That such a plan would be a failure on a farm, 

 I have no doubt whatever. 



My general conclusion then is that the old distinction observable 

 under Greco-Roman civilization was in itself a sound one. Yet it led 

 to no lasting and satisfactory solution of agricultural labour-problems. 

 Many causes no doubt contributed to this failure ; but the lack of 

 a satisfactory labour-system was probably the greatest. Neither slavery 

 nor serfdom was capable of meeting the need, and the wage-earning 

 system never grew so as efficiently to supersede them. Now, after 

 centuries of the wage-system, we are uneasily asking ourselves whether 

 modern civilization is gravely endangered through the failure of this 



1 A remarkable article in the Times of 10 May 1920 describes the influences tending in 

 the opposite direction in the United States, particularly the workman's prospect of pro- 

 prietorship. 



