aT a tr 
SRSA ee LOTS Se 
196 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. . [1 Supr., 1897. 
£18,437,500, and the sum of £3,675,000 was granted during the year in loans. By this 
means, in Germany, it is stated that in thousands of village communities in which no 
sort of chemical manure or rational fodder was ever known both have become of every- 
day use to a quite unforeseen extent. 
All sorts of labour-saving implements and agricultural machinery and better 
breeds of cattle are bought through the associations, and various arrangements for 
improving the quality of the produce begin to be introduced. Unions for the sale of 
agricultural produce are also formed, as well as for permanent improvement of the 
land. ‘ 
The co-operation or mutual aid that ean be rendered to one another by an 
‘agricultural or horticultural community is almost unexhaustive. Mutual aid im 
possible circumstances of village life is part of the routine life in France. 
Everywhere we meet under different names with the charroi—i.e., the free aid of 
neighbours for taking in a crop, vintage, or for the building of a house; and every 
where the commoners associate for all sorts of work. ‘This will perhaps be better 
illustrated by extracts from letters on this subject which I copy from an article on 
“Mutual Aid amongst Modern Men,” by Prince Kropolkin, in the Mineteent 
Century, and written to him by an aged man who for years has been mayor of his 
commune (Ariege, in the south of France). ‘The facts he mentions are known to him 
from long years of personal observation, and on the whole they depict quite a little 
world of village life. ‘In several communes in our neighbourhood the old custom 
Vemprunt* is in vigour. When many hands are required in a métairiet for rapid], 
making some work—dig out potatoes or mow grass—the youth of the neighbourh 
is convoked; young men and maidens come in numbers, make it gaily and for nothing, 
and in the evening, after a gay meal, they dance. ; 
“Tn the same communes, when a girl is going to marry, the girls of the neighbour- 
hood come to aid in serving the dowry. In the hamlet of C. a threshing-machine has 
been bought in common by several householders, the fifteen or twenty persons required 
to serve the machine being supplied by all the families. Three other threshing: 
‘machines have been bought, at are rented out by their owners; but the work 1s 
performed by outside helpers invited in the usual way.” 
It is, however, Russia which offers perhaps the best field for the study of 
co-operation under an infinite variety of aspects. It is here a natural growth, an 
inheritance from the middle ages; and while a formally established co-operative 
society would have to cope with many legal difficulties and official suspicion, 
informal co-overation—the artel—makes the very substance of Russian peasant life. 
In Russia the peasants combine for mutual aid—e.g., a plough is bought by the 
community, experimented upon on a portion of the communal land, and the necessary 
improvement indicated to the makers, whom the communes often aid in starting the 
manufacture of cheap ploughs as a village industry. In the district of Moscow, where 
1,560 ploughs were bought by the peasants during the last five years, the impulse 
came from the communes which rented lands as a body for the special purpose © 
improved culture. In the north-east (Vyatka) small associations of peasants who 
travel with their winnowing-machines (manufactured as a village industry in one of 
iron districts) have spread the use of such machines in the neighbouring Governments. 
The very widespread use of threshing-machines in Samara, Saratoo, and Kherson is 
due to the peasant associations, which can afford to buy a costly engine, while 
individual peasants could not. 
; It has been adduced in many economic treatises that the village community was 
doomed to disappear when the three-field system had to be substituted by the rotation 
of crop system. We see in Russia many village communities taking the initiative 0 
introducing the rotation of crops. Before accepting it the peasants usually set ap: 
a portion of the communal fields for an experiment in artificial meadows, and the 
commune buys the seed. If the experiment proves a success, they find no difficulty 
.whatever in redividing their fields, so as to suit the five or six fields system. : 
Permanent improvements—as drainage and irrigation—are of frequent occurrence. 
For instance, in three districts in Moscow—all three industrial toa great extent— 
‘drainage works have been accomplished during the last ten years on a large scale 10 
no less than 180 io 200 different villages—the commoners working themselves wi 
the spade. At another extremity of Kussia, in the dry steppes of Novouzen, over 
a thousand dams for ponds were built, and several hundreds of deep wells were sank 
by the communes; while in a wealthy German colony of the south-east, the commoners 
worked, men and women alike, for five weeks in succession to erect a dam two miles 
long for irrigation purposes. What could isolated men do in that struggle against the 
dry climate ? 
* Borrowing or making use of. + Farm. 
