II.2. The Protection of the Rural Proletariat

So far our discussion of Social Democratic agrarian policy has yielded a mainly negative result, one that is not very encouraging for those who are looking for a Social Democratic “agrarian programme”, that is, for demands that the proletariat is to raise in order to save the peasant mode of production, or to carry it over painlessly into socialist production, avoiding the capitalist transitional stage, yet still within capitalist society.

But it by no means follows that a positive Social Democratic agrarian policy is impossible from our standpoint, that we are condemned to agrarian nihilism. If the standpoint of Social Democracy makes positive activity in the field of industry possible, indeed necessary, even in present-day society, the same must hold for agriculture too; for society as a whole is, as has been repeatedly remarked, a single organism, and the policy of Social Democracy in the field of agriculture can in its essence be no other than its policy in the field of industry. On the other hand, however, the proletariat will not be able simply to transfer to agriculture the social policy it has hitherto pursued, which is drawn from the conditions of industry. It must adapt it to the peculiarities of agriculture. That is the task Social Democracy has first to solve if it wants to carry on agitation in the countryside. It need not seek new principles, new programmes for its activity in the open country; it has rather to investigate what the consequences of its existing general principles, of its existing general programme, are as soon as they are applied to agriculture, and what modifications its demands undergo in the process.

An investigation of this kind would make a large work in itself. Given the immense diversity of rural conditions, it would also have to turn out differently for every country, indeed for every locality. Nor could it be carried out completely by a theoretician alone, but only in association with one or more “practical men”, that is, with people thoroughly familiar with the agricultural practice of the various kinds of farming and regions concerned. It could never reach a conclusion, just as the programmes of social policy for industry must always be merely provisional, since conditions are always changing.

If we nevertheless undertake this investigation here, we do so only in order to obtain a few concrete examples that show unmistakably that a positive agrarian policy is possible for Social Democracy from our standpoint too. On the other hand, it is far from our intention to offer here an exhaustive and definitive statement of a Social Democratic agrarian policy.

The historical task of Social Democracy consists in furthering the development of society beyond the capitalist stage; but that requires on the one hand measures in the interest of society as a whole and on the other measures in the interest of the proletariat, the driving force that alone is able to raise society beyond the capitalist stage. The social policy of Social Democracy shows the same two sides. Accordingly its agrarian policy too will have to be divided into measures:

Special “protection of the peasantry” finds no place here.

Measures of the former kind can again be divided into two groups:

To the first group belong above all measures for abolishing the remnants of feudal bondage that still exist in Germany. The best known of these are the servants’ ordinances, in which, when the feudal-absolutist state collapsed, the ruling classes saved as much of serfdom as could still be saved. “No phenomenon in our bourgeois society”, says Anton Menger, “comes so close to slavery and serfdom as the relation of servant to master.” (Das bürgerliche Recht und die besitzlosen Volksklassen, Braun’s Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung, II, p. 403.) This feudal character of the servant relation is further reinforced where it receives a legal stamp through exceptional laws against servants, through the servants’ ordinances. It truly does the makers of the Civil Code for the German Empire no credit that, a hundred years after the great bourgeois revolution, they left this feudal remnant, like many another, entirely untouched. Only the imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine is free of a servants’ ordinance in Germany, thanks to French law. (On these see in particular the very instructive article in Wurm’s Volkslexikon, 1895, vol. 2, p. 926 ff., and also W. Kähler’s book Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Deutschland.)

But besides the exceptional laws against servants there are also such laws against the whole rural working class. It has not yet won the right of combination in the German Empire; this applies only to industrial workers. For the mass of agricultural labourers — farm servants, day-labourers, Instleute, Einlieger and so on — as for boatmen, the concerting of stoppages of work is forbidden in Prussia, for example, by the law of 24 April 1854, on pain of imprisonment for up to one year, and this law is still in force today. Alongside universal suffrage and freedom of movement, the right of combination is the most important of all fundamental rights for the modern proletarian; the proletariat cannot develop without this right, it has become one of the conditions of its existence. If Social Democracy wants to rouse the rural proletariat, to organise it, to incorporate it in the army of the fighting proletariat, it must win this fundamental right for it too. The right of combination is, however, more important for the urban worker than for the agricultural labourer, whose isolation and economic dependence are not removed by it.

In England the attempts to organise the agricultural labourers go back to the thirties. And today? “Of the three-quarters of a million agricultural labourers of Great Britain not more than 40,000 are at present organised.” (S. and B. Webb, Geschichte des britischen Trade Unionismus, German translation by Bernstein, p. 300.)

If the right of combination is an indispensable weapon for the agricultural labourer too, and one not to be underestimated, the right of freedom of movement is nevertheless in practice much more important for him. Where his position has improved in recent decades, he owes it above all to freedom of movement, which makes possible his emigration from the country, his migration into the towns and other industrial districts. For that very reason, however, freedom of movement is among the institutions of the modern state most hated by the agrarians. They are still powerless to touch it directly; all the more do they try every possible underhand method of getting at its throat: tying the labourers to the soil by means of rent-holdings; reviving commons, either communal pastures or arable and garden land leased to day-labourers, and similar institutions; obstruction of emigration by the authorities (a favourite means, especially in Galicia, of checking the flight of the dwarf peasants from the land); raising the cost of railway travel; the levying of entry fees in the towns, and similar reactionary lumber.

Social Democracy must oppose all these endeavours in the most determined way. The agrarians would, it is true, like to construct a conflict here between industrial and rural labour, by pointing out that the flooding of the industrial districts with labour-power from the countryside worsens the conditions of work of the industrial workers and diminishes their power of resistance against the capitalists. It is therefore, they say, in the interest of the industrial workers that the influx from the countryside should cease.

Arguments of this kind have also been heard among the industrial workers themselves. Indeed, in the discussions that preceded the drafting of the agrarian programme rejected at Breslau in 1895, it was even pointed out that it was precisely the influx from the countryside that made the preservation of the peasantry and the improvement of the lot of the agricultural labourers urgently necessary, in order thereby to keep them on the land. Trade-union agitation in the industrial districts was hopeless, it was said, so long as fresh swarms of proletarian elements, without needs, intellectually backward and economically quite without support, kept streaming in from the countryside and, as blacklegs, paralysed the efforts of the organised workers.

This argument is correct from the standpoint of the narrow momentary interests of particular strata of workers, from the standpoint of the guild-minded, narrow-minded pure-and-simple trade unionist, but not from the standpoint of the proletariat as a whole as the driving force of development towards a new social order. Were the argument in question correct, then the interest of the industrial proletariat would demand that it resist every increase in its ranks, that is, that it abolish the precondition of its own victory. The migration of the country people to the town may well make it harder for the workers already organised to attain a privileged position within the proletariat as a whole, but it alone brings with it the possibility of organising and incorporating in the fighting proletariat numerous strata of the working population that would otherwise remain outside its ranks, and indeed would in part let themselves be used as instruments for combating it. It is certainly harder to lead recruits to victory than veterans; but in the armies of the great French Revolution it was nevertheless the recruits who, by their enthusiasm and their numbers, triumphed over the veterans of monarchical Europe, which had no means of filling the gaps in their ranks. So too the guarantee of the victory of the proletarian armies lies less in the training of their veterans than in the rapid growth of the number of recruits who stream enthusiastically to their banners.

Then one must remember that the proletariat’s certainty of victory rests much less on the absorption of small-scale agricultural enterprise by the large, which proceeds only slowly and in places not at all, than on the growing dominance of industry in society, which springs on the one hand from the driving back of agriculture by industry and on the other from the growing dependence of the former on the latter.

It would be positively suicidal for Social Democracy to want to check this process, to cut off artificially the growth of industry and the increase of the industrial proletariat by obstructing the influx of fresh labour-power from the countryside into the industrial districts. Fortunately this is impossible.

It is impossible to put an end to the lack of needs and the apathy of the rural population and at the same time to keep it on the land. The conditions of the rural workers will always be less favourable in present-day society than those of the industrial proletariat; the development of the former will always limp behind the development of the latter; it is therefore impossible to do away with the attraction that industry exerts on the agricultural population; on the contrary, this attraction will increase in the measure that the rural population is roused, wakes from its torpor and comes into closer contact with the industrial population.

The right of combination and freedom of movement are the two most important means of free activity and of organisation for the rural as for the industrial proletariat. Social Democracy has the task of winning these weapons of the class struggle, of holding on to them where they have been won, and of instructing and supporting the various strata of the working class in their use.

So much for the first group of measures in the interest of the proletariat.

The second group comprises the laws for the protection of labour, the laws for the protection of all workers, or of working women and children in particular.

But are such laws for the protection of the rural workers needed at all? One may wonder that this question can be asked. But one must wonder still more that there are German social reformers who have answered it in the negative, on the basis of the inquiry into the conditions of the agricultural labourers organised by the Verein für Sozialpolitik, which has already been cited here several times.

This inquiry, it is true, came about in a peculiar way. The questionnaires were sent solely and exclusively to the agricultural employers. These were regarded by the social reformers as the source from which the purest truth about the conditions of the agricultural labourers springs.

When the absurdity of this procedure was pointed out, Herr Oberregierungsrath Thiel, one of the directors of the investigation, replied in his introduction to the publication of the results

“that if anywhere the statements of the employers could be trusted even without correction by the workers, this was to be hoped for in agriculture; for here conditions are still simpler: neither long years of wage struggle, strikes and incitement to class struggle, nor deep-going conflicts of interest and struggles have poisoned the patriarchal relation between employer and employed … Subjective judgements have of course also slipped in, and may often enough be coloured by the employer’s standpoint; but then they are also easily recognisable as such and will mislead no one.” (Verhältnisse, I, p. xii.)

In other words, the investigators assumed as already proved what was to be investigated and what they wanted to see proved, and it seemed to them self-evident that no one was better fitted than employers to answer questions such as the following:

“Does overwork through excessive hours of work occur, particularly among women and children? Does women’s labour lead to neglect of the household? Influence of field work on the mental development of the child? Does the existing servants’ ordinance appear to stand in need of reform?” and so on.

But should one of the farmers questioned nevertheless “colour subjectively” his answers to these questions, that would be “easily recognisable”!

A stranger assertion has hardly ever been put forward by men who expect to be taken seriously as scholars.

It does not of course occur to us to doubt that there are among the said farmers very honest and well-informed people from whom much can be learned; we owe a wealth of instruction to the inquiry in question. But it was absolutely unsuited to throw light on the need for reform of the conditions of rural labour; indeed it was worse than unsuited, it was positively misleading. No reasonable person will seek enlightenment on the necessity of a reform from those who have every reason to frustrate the reform.

However, the social reformers had other reasons, besides their rock-like trust in the patriarchal benevolence of the Junkers towards their labourers, for questioning only the former. First, lack of means and of assistants — a pitiful testimony to the scientific interest of our ruling and propertied classes. The gentlemen should have turned to Social Democracy; the proletarians would no doubt have provided them with the means and the assistants to question the agricultural labourers as well as the farmers. And Social Democracy would also have helped to overcome the second obstacle that, according to Herr Thiel, stood in the way of questioning agricultural labourers: their intellectual backwardness. This backwardness certainly exists, thanks to that patriotism which has more to spare for Kiaochow than for the Prussian elementary school; but our comrades could at least here and there have pointed out agricultural labourers who would have been able to tell the social reformers the plain truth.

But of course one cannot expect German social reformers to enter into relations with workers’ organisations when it is a matter of studying the conditions of the workers. Those who have done so, like E. H. Sax in Thuringia and H. Herkner in Alsace, have indeed drawn rich scientific gain from it, but they had to do it in secret. And these were young men without office or dignity. On the other hand, no person of insight will demand of the privy councillors who direct academic social reform in Germany that they should study the conditions of the workers anywhere but in the best circles.

But if they did not want to lower themselves so far as to question workers about the conditions of the workers, there were still other people whom they could question without compromising their sense of rank, and who yet did not stand in direct conflict of interest with the workers. One would think, for example, that the question whether child labour leads to neglect of school attendance could be answered more competently by the teachers than by the exploiters of the children; that country doctors could give information on whether food and housing are adequate, or the work too strenuous, sooner than farmers; and besides teachers and doctors there may well also be clergymen in the countryside who take their calling seriously and from whom, at least here and there, more unbiased answers could have been expected than from the employers themselves.

The procedure of the Verein für Sozialpolitik makes sense only if it was from the outset concerned not with the workers but with the employers, if the inquiry was meant to document not the distress of the workers but that of the employers, and to supply material for a relief operation on their behalf.

Among those who worked up the results, Dr. K. Kärger understood this best, and so he came to the conclusion:

“In my view the rural labour question culminates in the question: How is the agricultural labourer, especially in the Prussian East, to be inspired with the inclination to take service at home with the landowners there?

“By this way of putting the question I mean to express in the first place that a rural labour question exists essentially only from the standpoint of the employer, not from that of the worker himself. With few exceptions, the material position of the agricultural labourers, to whatever category they may belong, is in the whole of Germany … a good one, and has shown for two or three decades a clear tendency to improve steadily. The rural labour question cannot therefore consist in the question by what means the economic position of the labourers is to be raised.” (Verhältnisse, I, p. 217.)

And so the only legislative reform that Kärger proposes there is the severe punishment of breach of contract. Such are the results of German scientific inquiries into the conditions of the workers.

However, if one wants to see, one finds even in this imperfect inquiry, rosily as it colours things and quickly as it slips over conditions that it is impossible to colour rosily, enough facts to show the necessity of drastic measures for the protection of the rural workers even from a purely hygienic standpoint. Still more, of course, from the standpoint of socialism, which is concerned not merely with preventing the degeneration of the working population, but with raising it intellectually and morally, in order to make it capable of taking the direction of the economic mechanism into its own hands. A social policy that starts from the conviction that the agricultural labourers stand too low to be able to answer questions about their own situation, and that arrives at the result that the position of this class is a good one and measures to raise it superfluous — such a social policy stands condemned from the outset from the socialist standpoint.

Among the laws for the protection of labour the most important are those whose aim is the protection of the rising generation. The whole socialist movement is, after all, more a movement for our children than for ourselves.

The productive employment of children is nothing peculiar to capitalism. It is as old as mankind, indeed in a certain sense older still, for the animal too begins to seek its food long before it is grown. But the capitalist mode of production has given a quite peculiar and not advantageous shape to child labour in particular, as to labour in general. In place of labour in the family it put wage-labour in the service of the entrepreneur; the helper of the working parents became their competitor; the varied alternation of the most diverse activities, which developed mind and body, became a physically and mentally deadening monotony; half-play became exhausting drudgery. These last features are common to all wage-labour in capitalist society, but they have particularly glaring effects in the field of the labour of children, who are far less able to resist than adults, and at the same time far more sensitive than they to every physical or mental injury, and carry its consequences with them all their lives.

The devastating effects of the capitalist exploitation of children first showed themselves in large-scale industry. Soon they came to light in handicraft too, and likewise in agriculture. As in industry, here too it is large-scale enterprise that, with its division of labour, creates a series of simple, light operations that can apparently be performed by children without effort, and that it assigns exclusively to these cheap labour-powers incapable of resistance.

But as in industry, so in agriculture too the wage-labour of children does not remain confined to large-scale enterprise; it becomes, rather, precisely a means of preserving small-scale enterprise, of supplying it with cheap labour-power. And the more the flight from the land develops, the scarcer adult labour-power becomes in the countryside, the more the need grows to draw the labour-power of children into wage-labour.

Now the wage-labour of children in agriculture is said not to be accompanied by harmful effects; at least that is what the employers questioned by the Verein für Sozialpolitik assure us. Other people are of another opinion. It is true that work on the land is done in the open air and that the work of children is often light: gathering stones, picking hops and the like. But the system of wage-labour always presses for the greatest possible squeezing out of labour-power, for the greatest intensity and the longest duration of labour, but at the same time also for the greatest possible monotony of it, for every passage from one task to another involves a loss of time, and often also makes supervision more difficult. The lightest work, however, and, kept within certain limits, the healthiest, becomes harmful as soon as it is continued without interruption beyond a certain measure.

Night-work, as in industry, is not for the present to be feared in agriculture, but curtailment of the children’s night’s rest is very frequent precisely in agriculture, whose tasks, especially in summer (the tending of cattle in winter too), begin uncommonly early and end late. Konrad Agahd reports, for example, of children (in the district of Lissa, Posen) who “did field work from four in the morning until school time, then went to school, and then went on working until dark.” (Die Erwerbsthätigkeit schulpflichtiger Kinder im Deutschen Reiche, Braun’s Archiv, vol. XII, p. 413.)

Dr. E. Lauer, teacher of agriculture at Brugg, says of this:

“Agricultural work can become dangerous for children particularly by cutting short their necessary night’s rest. The employers, and many parents too, often do not consider how badly a child needs sleep. To wake children of 10 to 15 years at four or five in the morning and not to let them go to bed until nine in the evening or later still is a cruelty that can seriously impair the children’s development. It is here that the protection of child labour must step in and forbid the employment at work of children under 15 before seven in the morning and after seven in the evening. In the afternoon a break of at least two hours is to be granted. If such a regulation is to fulfil its purpose, however, it must also be extended to the school and to domestic industry. School lessons too are to be held within these hours.” (Die Beschlüsse des internationalen Kongresses für Arbeiterschutz in Bezug auf die Landwirthschaft, Schweizerische Blätter für Wirthschafts- und Sozialpolitik, vol. VI, p. 269.)

Just as by excessive duration, intensity and monotony of work, the child’s organism can be injured simply by being put to regular work at all at too early an age. No sensible farmer will harness a foal to his wagon. On the other hand it is nothing rare for children to be harnessed to wage-labour in agriculture from their sixth year. Agahd tells of a school in Posen where in a class of 55 pupils only 2 did no agricultural work. “20 are employed by strangers, and left their parents’ home: at 6 (!) years 2, at 7 years 1, at 8 years 2, at 9 years 3, the others at 10 years and over.” (Op. cit., p. 414.) Such six-year-old children are expected to work twelve hours a day and more, not counting the way to and from the place of work, which in the countryside is often considerable. What hideous conditions can develop in the exploitation of children in the countryside is shown by the following decree of the Anhalt government, issued for the protection of children; and yet what it permits is scandalous enough:

“Only children of at least eight may be put to full days’ work; younger ones still are to be employed for only half or two-thirds of the time … The hours of work are fixed from six in the morning to six in the evening, with a two-hour midday break. If a march on foot is still necessary after this work, the end of the working time is to be so placed that the return home can be accomplished by eight in the evening at the latest. When they are transported by cart, overcrowding and children falling out are to be prevented. No employment is to take place before morning lessons. On hot days the employers are to provide sufficient drink.” (Quoted in Agahd, op. cit., p. 423.)

It was no doubt the conditions on the beet plantations of our sugar factories that moved the Anhalt government to intervene. Of these conditions Schippel writes:

“For some kinds of work only children are employed at all, for example for ‘beet-thinning’, pulling out the superfluous small beets. Imagine children of 6–14 years squatting on the ground daily for 12–18 (!) hours, bent forward, so that the blood rushes to their heads. An adult cannot hold this position for ten minutes; what wonder if the children come back mentally abnormal after the end of weeks of this work, quite apart from the illnesses they catch from the damp of the ground to which they are directly exposed. And for this work the schools even give holidays, the so-called ‘beet holidays’! ‘These’ — writes a correspondent of the Preußische Schulzeitung about the Merseburg district — ‘are a veritable plague for the school. When the children have crawled about the fields for days and weeks, according to the size of the local beet-fields, in almost sansculotte attire — in which discipline and modesty go to pieces in the mass gathering of both sexes — with their faces close to the earth, and then come back to school, they are so worn out, so dull and stupid and feeble-minded that all intellectual stimulus and rousing by the lessons is at first in vain. The face is bloated, the gaze vacant, the skin cracked by the heat of the sun, the hands are chapped from the long scrabbling in the earth, and the dirt has eaten so deeply into wounds and pores that repeated washing with the sharpest soap does not at once make the hands white. In consequence of the continual animal crawling on all fours, the spine is hard to bring to a straight and erect posture in sitting and standing.’ If there are not enough children in the place, the estate-owners employ agents who go child-catching in the neighbouring places, and to whom, besides their day’s wage, they pay 5–10 pfennigs for every child caught. This catching is carried on with every means of enticement and deception. The children are promised lemonade, cake and beer; then, loaded on carts, with a band of musicians in front, they are carried off to the village in question. A child’s daily earnings amount to 50 to 80 pfennigs; for this the children have inhumanly long hours of work; the day’s work lasts from five in the morning till about nine at night. Work goes on even on holidays! When the children have been brought in and enticed from other villages, it is eleven at night before they get home again — in what condition, one can easily imagine.” (M. Schippel, Die deutsche Zuckerindustrie und ihre Subventionirten, pp. 22, 23.)

What does Kärger say? “A rural labour question exists only from the standpoint of the employer.” Perhaps the means and assistants of the Verein für Sozialpolitik might at least have stretched to sending a questionnaire to the Anhalt government. From it the privy councillors might surely have taken counsel!

But we do the inquiry an injustice. Now and again we find a forceful little word against child labour. Thus Weber, for example, reports that “in a report on the district of Johannesburg it is stated that the working time of the herd-boys is ‘a very long one’ and ‘contributes greatly to their demoralisation’.” (Verhältnisse, III, p. 85.) A general report from Labiau-Wehlau describes “the herd-children system as an abuse that lies open to view, but is hard for the peasants to avoid, and that leads to the brutalisation of the children”. (Op. cit., p. 128.) That agrees entirely with Agahd’s account:

“The greatest injuries are brought by herding. This has been shown in figures particularly by the teachers of Pomerania, where 58 reporters on the subject of ‘Child Labour in Agriculture’ established that of 3,275 children 2,310 were exposed to moral dangers, while in 312 cases opinion was doubtful and for a further 653 such dangers were denied; besides this, dangers to health were feared for 1,382 children.” (Op. cit., p. 414.)

Von der Goltz too speaks of the “morally and economically ruinous system of herd-children”. (Die ländliche Arbeiterklasse, p. 264.)

Our poets have shown us the shepherd boy in a poetic light, and in former times the herdsman’s life certainly had its stimulus and its charms, when the task was to drive larger numbers of cattle into forests and inhospitable regions, to keep them together and protect them against dangers of every kind. That developed strength, agility, courage, endurance, sharpness of wit. Today the herd-boy has the task of crouching the whole day beside a few head of cattle on a patch of grass and seeing that they do not cross its boundaries. His intelligence has merely to fulfil the functions of a fence. That this enforced inactivity and immobility calls up all kinds of bad and stupid thoughts and instincts is understandable. The herd-children system must be combated on educational grounds, if not on hygienic ones.

But how do the farmers with a turn for social reform come to set their faces against the herd-children system? Whence this philanthropy? Very simply: “The herd-boys are employed predominantly by peasants, since the large landowner has his own herdsmen.” (Weber, op. cit., p. 127.) What grieves the large landowner is not the lot of the children but the waste of this cheap labour-power by small-scale farming in the face of the shortage of hands:

“How much more usefully the strength of these children could be employed if they were occupied in field work; would this not benefit not only the children and their parents but equally the agricultural employers?” (Goltz, op. cit., p. 265.)

That is a love of children on the same level as that of a reporter from Westphalia who denounces the mine-owners there for violating the regulations on the employment of juvenile workers, and would like best to exclude these altogether from industry:

“If it were seen to with all strictness in industry that juvenile workers were not taken on before 16 years, and, what would be still more favourable, not before 18 years, the latter would be compelled to enter service with farmers or craftsmen, which would be of great advantage both to agriculture and to industry itself.” (Verhältnisse, I, p. 140.)

So the farmers questioned by our social reformers are not entirely hardened on the question of the protection of children after all. As soon as one-sided protection of children performs the service of driving hands to the other side, it is welcome.

The position of wage-earning children becomes particularly lamentable where they are strangers to the place, have no one at all who could serve them as protection and support, where they are delivered up quite defenceless to their exploiters. And that is not seldom the case. Migrant labour of children unaccompanied by adults occurs frequently, particularly in South Germany, Baden, Württemberg. In the Tyrol there exists a special association — the “Herd-Children’s Association” — that occupies itself with the traffic in children. In Vorarlberg the “Swabian children” form a special category of schoolchildren: those who from their tenth year enjoy the “privilege” of being exempted from school attendance from 15 March to the middle of November, in order to hire themselves out as agricultural labourers in the neighbouring states. Ravensburg is the chief market, where in spring hundreds of children from the Tyrol and Vorarlberg are brought together to be sold to the highest bidder for the summer. The shipping of the tender human merchandise is attended to by the village clergy.

What treatment these entirely friendless poor children receive can be imagined. The Bernische Blätter für Landwirthschaft, which serve the peasantry, declare in an article (1 September 1896) on Die landwirthschaftliche Arbeiterfrage that the shortage of labour in the countryside is for the most part caused by the bad treatment of the servants, especially of the “farm boys”.

On the same level of humanity as the temporary sale of children abroad stands the handing over to the peasants of children who have fallen to the charge of poor relief, a system whose working in Switzerland has been described by a well-informed contributor to the Neue Zeit (XVII, 1, p. 197 ff.) under the pseudonym Rusticus, but which is not unknown in Germany either. How the ill-treatment of children develops under the influence of the peasant milieu even in educational institutions is shown us by a drastic example in the article by Rusticus just mentioned (p. 204):

“In what spirited fashion girls in Bernese educational institutions are trained for higher agriculture came to light as an incidental result of the investigation on the occasion of the criminal case of Jordi (punitive and sexual abuse of wards, January 1898). The girls of the educational and reformatory institution of Kehrsatz near Bern had in summer to get up at four or half past four to load green fodder. They had further to muck out the cattle-sheds, load manure, pump liquid manure, turn the soil (dig) on slopes instead of with the heavy plough, clear the drainage ditches in the moss in the valley bottom, trench, etc., etc. All of them tasks that exceed such young strength, that for the most part are not suitable for women’s work even by the current views of the canton of Bern, and that in the eyes of all decent-minded people are a brutality, however much one may talk of the ‘blessing of work’, which, combined with sayings from the Bible and prayers, is supposed to root out the ‘seed of evil’.”

Worse still than with the children sold into conditions that are still to some extent patriarchal, as members of the household servants, is the case of those who leave their homes as the slaves of a gang-master, an agent, to drudge under his rod. We shall come back to the gang system and migrant labour in general in another connection. Here it need only be remarked that even Herr Kärger finds himself obliged to declare:

“Those of quite tender age must be absolutely protected against the dangers that the Saxon-going entails not only for morality but also, with the extremely strenuous work on the beet farms, for the health of the still feeble body.” (Die Sachsengängerei, p. 207.)

In view of all these facts it is not surprising that not only theoreticians but also “practical men” well acquainted with agricultural conditions come out energetically for the legal protection of children in agriculture. Thus Dr. R. Meyer, for example, declared at the Zurich congress for the protection of labour:

“The reporter seems to believe that work on the land is quite healthy for children. I believe the gentleman has never seen North Germany, Bohemia and Hungary, never seen the great sugar-beet fields, the wide potato fields there. He has never seen how in autumn, in wet and cold, the children crawl about on the ground from early till late, to top mangolds or dig potatoes. And there are many more such children than the few factory children with whom alone you concern yourselves.”

In fact, in the German Empire in 1882, 460,474 gainfully occupied children under 15 years were counted; of these 143,262 were employed in industry, mining and building, and 291,289, that is, more than twice as many, in agriculture. In 1895 the gainfully occupied children under 14 years and those under 12 years were counted separately for the first time. In all 214,954 children under 14 years were gainfully occupied, among them 135,125 in agriculture. Of the 32,398 gainfully occupied children under 12 years no fewer than 30,604 fell to agriculture. All these figures are to be taken only as minimum figures. The number of children actually gainfully occupied is estimated at far more, a million and over. Von der Goltz estimates the number of herd-children in East Elbia alone at 50,000 to “far over 100,000”. (Die ländliche Arbeiterklasse, p. 265.) All the same, the figures of the occupational statistics are significant for the relation between industrial and agricultural child labour.

The exploitation of children in agriculture is thus widespread, and the protection of children urgently required.

The question of child labour is, however, not an altogether simple one, as Bernstein emphasised immediately after the Zurich congress in a most noteworthy article on Der Sozialismus und die gewerbliche Arbeit der Jugend (Neue Zeit, XVI, 1, p. 37 ff.).

The productive physical labour of children contains a series of important educational elements. Precisely in the years of growth nothing is more harmful than one-sided mental work. Ample physical activity is indispensable. And whoever does not learn to work physically at this age will only with difficulty bring himself to it later, and will never attain that familiarity with work and that dexterity which belong to one who has done it from childhood. But in productive labour there lies also a strong ethical element; it is not a matter of indifference whether children grow up as parasites on society or as useful members of it. The bourgeois son who, in the years in which character is formed, lives entirely on the labour of others turns out only too easily, when he is then suddenly compelled to stand on his own feet, to be a weakling without character, a toady and a pensioner of petticoats, who wants to make his way as before through the favour of others, not by his own strength. In the proletarian, on the other hand, the early necessity of working productively, of providing for himself, sometimes even for others as well, awakens a feeling of responsibility, but also of his own strength.

The great Utopians of socialism, who were at the same time great educators, accordingly wanted the young to be drawn into work early. John Bellers, like Fourier, has the children doing useful work as early as between their fourth and fifth years, Robert Owen from the eighth year on.

In this endeavour they meet the industrial capitalists. But what in the social plans of the socialist Utopians is one of the most effective means of raising and ennobling mankind becomes in capitalist reality one of the most effective means of the most hideous degradation of the working proletariat. We need not undertake to prove this; the proof has been furnished countless times since Owen’s own activity.

So capitalist society stands before the dilemma either of surrendering the young to capital, and so leading the workers of the future, and with them the future of the working class, to ruin, or of excluding productive labour for the young, and thereby most seriously endangering the formation of their character as well as of their efficiency in work.

Within the capitalist mode of production the complete solution of this contradiction, and with it a completely satisfactory education of the mass of the population, is impossible.

Capitalist society, so far as its most intelligent and unprejudiced representatives prevail over the short-sighted interest of the manufacturers, contents itself with a compromise: it strikes productive labour entirely out of the plan of education of the young up to a certain age (the twelfth to the fourteenth year), in order from then on to declare the education of the growing proletarian complete and to leave him exclusively to productive labour, which today means to capitalist exploitation.

Social Democracy, in its practical intervention in this field, has hitherto taken its stand almost entirely on the ground of this compromise. It differed from the bourgeois friends of the workers essentially only in that it tried in a purely mechanical way to push the age limit for the total prohibition of child labour as high as possible. But the further one goes in this, the nearer one comes to the goal of letting productive labour for the young begin only at the age of maturity, the further one moves from any possibility of allowing productive labour an influence on the formation of the character and the efficiency in work of the rising generation; one escapes Scylla only to fall into Charybdis.

It can hardly be in the interest of the working class to extend the age limit up to which child labour is absolutely forbidden beyond the level of the fourteenth year, already widely attained today.

But the lower this age limit is fixed, the stricter must be the provisions for the protection of working children — and we take the notion “children” here in the widest sense, up to the eighteenth year. At a time when the intensity of labour on the one side, and on the other the need of the workers to be active as human beings outside their work, in particular to educate themselves, have risen so greatly that the call for the eight-hour working day for adults is heard on every side, the same working time seems to us too long for juvenile workers. We should have preferred it if the Zurich congress, instead of pushing up to the fifteenth year the age limit below which all gainful work is forbidden, had demanded the four-hour working day for juvenile workers. The system that applies today in the English textile factories to children up to the fourteenth year, who may be employed only for half a shift, 4½ hours a day, ought to be put into effect for juvenile workers up to the eighteenth year.

But the lower the age limit from which the employment of children is permitted, the more strictly must legislation proceed in singling out those branches of industry and kinds of work in which the employment of children and juvenile workers is to be absolutely excluded, the more strictly also in working out the hygienic regulations for work, and the more must it perfect factory inspection; the more numerous and independent must the inspectors be, and the more important does it become that besides the technician the practical worker, the doctor and the educator should also have their say in inspection.

That all this must hold not merely for the factory but equally for handicraft and domestic industry, where child labour has created far more appalling conditions than in the factory, goes without saying.

But the endeavour to make child labour as rational as is possible in present-day society must not, if it wants to reach its goal, confine itself to the place of work; by natural necessity it must also draw the school into its sphere, bring instruction and work into relation with each other, adapt each to the other. Here the gulf between Social Democracy and reactionary, petty-bourgeois Christian “socialism” comes clearly to light. Each of the two parties wants to curb capitalist exploitation; but the latter in order to hold back the development of society, the former in order to hasten it; the latter in order to lead the proletarians back, if not to petty-bourgeois conditions of existence, at least to the ways of thinking of the petty-bourgeois Middle Ages; the former in order to raise their conditions of existence and their way of thinking to a higher level, which will enable them to stride forward beyond capitalist society. For this Social Democracy needs the modern school just as much as the Christian Socials must stand opposed to it.

We are by no means among those who overestimate the influence of the school. Nothing is more mistaken than the view of those who think that whoever has the school has the young, and so the future. What forms us is not the school alone but the whole of life, of which the school is only a small part. Where the teachings of the school come into conflict with the teachings of life, the latter carries off the victory. However pious and Byzantine the school may be, where life teaches materialism and democracy it will bring up neither bigots nor toadies. Where the teachings of the school come into conflict with those of life, their only effect is to harm the children, by wasting their time and turning all the school’s educational influences on the child into their opposite; but to the rulers whose power it is meant to secure it is then of precious little use.

Just as little is the school, were it the best, able to contribute much to the intellectual and moral elevation of mankind unless the whole milieu supports it in this. The reform of society cannot start from the school.

But every form of society, every class, does need a particular kind of instruction and education, without which it cannot thrive or completely fulfil its tasks, and to that extent the shaping of the school system is not a matter of indifference.

We have no reason whatever to believe that his school knowledge raises the average modern man intellectually and morally above primitive man. It seems to us rather that the singers and the audience of the Homeric poems and of the Edda far surpassed the singers and the audience of modern popular poetry not only in their aesthetic feeling, but also in moral strength, intelligence, and understanding of nature and of man. They had no need of the school to sharpen and ennoble their minds and senses, or to acquire knowledge. The public life of the community, which had moved in the same track for thousands of years, taught them everything they needed; oral communication and personal observation were entirely sufficient to make every stimulus and all the knowledge of society accessible to every average person.

Today, in the age of world commerce, in the age of permanent revolutions — not merely political, but above all technical and commercial — social life proceeds in dimensions and by leaps before which anyone is helpless who depends merely on oral communication and personal observation. Reading, writing, arithmetic, the elements of natural science, of geography and statistics, of political history, are absolutely necessary for anyone who is to find his way in the social mechanism. This school knowledge offers by itself, especially in the form in which it is taught today, far less stimulus and sure insight than the knowledge that was formerly spread in the open market-place by oral tradition and personal observation; school knowledge is only a meagre substitute for living perception, and the common popular reading, cheap sensational newspapers and trashy novels, is more stupefying than elevating, whereas observation of the nature with which one struggled, and the tale of the guest who came from afar, always stimulated the mind and increased knowledge. All the same, even if the replacement of living perception by school knowledge does not in itself signify the moral and intellectual superiority of civilised man over primitive man, this knowledge has nevertheless become an indispensable precondition for the former if he is to fulfil his tasks. The life of civilised mankind has become so immensely extended, in space and in time, that it is impossible for any individual, were he the most gifted and the most capable of work, to grasp it entirely through personal perception. However important this is, it will always take in only a little piece of life; the rest can be known and understood only by the means of school knowledge.

For individuals as for whole nations it is impossible today to hold their own in the competitive struggle and to meet the demands of modern culture without a certain measure of schooling. What the present elementary school offers is the less sufficient the more modern society develops; the improvement and extension of the elementary school, and the addition of general continuation classes for some years beyond the fourteenth year, are indispensable.

In measuring the permissible extent of child labour the educational factor must be considered alongside the hygienic. Child labour must remain, even beyond the fourteenth year, within limits that make regular, ample and fruitful school attendance possible.

But the school serves not only instruction but also education.

So long as social life was a public life, it offered all the educational elements that were necessary for the purposes of society. The company of equals, of those of the same age, at play and at light work, the example of the adults, helping in what they did, the teachings of the old, were sufficient to develop the social virtues. Today, especially for childhood and particularly in the towns, family life has taken the place of public life. It is no longer society, it is supposedly the parents who bring up the children. But the parents lack in this all the educational factors that life in society, life among equals, offers; from the parents the child learns at best obedience, but not comradeship, public spirit, independence. And how many parents have the capacity, and the opportunity too, to bring up their children? Their occupation takes them entirely captive. But the family in the town robs the child not only of the company of equals but also of useful occupation, particularly in the case of boys. If the present-day family is separated from society, it is separated from work as well. If the children do not go along to the work by which a living is earned, they lose all the educational influences of the example of work and of helping in it.

Here the school steps in; it brings the isolated children together again, and thereby offers them the powerful means of education by equals. And at the same time a planned, well-thought-out occupation by superiors. But if this occupation is to exert its full educational effect, it must be an all-round one; it must fill the children not only with dead school knowledge but also with living humanity; the teacher must come close to the children not only in lessons but also at play and at work, that is, in an activity that, unlike play and lessons, produces immediate, visible results, an activity that carries within it an aim that even the child can at once recognise, and that, through joy in what has been created, awakens joy in creating and self-confidence. If for older youth the school must be placed alongside productive labour, productive labour should not be missing from the school in the first years of school attendance either, not only on economic but also on educational grounds.

For the age at which wage-labour is entirely excluded, the combination of instruction with productive labour, the combination of the school with workshops and gardens for teaching, in which the simplest operations of various crafts and of plant production are taught and practised, becomes indispensable, the more indispensable the higher this age limit is set.

One sees that the question of child labour harbours numerous problems; very little is done by simply pushing up the age limit for wage-labour mechanically to the greatest possible height.

The question of child labour, however, again takes on particular forms when one turns from industry to agriculture. For becoming accustomed to work and acquiring the necessary skills, early help by the children in the work is still more indispensable in agriculture than in industry; in the latter, division of labour and the machine as a rule reduce the work of the individual to a few operations that require neither extraordinary bodily strength nor skill, though learning them is still hard enough for those wholly unpractised. In agriculture there is a multiplicity of tasks requiring care, skill and often bodily strength and hardening against the weather as well, which need to be practised early. The urban worker of today is useless for agriculture.

On the other hand, there does not exist in the countryside the dilemma that exists in the town, that the prohibition of wage-labour for children today almost universally means also the prohibition of any productive labour for them, that the prohibition of exploiting them capitalistically includes also the prohibition of developing their capacity for work and of letting the educational influence of an activity useful to society act upon them.

In the countryside every household today is bound up with an agricultural enterprise. There even the wage-labourer farms for himself if he has a family of his own. The children are there by no means dependent on wage-labour for strangers in order to be usefully active. Under these circumstances the prohibition of the wage-labour of children really means only the prohibition of exploiting them capitalistically. If the wage-labour of children up to the fourteenth year has been prohibited in industry, it can all the more be prohibited in agriculture. The migrant labour of children, however, must in any case be forbidden up to a still higher age. It is, after all, especially in the form of the gang system, the most hideous and demoralising form of wage-labour.

But even in the countryside the question of child labour is not solved by this prohibition. We have already pointed out that in the countryside work in the parents’ enterprise gives the child sufficient opportunity for activity. But this opportunity is often exploited by the parents themselves to overwork and overburden the children. The greatest possible increase in the labour of one’s own children is, in agriculture as in domestic industry, one of the methods by which small-scale enterprise still prolongs its existence. How important it has become for the peasant is shown by the endeavour, so powerful in the countryside, to shorten the period of schooling.

This endeavour must on no account be given way to. Precisely in the countryside an improvement and extension of the school system is particularly necessary. Even in the interest of agriculture itself. The modern mode of production has simplified the work of the manual worker in industry to the utmost. Not so in agriculture, which grows ever more complicated, whose implements grow ever more delicate, whose methods require ever more intelligence and understanding. It is precisely agriculture, then, that needs more and more intelligent labour-power, and it is precisely to agriculture that such labour-power flows least. We have already remarked in the first part how the countryside is becoming intellectually desolate; its most gifted workers flee to the town; and while the town, with its newspapers, associations, meetings, museums, etc., offers countless stimuli and aids to further education beyond the school, there is hardly anything in the countryside that would counteract the withering of the meagre school knowledge of the grown countryman. All the more important in the countryside, therefore, is ample schooling, not only up to the fourteenth year but beyond it, an instruction that carries within itself the spur to further education.

The countryman calls for more child labour. He calls for it all the more, the scarcer wage-labourers become in the countryside. But he needs a higher education. This could be attained without lengthening the period of schooling, indeed even, at least to a certain degree, with a shortening of it, if religious instruction, which is entirely useless, indeed harmful, ethically, educationally and scientifically, were replaced by instruction in the elements of those disciplines that a rational conduct of agriculture presupposes (chemistry, mechanics, botany, zoology, geography), and knowledge of which would make further education possible for the farmer if need be.

But precisely those parties that have taken the rescue of agriculture on hereditary lease are the same that strive, where the opportunity is favourable, for a reduction of the period of compulsory schooling, and everywhere for the ousting of the instruction in real subjects, meagre enough as it is, by more religious instruction, which already dominates the elementary school. If there are parties that sacrifice the prosperity of agriculture to their momentary interests hostile to culture, it is these “state-preserving”, “Christian” parties.

The Ultramontanes of Austria carry it furthest in this respect. But in Germany too, and among little Protestant parsons too, one can make similar observations. Thus, for example, a Thuringian country pastor has written a book on the peasant doctrine of faith and morals, in which he expresses himself most unfavourably on the effects of the modern school on the peasants:

“Reading now leads straight to the madhouse — less often a peasant, it is true, for he is accustomed to it already at school. But from this direction there seems to me to threaten a very great danger, all too little heeded, namely that, at least in part through much reading as a means of education, as through present-day schooling in general, the countryman is deprived even in childhood and youth of practice in manual work and, what is still more important, of pleasure and joy in his station and contentment with it … It is surely obvious even to the unprejudiced observer how boys and girls who, leaving aside the infant and continuation school, have been kept at their ‘books’ from the sixth to the fourteenth year, kept at them and from the work of the countryside, crammed with knowledge of ‘all kinds’ and drilled into half-scholars (!), afterwards find no taste in occupying themselves with fields, cattle and the rest of farming, and, as I have particularly encountered in zealous and capable girl pupils, leave school very unwillingly and submit with secret repugnance to the fate of now having to help father and mother. Very understandable, too, that ‘education’ at school not only hinders proper, that is, early, practice in agricultural work, but also, especially in mentally lively children, awakens and nourishes a longing for the richer and more pleasurable life without sweat or calluses depicted in the ‘pretty stories’ of books for the young and the people, the so-called ‘having it much better’ of the other classes! In the end the fanatics of education will yet have their eyes opened, perhaps opened in a dreadful way, to the fact that ‘intelligence’ among the people has its very dark side too. For nowadays things go by steam, in drawing conclusions too, and if the dissatisfied farmer, out of dissatisfaction with his condition, inclines to and holds with the ‘Freisinn’ or the ‘Fortschritt’, then logically Social Democracy lies far nearer to the poorer countryman. ‘It is in the air now’, said an old, experienced village headman; he added: ‘in other days people did not think about such things, but took everything and put up with it as it was; now they compare their circumstances with those of other people and ask themselves: Why should those people be better off than we are?’”

It could hardly be put more cynically: because higher education makes people Social Democrats, the people must be kept in ignorance. What does it matter if the ignorant peasants are even less able to farm rationally than the knowing ones! It is not prosperous but submissive peasants we need, and therefore out with the hymn-book and the catechism, and away with the little bit of scientific and social education that seeps into the heads of the village children through the village school.

No wonder our friend of the peasants records with satisfaction that the peasants’ friendliness towards the school is on the decline. (Zur bäuerlichen Glaubens- und Sittenlehre. By a Thuringian country pastor, pp. 24, 26. Cf. also the remarks on the “education swindle”, p. 97.)

In the inquiry of the Verein für Sozialpolitik into the conditions of the agricultural labourers a reporter from the government district of Wiesbaden expressed himself in a similar way. The education of the agricultural labourers, he said, had indeed increased as a result of the improved school, but so had their coarseness — other reporters assert the opposite. This coarseness is supposed to be the fruit of much newspaper reading.

But from the same predominantly small-peasant region it is also reported that attendance at the rural continuation schools, which were still well frequented in the seventies, has become much weaker. (Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter in Deutschland, II, pp. 54, 61, 63.)

And yet in the field of rural continuation schools practically everything remains to be done, as the following survey of conditions in Prussia shows:

The total expenditure on these schools amounted to 91,808 marks, of which a whole 33,174 marks was provided by the state! About as much as a couple of shots from a big gun cost.

And all the while vast sums are thrown away on the “rescue of agriculture”. Continuation schools, to be sure, contribute nothing to raising ground-rent.

The peasant is in a bad dilemma with regard to continuation schools: the more ignorant he remains, the more irrational his enterprise, the less able he is to apply expediently even the little technical progress that it is possible for him to introduce into his small enterprise. But the higher his education, the more harshly he feels the struggle for existence that forces him into overwork and into screwing down his standard of living, and the sooner he turns his back on his calling.

That is very unpleasant for those who want to preserve the present peasant mode of farming as the firmest support of present-day society, but not for the representatives of social progress. If peasant farming is incompatible with the demands of a higher culture such as ample and suitable schooling produces, that speaks against the former, not against the latter. Where peasant enterprise is still capable of improvement, the improvement of schooling must result in its being shaped more rationally; where conditions do not permit that, higher schooling must lead the population to turn away more and more from peasant farming: in the one case as in the other it proves to be a factor of economic progress.

But schooling has yet another good side. It steps in where the laws for the protection of children fail; in agriculture, as in domestic industry, it has already been an excellent means of counteracting the excessive overworking of children in their own family, which is to be valued all the more highly the more legislation shrinks from interfering in the inner life of the family. But for curbing the wage-labour of children in the countryside too, compulsory schooling will be indispensable even if child labour should be completely forbidden. With the great distances and the dispersal of the labourers over large areas, the enforcement of laws for the protection of labour will be much more difficult in agriculture than in large-scale industry. A ruthless enforcement of compulsory schooling, however, would for the most part reduce the wage-labour of children to dimensions at which it would no longer pay.

It is significant that the only law for the protection of labour in agriculture known to us, the English Agricultural Children Act of 1874, suppressed child labour only indirectly, through compulsory schooling. Under this act children under eight may not be employed in agriculture at all. From the eighth to the tenth year they may be employed only if they show that they have attended school 250 times in the year; from the tenth to the twelfth year only 150 attendances a year are required. All gangs are forbidden. Meagre as these provisions are, and though they have suffered some further breaches, they nevertheless brought about a shrinking of the labour of children under twelve to a minimum.

The school, the elementary school as well as the continuation school, has a still greater mission in the countryside than in the town. Efforts for the protection of working children must turn above all to its development.

Prohibition of the wage-labour of children up to the fourteenth year; prohibition of work from seven in the evening to seven in the morning for all children and juvenile persons without exception; prohibition of migrant labour by juvenile persons; prohibition of exemptions from compulsory schooling motivated by purposes of gain; sufficient compulsory continuation schools for juvenile persons: these are the demands with regard to rural child labour that follow from Social Democratic social policy.

We can be briefer on the question of women’s labour. Its development in agriculture by no means runs parallel to that in industry. We have here a clear example of how changeable the division of labour between the sexes is, how the boundaries between the fields of women’s work and those of men’s work are continually shifting, and how little it is in place, therefore, to regard these boundaries as natural, that is, as “eternal” in relation to social institutions.

In the beginnings of tillage it falls exclusively to the woman, while hunting, and then stock-raising too, are carried on by the man. The greater the importance tillage acquired for society, the more esteemed the woman became in the family and in society, whose chief provider she became. (On this see Cunow’s interesting essay Die ökonomischen Grundlagen der Mutterherrschaft, Neue Zeit, XV, p. 106 ff.) But when tillage began to push hunting and stock-raising too into the background, the man too had to take it up. The more arable farming developed, however, the more settled the population became; the narrow tent turned into the solid, roomy house with a considerable household. The woman’s work for this grew and soon took her up entirely; the art of tillage, once purely feminine, whose invention the Greeks and Romans not for nothing ascribed to female deities, became the business of men.

Lippert asks himself how it comes about that in the Jewish myth arable farming is practised from the beginning by men, Adam, Cain, Noah, and thinks that this arises from the fact that the Jews did not go through the stage of the invention of arable farming, but came to know it at once at a high level, when, in the stage of Bedouin nomadism, they conquered Canaan. (Cf. Lippert, Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit, I, p. 447.)

Stock-farming, on the other hand, became the business of women all the more, the more the beasts of prey disappeared against which the cattle had to be protected, and the more the cattle were kept, outside the grazing season, in stalls that formed part of the house.

The capitalist mode of production drives the woman back into the field: partly by creating a mass rural proletariat whose wages are so low that the man’s earnings are not enough to maintain the family, so that wife and child are drawn in as well to raise the wage, with the result, of course, of depressing the man’s wage still further; partly by worsening the position of the peasants, who, to prolong their existence, are more and more compelled to flay out of all their labour-power, out of wife and child, whatever can be flayed out of it.

Where the peasant is well off, the wife confines herself to the household, which also keeps her sufficiently busy. The same holds for the wife of the rural day-labourer. In America she does not even take part in the harvest work, despite the shortage of wage-labourers.

“Nothing is more characteristic of the views and pretensions of the American farming population than the position of their women. The female members of the farmer’s family concern themselves exclusively with the household in the narrower sense and leave all rough work to the men … It is exceedingly rare to see women working in the fields in America, and one can then be sure every time that they belong to the family of an immigrant farmer.” (Sering, Die landwirthschaftliche Konkurrenz Nordamerikas, p. 180.)

This fact is hard to grasp statistically, since the occupational statistics establish only the fact of employment in a particular occupation, not its kind. Still, it is significant that among the agricultural labourers in Germany in 1895 there were 2,380,148 women to 3,239,646 men, whereas in the United States in 1890 there were recorded as “farm laborers” 2,556,957 men and 447,104 women, and as “laborers” pure and simple (who are also in many cases agricultural labourers) 1,858,558 men and 54,815 women.

But this tendency is not confined to America. In England the position of the agricultural labourers has, thanks to migration and emigration, on the whole improved in recent decades, partly through a rise in wages, partly through the fall in the prices of provisions. Hand in hand with this goes the decrease in the wage-labour of women in agriculture: “The general withdrawal of women from field work is a proof of the improvement in the position of the labourers”, says the latest report, already often cited, of the British inquiry into the agricultural depression. (P. 37.)

In Great Britain (without Ireland) the agricultural labourers numbered:

The number of men diminished by 18 per cent, that of women by 54 per cent.

In Germany the improvement in the position of the agricultural labourers is less evident; but here too the field work of women working by the day is decreasing. Thus Weber reports from West Prussia: “In places women’s labour has disappeared entirely; the wives of the free day-labourers try to avoid it as far as possible.” From East Prussia: “The wives of the free day-labourers almost without exception join in the work only very rarely … Women’s labour seems for the most part to be declining.” From Pomerania: “The decline of women’s labour in comparison with 1849 is evident”, and so on. (Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland, pp. 49, 185, 202, 377.)

Here, then, development by no means proceeds in the same direction as in industry, and that is easily explained in view of the great importance that the private household still has in the countryside, where it makes quite different demands on the housewife than in the town. Only the bitterest want, which on the one hand reduces the household to the utmost and on the other compels boundless overwork, can bring the wife of the day-labourer or small peasant in the countryside to wage-labour in the field. It is significant that English farmers named as one of the reasons for the decrease in women’s labour the increased care for the children, whose wage-labour had been forbidden. The Education Act “has withdrawn from the farmers not only child labour but women’s labour too; the women now stay at home and look after the children”, and so on. (Kablukov, Ländliche Arbeiterfrage, p. 102.)

Since the wage-labour of married women in the countryside is a phenomenon that disappears in the measure that the raising of the class of agricultural labourers progresses, it offers little occasion for special protective legislation where general social policy is strong enough to bring about such a raising.

Nor, so far as we know, does the wage-labour of girls in its predominant form, that of service as farm servants, give occasion for special protective regulations that do not concern all farm servants or the whole body of agricultural labourers in general.

This is, however, the case with the migrant labour of girls.

Migrant labour found its classical form in England’s gang system, now forbidden. Marx described it in his Capital as follows:

“The gang consists of 10 to 40 or 50 persons, women, young persons of both sexes (13–18 years of age, although the boys are for the most part eliminated at the age of 13), and children of both sexes (6–13 years of age). At the head is the gang-master, always an ordinary agricultural labourer, generally what is called a bad lot, a scapegrace, unsteady, drunken, but with a dash of enterprise and savoir faire … The gang-master goes from one farm to another, and thus employs his gang from 6 to 8 months in the year. The ‘drawbacks’ of the system are the over-work of the children and young persons, the enormous marches … finally, the demoralisation of the gang … The getting with child of girls of 13 and 14 by their male companions of the same age is common. The open villages which supply the contingent of the gang become Sodoms and Gomorrahs, and have twice as high a rate of illegitimate births as the rest of the kingdom.” (Marx, Capital, 2nd edition, I, pp. 726–728.)

Not much better are some kinds of German migrant labour. Let us hear only an unsuspected witness, the warm eulogist of the Saxon-going — as warm as this institution can in any way bear — Dr. Kärger.

The Saxon-goers are labourers from poor, economically backward regions who go to the regions of sugar-beet cultivation, particularly Saxony, to do the hoeing and harvest work there for which the beet-growers do not find equally willing and cheap labour-power near at hand. This labour-power is recruited by agents who seem to bear a striking resemblance to the gang-master. The recruiting takes place in the tavern, with the use of every possible swindler’s trick. When he has to do with really stupid people, the recruiting agent very ostentatiously shows them the stamp on the contract, in order thereby to give the impression that the authorities have approved it; if possible he engages beforehand a confidential man with a command of both languages (German and Polish), who, moving among the labourers, has to make the acceptance of the contract plausible to them from their own standpoint and, as bell-wether, to be the first to sign it.

“Unfortunately it sometimes happens in such villages with a Polish-speaking population that the agents tell the people of better conditions than the contract actually contains.” (Die Sachsengängerei, p. 31.)

The same agent who recruits the working people in this fine manner remains their overseer at work, and as such has ample opportunity to exercise his swindler’s genius further. He exploits the people he has cheated in the contract by a concealed truck system as well:

“Thus it has in fact happened that the overseer has put at a disadvantage in the distribution of work labourers who, for example, would not buy from ‘his’ tradesmen, that is, those whom he patronised in return for the concession of favours, by allotting them, as often as he could, only unpleasant and badly paid work … A still greater danger arises for the Saxon-goers when the overseer also has charge of the distribution of the wages.”

He quite simply embezzles part of them, and that so generally “that on some estates where this was to be abolished the overseers insolently demanded that a small percentage of the total wages of their people should from now on fall to them by right”. In many cases, therefore, this method of paying wages has been abolished.

The labourers who stand under the supervision of these gentlemen are chiefly girls, “whose number regularly exceeds that of the men several times over” (p. 43), and mostly girls of the most tender age. On four Saxon estates Kärger counted 337 female and 150 male labourers. Of the former 48.3 per cent were under 20 years of age, 33.9 per cent from 20 to 25, so that together 82.2 per cent were under 25 and 93.4 per cent under 30. Unfortunately Herr Kärger has omitted to state how many were under 16; perhaps he would not have learned it even if he had asked. The sugar manufacturers will not have betrayed all their business secrets even to Herr Kärger.

Of the 150 men, 32 per cent were under 20, 19.3 per cent 20–25, and 73.3 per cent under 30 years of age.

The young, carefree girls, ignorant of the world, go out into the world in bands, together with the young lads, under the leadership of the recruiting agent, already known to us as a strict moralist. It is natural that the conditions that develop there show a fateful resemblance to those of the English gang system.

When they have arrived on the estates of our Christian-patriotic landowner, they have by no means left all dangers behind them. The work is heavy, the working time inhumanly long. “It begins — so far as I have seen such contracts — in the West without exception at five in the morning, and ends, after a half-hour breakfast break, an hour’s midday break and a half-hour afternoon break, at seven in the evening. But everywhere the stipulation is made that overtime may be fixed” (p. 41); so the young girls are worked to exhaustion beyond 14 hours. And how women work Marx has already pointed out:

“The farmers have discovered that women work steadily only under the direction of men, but that women and children, once set going, impetuously spend their life-force — as Fourier knew — while the adult male labourer is shrewd enough to economise his as much as he can.” (Capital, I, 2nd edition, p. 727.)

The methods of the industrial slave-drivers for flaying as much work as possible out of their workers are well known to the “patriarchal” regime too. Especially in those branches of work that are assigned to the migrant labourers, the murderous work of piece-work plays a large part. But the East Elbians have invented further ingenious methods of their own for driving their labourers to overwork. Weber gives us a hint of these in his book already cited several times (p. 126, cf. also p. 286):

“It is repeatedly stated that the labourers are more easily induced to work overtime by the granting of ‘refreshments’ (schnapps) than by money, and from the district of Heiligenbeil it is emphasised as an essential drawback of overtime work that the labourers must still always, if less now than formerly, be induced to it by the ‘accursed schnapps’.”

That is to say, our Christian-Germanic nobility systematically makes its labourers drunk with schnapps to spur them on to work, much as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the mercenaries were made drunk with schnapps before a battle to fire them to lay about them in contempt of death. One sees that Prussian schnapps has its profitable side for the Junker not only as a commodity but also as an article of consumption.

The migrant labourers are spared even less than the native, permanent labourers. Let them fall ill afterwards! One does not have to keep them through the winter or to pay for their sickness.

Worst of all, however, are the dwellings assigned to the migrant labourers. It does not pay, after all, to build solid dwellings for them, which must then stand empty for seven or eight months of the year. The more primitive their quarters, the better. Herr Kärger, it is true, is full of praise for the barracks that have been built for the Saxon-goers on some estates; but their most extraordinary advantage must be considered the arrangement, by no means a matter of course there, that the sexes sleep separately. That was enforced by police ordinance.

In East Elbia they have not got even so far:

“As dwellings (in West Prussia) barracks are provided in some cases, in others stables and empty barns, in which the labourers lie together ten and more at a time. Whether the separation of the sexes — half, two-thirds, often still more of them are girls — is carried out everywhere is not evident; on the more advanced estates it will no doubt be the case as elsewhere.” (Weber, op. cit., p. 240, cf. also p. 275.)

How far one may share this expectation is clear from the fact that a few pages earlier Weber himself complains that not even in the dwellings of the permanent Inst-labourers are there facilities for separating the sexes. “The family must share the living-room and bedroom with strange Scharwerker.” (P. 183.)

Not in the “state of the future”, no, in the state of the present, where Christian-Germanic discipline and respectability are still entirely untouched by the Social Democratic poison, where our noblest and best rule and dispose most unhindered, there we find the rabbit-warren, produced by the defenders of family and marriage themselves, who, to reduce the costs of production of schnapps and sugar, pen their human working cattle together in their cattle-sheds without distinction of age or sex.

That these scandalous conditions cry out for remedy by legislation is recognised today even by bourgeois social reformers.

Above all, one would have to demand the prohibition of migrant labour for girls who are minors. Dr. Kärger, to be sure, will have nothing to do with this, and he has his good reasons:

“The proposal to forbid girls who are minors to migrate altogether springs from the hope of thereby reducing somewhat the dangers of demoralisation. But in the first place I believe that the percentage of girls who surrender their virtue would hardly be reduced by that measure, since the girl guarded by her parents up to twenty-one years of age and only then let out into life will, if she has not already fallen victim to it at home, resist the temptation to immorality hardly more victoriously than the younger girl.” (P. 206.)

The sentence is not quite faultlessly framed, but we conclude from it that Dr. Kärger would receive very coolly Marx’s report that under the gang system girls of fourteen were got with child by lads of fourteen. Whether that happens earlier or later is, after all, quite immaterial.

He combats the prohibition of migrant labour above all in the interest of the fathers of the girl migrant labourers. What are these poor devils to do with their daughters under age if they may not barter them away into contract slavery?

“What, for example, is a small proprietor of the Landsberg district to do with this blessing of children when the last has turned 16, if fate — to take a really glaring example — has presented him with a daughter every year for six years in succession?”

That this example is glaring we will not dispute. If it is to be regarded as conclusive, then another example, chosen just as arbitrarily but certainly not more glaring, is no less conclusive. If the small proprietor sends his six daughters off on the Saxon-going and each comes home with an illegitimate child, what will he “do with this blessing of children” then?

But Dr. Kärger has yet another cogent reason: the exploitation of girls from 16 to 21 is precisely the most profitable for the beet-growing farmers and the sugar manufacturers, and the prohibition of their employment “is therefore to be rejected from the standpoint of the interest of beet cultivation too”. A veritable Kulturkampf that our noble doctor fights for the right of beet culture to the prostitution of girls under age. We Social Democratic vandals, however, have no feeling for the culture of beets by means of the unculture of men, and demand, for all that, the prohibition of migrant labour for girls under age.

That, to be sure, is not enough. Even if a girl of 21 is less easily corrupted than one of 15 or 16, because she is more experienced and her character more settled, the conditions under which the migrant labourers of today live are bad enough to corrupt more mature girls too. Nevertheless it would go too far to forbid migrant labour altogether. That would mean taking freedom of movement from a large part of the working population and robbing it of a means of seeking higher wages than it can obtain at home. But contract slavery and the gang system are not necessary forms in which migrant labour appears. They ought to be abolished. This would be done most effectively by the development of public labour exchanges, which would drive out the agents’ traffic in human beings.

That strict regulations enforcing dwellings fit for human beings must be demanded needs no proof after what has been said. A shortening of the inhumanly long working time is also indispensable.

Not, however, for the migrant labourers alone.

Here we have arrived at the question of the normal working day, the chief question of the protection of labour.

The opponents of the proletarian movement like to declare that the normal working day — whose expediency, indeed necessity, in industry they can no longer dispute, though they mostly resist its shortening — is incompatible with the conditions of existence of agriculture, which lacks the uniformity of industry, is more dependent on external circumstances, on wind and weather, rain and sunshine, and must therefore be more flexible and may not be squeezed into the bounds of a normal working day.

In fact, however, agriculture needs far less flexibility than industry. The plan of work of an estate is fixed for the whole year, while that of an industrial enterprise changes from one state of trade to the next. And indeed no one lamented more than the industrial employers that the normal working day made it impossible for them to take advantage of booms, to cope with large orders that had to be executed quickly. Far more even than the farmers they called for a flexible working day, in order to meet the changing needs of the market, which is still more capricious than wind and weather. And behold, it worked after all when it had to. Technical ability and talent for organisation have overcome all obstacles. Where the normal working day has come into effect it has killed, not industry, but only the slovenly routine in industry.

Nor is the normal working day in agriculture by any means without precedent. A normal working day for it fixed by law is not, it is true, known to us. But attempts to introduce one have been made here and there, partly under the pressure of indignant agricultural labourers, partly from more idealistic motives by ideologists of agrarianism themselves who were well acquainted with agricultural conditions. In his introduction to an essay by H. Schumacher-Zarchlin, Zur Geschichte des Normalarbeitstages (in the Zeitschrift für Sozial- und Wirthschaftsgeschichte, VI, 1), Dr. R. Meyer remarks:

“Legal limitation of the working time of men was first carried out in Mecklenburg in 1848. (The revolt of the estate day-labourers there led, by an ordinance of the sovereign, to the setting up of an arbitration commission for disputed matters concerning the estate day-labourers (15 May 1848), and this commission also regulated the working time on the large estates.) … Since then the Prussian Conservatives Wagener and von Brauchitsch made an attempt in 1869 to introduce the normal working day, but it was wrecked by the resistance of Herr Stumm … Together with Herr Schumacher I carried a resolution in 1872 at the conference of rural employers that demanded the legal normal working day for agricultural labourers, and in 1874 or 1875 I drew up, jointly with Wagener, the draft of a law limiting the labour of adults to 56½ hours quite generally, in town and country, and communicated it to Bismarck.”

These endeavours remained without result. But economic development has since worked in favour of the normal working day in the countryside.

The technique of large-scale enterprise has brought with it in agriculture too a greater regularity of work than is customary in small-scale enterprise, and the growing pressure of the agricultural labourers is likewise operating in this direction.

Let us recall the daily working time on the beet estates that is fixed by contract for the Saxon-goers: that is surely nothing other than a normal working day. Weber too reports that the tendency to fix a normal working day is growing. Thus he reports from Lithuania:

“The most effective shortening of the working time — beginning work at a fixed hour after sunrise — is in many cases only of recent date, and in the southern districts has been introduced only on some of the farms. In these cases the hour varies between five and six in the morning. In places a fixed closing hour differing from the time of sunset (seven to eight in the evening in summer) has also already won through.” (Op. cit., p. 48.)

From the government district of Königsberg: “Where work in summer still begins at sunrise, this is mostly the case with the middling proprietors; the large estates have mostly already gone over to fixed starting hours, 5, 5½, 6.” (P. 121.) From Masuria: “In a relatively large number of cases the beginning of work in summer has already been tied to a fixed hour, and in several cases this has also been done with the closing hour.” (P. 84.)

At the same time Weber stresses that the agricultural labourers’ aversion to overtime is growing. We thus already have before us in Germany too the beginnings of a normal working day in agriculture, and if these beginnings are still so meagre, the blame lies less with the peculiar nature of agricultural production than with the great dependence of the agricultural labourers, whose power to compel a shortening of the working time and its regular observance is only slight.

All the more is it the task of their comrades in industry to see to it that legislation brings them what they cannot win by their own strength.

The determination of the limit of the agricultural normal working day goes beyond the scope of the present work; as in industry, so in agriculture too the limit practically attainable at any given time will no doubt vary considerably, all the more since it is determined not only by objective technical factors but also by very subjective factors of power. But we see no reason why, in agriculture as in industry, the eight-hour day should not be the goal of the labour movement with regard to the length of the working day even in capitalist society.

It may be objected that agricultural work is carried on under hygienically much more favourable conditions than work in industry — there monotonous work in closed premises, often filled with poisonous gases, here varied work in the fresh air. This difference holds in the majority of cases, but on the other hand the position of the wage-labourer in the town is also different from that in the countryside. There, as we have often emphasised, the household is necessarily bound up with an agricultural enterprise. The day-labourer who comes home from his wage-labour has not finished his day’s work; he still has to see to his little farm, clean the stall, fetch fodder for the cow, dig the potato patch, etc. If wage-labour takes up the whole day, from sunrise to sunset, then only the nights and Sunday are left him for his own farm.

As for the married woman factory worker, so for the day-labourer in the countryside the time of wage-labour is not the same thing as the working time. And every improvement in the position of the agricultural labourer goes hand in hand with an increase in his work for his own farm. That will hardly change very soon. The reduction of the agricultural labourer’s wage-labour to eight hours would therefore by no means mean favouring him above the urban worker.

If we consider the normal working day as practicable in agriculture as in industry, that does not yet mean that it is practicable in exactly the same way in the one as in the other. The length of the natural day affects the length of the working day quite differently in agriculture than in industry, where work is done by artificial light too. On the other hand, industry has at its command quite a different reserve army from agriculture. It will therefore probably become necessary, instead of fixing a uniform normal working day for the whole year, to fix it differently for the different seasons; for example, if we want to hold to the eight-hour day as the average norm, to fix the working day at six hours for the winter and ten for the summer. Overtime will also have to be permitted in the event of natural calamities and for some urgent harvest work. But we need not rack our brains about this. If it ever comes to fixing the agricultural normal working day, the interested parties will see to its necessary elasticity. The task of Social Democracy will then be not to be mindful of this elasticity, but to see that it does not become arbitrariness, which makes every limitation of the working time illusory.

But even if we grant that the normal working day in agriculture cannot look exactly as it does in industry, we know of no peculiarities in agriculture that would justify restricting the rural normal working day to large-scale enterprise, as the Zurich international congress for the protection of labour resolved. That small-scale enterprise in general farms far more slackly than large-scale, that in it the strict observance of a regular working time, which is a technical necessity for large-scale enterprise, can be achieved only by external compulsion, holds in industry just as in agriculture. If Social Democracy nevertheless demands the normal working day for handicraft in the same way as for the factory, it may surely demand for the wage-labourer of the large peasant the same right as for that of the owner of a knight’s estate. It is by no means its task to concede to small-scale enterprise a privileged position as against large-scale enterprise.

But if we cannot warm to the restriction of the normal working day to large-scale enterprise in agriculture, that is not to say that we consider the normal working day applicable to every kind of rural work. A distinction will no doubt have to be made, but not that between large-scale and small-scale enterprise.

Social Democracy demands the normal working day for every kind of wage-labour, except for one: work in the household. It makes this exception not because domestic servants did not need a shortening of their working time, but because the needs of the household hardly allow its limitation to definite hours of the day. This holds for the household in the countryside as much as for that in the town. But in the countryside the household is closely bound up with the agricultural enterprise, or at least with certain sides of it. The more closely a branch of work in the countryside is bound up with the household, the more difficult it will be to subject it to the normal working day. The particular kinds of work to which the normal working day applies will therefore have to be precisely specified. In general it may be said that field work can more readily be subjected to it than work in house and yard (particularly the tending of cattle), the work of day-labourers more readily than that of farm servants. The work of the former is also as a rule definite, uniform, measurable — weeding, mowing, threshing, and so on — that of the latter changing and not easily controlled.

The overworking of farm servants will therefore be only imperfectly prevented by a normal working day. The normal working day is the form of protection of labour-power corresponding to the conditions of modern wage-labour. To protect the farm servants, this survival from the Middle Ages, we must fall back on medieval methods. Then the natural day counted as the working day; there was no limitation of the daily working time, but there was a limitation of the yearly working time through numerous days of rest, the occasions for which were naturally taken from religious tradition, in keeping with the thinking of the time. The number of church festivals was legion (cf. p. 107). The struggle over working time in the Middle Ages was the struggle over the days of rest — in handicraft the journeymen added “blue Monday” to the church holidays. The overthrow of the democratic classes by mercantilist-feudal absolutism led to a reduction of the holidays, first in the Protestant, then in the Catholic countries too. But Sunday rest remained.

Today even this is no longer strictly observed, least of all by that population which still holds most to religion, the rural population.

“I have known the time”, laments the “Thuringian country pastor” already known to us, “when Sunday in the countryside was a Protestant Sabbath; any urgent business in the fields was got through very early, before six at the latest; only in real bad years did the pastor, at the request of the mayor, once announce on Sunday morning that the midday service would not be held and field work would be permitted. I have also lived through decades in which a Sunday law did stand on paper, but was put out of force by the almost unexceptional indulgence of the authorities; … with progress in agriculture, with the increase in the yields of the harvest, with the ever more nervous haste and greed in acquiring, and with the even retreat of the old peasant trust in God, more properly submission to God and leaving things to God, Sunday work increased from year to year.” (Zur bäuerischen Glaubens- und Sittenlehre, p. 296.)

He expected an improvement from a new law on Sunday rest, but soon everything was back as before.

Sunday work has increased no less in the regions of large landed property than in the peasant regions. There too, as with overtime, schnapps plays the part of the driver. (Cf., e.g., Weber, op. cit., p. 289.) The pillars of piety who strive so zealously to preserve religion for the people fire them with fusel to transgress the commandments of religion!

We need not get heated over the decline in church attendance, but we must work resolutely to see that the scanty rest that custom has still left the agricultural labourer is not also stunted. The strict prohibition of all work on Sunday that is not absolutely necessary, and the securing of every second Sunday as an entirely free day for the farm servants, are indispensable even if a normal working day is introduced in agriculture. They are in any case easier to obtain than the latter, and all the more resolutely to be demanded.

With regard to other provisions for the protection of the workers, the problems in most fields will take a much simpler shape in agriculture than in industry. The fitting of safety devices to machines and the prohibition of employing untrained, and especially juvenile, labour-power on them is, to be sure, as indispensable in agriculture as in industry. On the other hand, night-work still plays no part in agriculture today — with the entry of electricity into agricultural enterprise this may perhaps change — and field work certainly requires no special regulations on air space, cleanliness and ventilation of the workplaces.

On the other hand, larger tasks arise for the protection of labour in agriculture than in industry in the field of the sanitary policing of dwellings. It cannot be our task here to open up the whole housing question; nor do we by any means want to conceal that the housing misery in the towns brings to light conditions just as appalling as in the countryside; some sections of the industrial population are perhaps housed even worse than the rural; for example, the housing conditions in the industrial districts of northern Bohemia, which Professor Singer has exposed, can certainly bear comparison in hideousness with anything that Pastors Göhre, Quistorp, Wittenberg and others report of the “rural huts”. The attic that Göhre saw, in which four married couples, strangers to one another, sleep on eight straw sacks lying on the ground, is no worse than that room in a workers’ barracks in Trautenau which Singer visited at night. This “room of only 15.2 square metres contained a bed of ordinary size, in which a family consisting of 5 individuals (3 adults and 2 children) was lying. The remaining 9 persons of both sexes, young and old, lay sleeping close beside one another directly on the hard floor, not even covered with straw, etc.” (I. Singer, Untersuchungen über die sozialen Zustände in den Fabrikbezirken des nordöstlichen Böhmen, p. 186.)

It is not so bad everywhere, of course, but everywhere among the wage-labourers of today one can establish as the rule “the disproportion between the narrowness of the rooms and the number of their inhabitants” that Pastor Göhre found in Chemnitz (Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter, p. 21), and that leads married couples to share their dwelling, which mostly means their bedroom, not only with half-grown or grown-up children but also with strangers, lodgers of either sex who rent a bed.

Here, however, we are concerned not with the question of the dwellings of the poorer classes in general, but with those dwellings that form part of the wage. Such dwellings play quite a different part in the countryside than in the town. In the town the wage-labourer’s living in his employer’s dwelling is a rapidly disappearing remnant of medieval handicraft custom; in the countryside even the most modern large-scale enterprise must provide dwellings for at least a part of its labourers. In handicraft, and still more in large-scale industry, the labour of servants no longer plays any part; quite otherwise in agriculture. Besides these, however, agriculture has to reckon with married labourers bound by contract, with a household of their own but living in the employer’s dwelling, with Instleute, with holders of rent-holdings who have to perform a number of days’ work by contract in return for their dwelling, and the like.

But the dwelling is that field of the standard of living to which the worker — the word taken here in the widest sense, of all classes that perform so-called manual labour — attaches the least weight. Every loss of food he feels at once in his body; he must eat well to remain fit for work, particularly if he does heavy work in the open air, like the agricultural labourer. On the other hand, the pleasures of the palate, not only of eating but also of drinking and smoking, lie particularly near to him for traditional and physiological reasons, and are easily attainable, and are therefore highly prized.

In clothing, again, social rank and social aspiration are expressed most clearly. Every aristocracy and hierarchy therefore attaches the greatest value to definite rules of dress and badges for the various estates and ranks; the arrogance of the soldiery expresses itself most clearly in the veneration it demands for the uniform, the so-called “King’s coat”. Where militarism does not prevail, as in England, where the soldier’s uniform is a garment of service, not of honour, any officer who showed himself in uniform off duty would make himself ridiculous.

Hand in hand with the advance of democracy goes the tendency to abolish the differences in dress between the various classes, which, as they are equal before the law, demand equal regard in society too. The proletarian does not want to wear any sign of his wage-slavery outside his work, or to be outwardly distinguished from the bourgeois; he wants to be dressed on Sunday just like him. The social rise of a stratum of proletarians shows itself perhaps sooner in an improvement of their clothing than of their food.

On the dwelling, on the other hand, the least value is placed. The physiologically harmful effects of bad dwellings do not show themselves so quickly and directly as those of insufficient nourishment. To recognise the connection between a bad dwelling and bodily decline requires observations and knowledge remote from one who owes his whole knowledge, so far as it does not rest on personal experience, to our elementary school. And what is the dwelling for the mass of the workers today? A place to sleep. Late in the evening he comes home dead tired to stretch himself out on his bed; early in the morning he leaves it to go to his day’s work. But for a mere place to sleep almost any room is good enough.

The workers’ lack of needs with regard to dwellings is recognised even by the economists most hostile to the workers. However much they may rail at the workers’ love of pleasure and finery, at the champagne carousals of the bricklayers and the silk dresses of the factory girls, we have never yet heard a complaint about their luxury in dwellings.

This is the point at which the proletarian standard of living parts furthest from the bourgeois, but also the point at which the worker offers the weakest resistance to all depressing tendencies, and precisely this is the point at which these depressing tendencies make themselves felt most strongly. The prices of manufactured articles, and of many provisions too, are falling where they are not artificially forced up (by protective tariffs or rings). If one compares only these with money wages, one can establish a rising standard of living among many strata of proletarians. It is otherwise with dwellings. While agricultural ground-rent is falling, urban ground-rent is everywhere growing rapidly; that is, the price of dwellings in the towns rises rapidly and compels the worker either to spend a greater percentage of his wage on rent or to restrict himself more and more in the matter of his dwelling. But things are no better in the countryside, where the wage-labourer receives his dwelling in kind, as part of his wage. The more widespread the system of the provision of the dwelling by the employer, the greater the urge to reduce the costs of production, the more tenaciously the labourers fend off every curtailment of their rations or allowances of provisions, the higher the money wages that have to be paid them, the stronger the endeavour to make at least the dwellings granted to the labourers worse, or, where that is no longer possible, to resist any improvement.

But if the dwelling is that point of the proletarian standard of living which most strongly resists improvement, at which the tendency to immiseration asserts itself most strongly, it is on the other hand probably the point of it that most degrades the proletarian. Insufficient housing leads not only, like insufficient food, to bodily stunting, but also to the stunting of the intellectual and moral capacities, indeed to the complete suppression of the most tender feelings that spring from the most intimate relations. Whoever wants to understand the shamelessness and brutality that prevail in the criminal quarters of the great cities will get fuller enlightenment from investigating the dwellings of the lumpenproletarians than from investigating the shapes of their skulls.

But the migrant labourers and many other working proletarians live in dens of vice like those of the poorest lumpenproletarians of the great cities: married couples with their children, girls and lads, sick and healthy, all jumbled up together and pressed close against one another to keep warm and to find room in the narrow space. Tormented like beasts of burden by day, housed worse than beasts of burden in the stall by night — what can thrive there but animal brutality and shamelessness? And the dwellings of the factory workers, such as are the norm — cf. Göhre’s description mentioned above — or the dwellings of the Instleute, who sleep together with the Scharwerker, are not exactly suited either to letting finer feelings arise.

But here there is a great difference between town and country. If the housing shortage in the town works to degrade the worker and blunt him morally, the town also develops factors that counteract this and not only weaken the effects of the housing shortage but in places entirely overcome them. Work itself brings the workers together in the town, not only for production but also for mutual stimulation, for discussion of public affairs, at least before and after work and during the breaks. In the countryside work scatters people over large areas and isolates one from another. In the town, however, life outside work also offers countless stimuli: associations, meetings, exhibitions, museums, theatres — even the public house becomes an organ of public life, through which a part of the spirit of the town flows; the worker reads newspapers there and discusses what he has read. The individual develops towards independent thought, he becomes an individuality and as such begins to feel the need for a home, for a place in which he can live for himself, his friends, his reading, his thoughts. If the stimuli of the town allow the degrading effects of the housing shortage to be overcome, at least in particular strata, especially among the better-placed elements of the working class, they also develop in these strata “covetousness” in the matter of housing too, and drive the worker to make higher demands in this respect as well.

It is otherwise in the countryside. There is no stimulus there that counteracts the degrading influences of housing misery. Work isolates people, as we have seen; associations and meetings are almost impossible in view of the economic dependence of the agricultural labourers; no intellectual life of any kind uplifts the labourer; the only centre of public life is the public house, which, however, reflects the whole intellectual desolation of the open country and mostly smothers entirely in fusel the little intellectual stimulus it might offer, so that, far from weakening the depressing effects of housing misery, it rather intensifies them.

If these effects thus come to light still more glaringly in the countryside than in the town, the same is true of the particular effects exercised by living in the dwelling of the master, the employer. In the town these effects too are paralysed by public life. The master baker or butcher may forbid the journeymen who sleep in his house to bring Social Democratic newspapers home, but he cannot forbid them to read them in the public house, he cannot keep them from attending meetings in their free time, and so on. In the countryside, on the other hand, the labourer who lives in the landowner’s yard is compelled to submit without a will of his own not only during work but also outside it. His intellectual life, his political conduct, his personal intercourse, everything is watched; for him there exists no freedom of the press, no right of combination (not even where the legislator grants it to him), often no freedom of voting either, despite universal suffrage. He differs from a slave only in that he can change his slaveholder from time to time, and the latter in return can turn him out on to the street when he has become unfit for work.

Important as an improvement in housing conditions in the town is, it is much more important still in the countryside. Legislation for the protection of labour in agriculture would fail in one of its most important tasks if it did not draw housing conditions into its sphere. It must prescribe a minimum of sanitary conditions for all dwelling-rooms that are made over by the employers to their labourers for their use as part of the wage.

A regulation of this kind, going as far as the principles of hygiene command, and enforced energetically and ruthlessly, would have the most beneficial influence in the countryside. It would not only considerably improve the housing conditions of a large part of the agricultural labourers, and thereby, in its reaction, raise the whole standard of living of the rural population; it would also prove a powerful means of clearing away the remnants of feudal labour relations in the twentieth century. For it would press all farmers to reduce to the utmost the number of labourers living with them, and to replace them as far as possible by free day-labourers. The displacement of the farm servants and the Instleute by day-labourers who are free men outside their work would, however, be a great social advance.

This social advance would, it is true, be bound up with a partial technical step backwards. For if the landowner wants to keep the free day-labourers in his district, he must try to see that they set up households of their own, and so can take a piece of land into cultivation, whether their own or leased. The decline in the number of farm servants would lead to an increase in small-scale enterprises at the expense of large ones. But this increase would be slight from the technical standpoint, and would count for nothing as against the social advance bound up with the displacement of the remnants of medieval bondage by free wage-labour.

But even if the free day-labourer stands higher socially than the farm-hand or the Instmann, he lacks, if he owns a house of his own with a little land, the most important weapon of the proletarian class struggle in the countryside, one that there surpasses freedom of combination in effectiveness: freedom of movement. His property fetters him.

To remove this obstacle we see only one way: the building of workers’ dwellings out of public funds, to be let to workers. This demand is evidently bound up with a series of preconditions, above all with the free self-government of the commune, or of the district or county, and with universal suffrage for the representative bodies that have a decisive part in its administration. Only where these conditions are given, and an independent movement among the agricultural labourers has grown strong enough for them to be able and willing to take up the struggle for representation in commune and district, could Social Democracy actually raise the demand that the commune, or better still the district, in which the economic preponderance of individual landowners would come out less sharply, should build dwellings to let for the agricultural labourers. With this they would no doubt reach the highest degree of independence that they can reach at all in capitalist society.

But apart from England we know of no state in which it would already be in the interest of the agricultural labourers today to raise this demand.

Closely connected with the housing question are some questions of rent.

We saw in an earlier chapter that the price of land used for agriculture is determined by ground-rent only where it serves capitalist commodity production. Where it is an appendage of the household, its price can go far beyond the capitalised ground-rent, and does go beyond it if circumstances favour the growth of population and the demand for land; it then goes beyond it in each individual case all the more, the less the land serves commodity production, the more it forms an appendage of the household, that is, generally speaking, the smaller the plot.

This is undoubtedly a great disadvantage for the working population in the countryside, one of the richest sources of the exploitation of the agricultural labourer. The higher the price of the parcel he must acquire if he wants to found an independent household, the more he must stint himself out of his wages in order to be able to save the purchase price, the lower he will depress his standard of living, the sooner he will try to borrow part of the purchase sum and so fall into debt-slavery and dependence. Where, again, he does not buy the parcel but leases it, he will be the more urgently dependent on wage-labour the higher the rent, which he pays out of his money wage, not out of the product of his plot, which does not become a commodity for him, or only to a small extent; the higher the rent, the more urgent the offer of his labour-power, the less his resistance to the depression of wages, the more easily he falls into arrears with the payment of rent, which likewise becomes a source of debt-slavery and dependence for him.

If this evil could be counteracted, the raising of the agricultural labourer’s condition of life and of his independence would thereby be greatly furthered.

Where the leasing system prevails, this is not impossible; there one need only subject leases to the control of a court that has the right to reduce unfairly high rents, those that go beyond the amount of the normal ground-rent, to its measure, that is, to bring the rents of the proletarian tenants down, relatively, to the level of those of the capitalist tenants. An institution of this kind was already set up in Ireland in 1881 by the Liberal, supposedly Manchesterite, Gladstone ministry, and it has proved its worth excellently.

The effects of such a law must in a certain respect be just the opposite of those of the housing law demanded above. The latter presses the large landowner to reduce the size of his enterprise by detaching small parcels for his labourers; the former, on the contrary, makes this detachment less profitable than it has been hitherto; the one furthers small-scale enterprise, the other large-scale. But the two laws do not contradict but complement each other, and both work in the same direction in so far as each, if in a different way, favours the raising of the worker’s standard of living and of his independence.

The matter is not so simple where the labourer in the countryside does not lease his parcel but buys it. We see no practicable legal way that could compel the lowering of the excessive prices of these parcels; but even if there were one, grave objections would arise against it. The landowner at whose expense the reduction of ground-rent would here be made is often himself a worker. Beneficial as this reduction would be for the worker buying land, it would rob of a nest-egg, often painfully saved, those proletarians who must sell their parcel as its former owners or as co-heirs. We have here before us again one of those cases in which private property in land makes a rational reform impossible.