The application of machinery to the land, the division of labor, major soil -- improvement measures, such as cutting drainage and irrigation canals and the like, become more and more impossible, while the unproductive costs of cultivation increase in the same proportion as the division of the instrument of production itself.All this, regardless of whether the possessor of the small allotment possesses capital or not.But the more the division increases, the more does the parcel of land with its utterly wretched inventory form the entire capital of the small allotment peasant, the more does investment of capital in the land diminish, the more does the peasant lack land, money, and education for making use of the progress in agronomy, and the more does the cultivation of the soil retrogress.Finally, the net proceeds diminish in the same proportion as the gross consumption increases, as the whole family of the peasant is kept back from other occupations through its holding and yet is not enabled to live by it.
In the measure, therefore, that the population and, with it, the division of the land increases, does the instrument of production, the soil, become more expensive and its fertility decrease, does agriculture decline and the peasant become loaded with debt.And what was the effect becomes, in its turn, the cause.Each generation leaves behind another more deeply in debt -- each new generation begins under more unfavorable and more aggravating conditions; mortgaging begets mortgaging, and when it becomes impossible for the peasant to offer his small holding as security for new debts, that is, to encumber it with new mortgages, he falls a direct victim to usury, and usurious interest rates become so much the more exorbitant.
Thus it came about that the French peasant cedes to the capitalist, in the form of interest on the mortgages encumbering the soil and in the form of interest on the advances made by the usurer without mortgages, not only ground rent, not only the industrial profit -- in a word, not only the whole net profit -- but even a part of the wages, and that therefore he has sunk to the level of the Irish tenant farmer -- all under the pretense of being a private proprietor.
This process was accelerated in France by the ever growing burden of taxes, by court costs called forth in part directly by the formalities with which French legislation encumbers the ownership of land, in part by the innumerable conflicts over parcels everywhere bounding and crossing each other, and in part by the litigiousness of the peasants, whose enjoyment of property is limited to the fanatical assertion of their title to their fancied property, their property rights.
According to a statistical statement of 1840, the gross production of French agriculture amounted to 5,237,178,000 francs.Of this the costs of cultivation came to 3,552,000,000 francs, including consumption by the persons working.There remained a net product of 1,685,178,000 francs, from which 550,000,000 had to be deducted for interest on mortgages, 100,000,000for law officials, 350,000,000 for taxes, and 107,000,000 for registration money, stamp duty, mortgage fees, etc.There was left one-third of the net product or 538,000,000; when distributed over the population, not 25francs per head net product.Naturally, neither usury outside of mortgage nor lawyers' fees, etc., are included in this calculation.
The condition of the French peasants, when the republic had added new burdens to their old ones, is comprehensible.It can be seen that their exploitation differs only in form from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat.The exploiter is the same: capital.The individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants through mortgages and usury, the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through the state taxes.The peasant's title to property is the talisman by which capital held him hitherto under its spell, the pretext under which it set him against the industrial proletariat.
Only the fall of capital can raise the peasant; only an anticapitalist, a proletarian government can break his economic misery, his social degradation.
The constitutional republic is the dictatorship of his united exploiters;the social-democratic, the red republic, is the dictatorship of his allies.
And the scale rises or falls according to the votes the peasant casts into the ballot box.He himself has to decide his fate.So spoke the socialists in pamphlets, almanacs, calendars, and leaflets of all kinds.This language became more understandable to him through the counterwritings of the party of Order, which for its part turned to him, and which by gross exaggeration, by its brutal conception and representation of the intentions and ideas of the socialists, struck the true peasant note and overstimulated his lust after forbidden fruit.But most understandable was the language of the actual experience that the peasant class had gained from the use of the suffrage, were the disillusionments overwhelming him, blow upon blow, with revolutionary speed.Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
