II.3. The Protection of Agriculture

The reform last mentioned is no longer merely a reform in favour of the agricultural labourers, but also one in favour of agriculture. It will and should, it is true, as has already been mentioned, benefit only the proletarian tenant; the capitalist tenant would profit from it only if the rent were forced down below the level of the normal ground-rent. But that would be the end of the system of tenancy altogether, for in that case the landowner would find it more profitable to farm his land himself. The proletarian tenant, however, can use the increase in his income that follows from the reduction of his rent not merely to raise his standard of living, but also to conduct his farm more rationally, by procuring better implements, manure, seed, etc.

The demand for the reduction of excessive rents by special courts thus forms the transition from the measures for the protection of the agricultural labourers to the measures that the interest of agriculture requires.

It is evident that the latter are not of such great importance for Social Democracy as the former, which must be the most important for it if only because in standing up for the rural proletarian it stands pretty well alone. With agriculture the case is quite different. The interest of agriculture coincides today with the interests of the agricultural entrepreneurs and the landowners, with the interest of agricultural profit on capital and of ground-rent, just as the interest of industry coincides with the interest of industrial profit on capital, and that of commerce with that of commercial profit. However important these branches of production may be for the whole life of our society, and so for the proletariat too, they have other and more powerful promoters than the proletariat. If agriculture is in distress, this is certainly not because the interests of agriculture and of the landowners are not sufficiently represented in the states of today and not sufficiently heeded by governments and parliaments, but because of causes that even the state power most friendly to agriculture cannot remove so long as it stands on the ground of present-day society and does not wish to violate its conditions of life in the deepest way.

If it cannot possibly be the task of Social Democracy, for reasons of propaganda, to vie with the agrarian quacks in crying up miracle cures for the immediate recovery of sick agriculture, neither is it its task to put the safeguarding of the real interests of agriculture, those that harmonise with the general interest of society, in the forefront of its efforts, any more than it is its task to exert itself especially for the interests of industry and commerce. Not because it underestimates these interests, but because it can be sure that they receive sufficient weight in the modern state, and that the state does everything in its power to promote them.

As towards the industrialists and the financiers, so also towards the farmers and landowners (small and large) the role of Social Democracy is not that of an agitator who has to rouse them to safeguard their interests, but rather that of an observer, if need be of a watchman, who watches that particular interests do not gain the upper hand at the expense of the general interests, nor momentary interests at the expense of lasting ones.

Social Democracy, which must be active in a positive and stimulating way in the interest of the proletariat, is essentially confined to a negative, defensive attitude where it has to safeguard the interests of the whole in present-day society. In this field its positive side will always have to take second place to its negative side, at least so long as it does not obtain a determining influence on the life of the state.

But from this alone it already follows that it will never succeed, among the mass of independent farmers and landowners not dependent on secondary earnings, in driving from the field the agrarian parties, which demand special advantages for the farmer and landowner at the expense of the community. In spite of all its theoretical good will to help the peasants, Social Democracy has in practice always found itself compelled to oppose most resolutely precisely the agrarian measures that the peasants have most urgently demanded.

All the same, there are already today a few points on which Social Democracy is able to work positively in the interest of agricultural development.

Above all, here too Social Democracy must work for the removal of the remnants of the feudal era, wherever they have been preserved or even revived. Social Democracy is not to be had for feudal privileges, not for the single-heir law, not for entails. To be sure, when it comes out against the tying up of entailed landed property, it does not do so, like bourgeois democracy, in order to promote its break-up into small peasant holdings. That would seem to us a grievous technical step backwards.

Far more ruinous than the entails in the east of Prussia is the right of the large landowners to separate their properties from the rural communes as independent manorial districts, and so to saddle the commune with practically the whole of their share of the communal burdens. They use the streets and roads of the commune, their labourers send their children to the commune’s school, but in many cases they are not obliged at all, or only to a ridiculously small extent, to bear the burdens that arise from this for the commune. Cases like the following can then occur:

“In the village of Zuckersdorf, Rummelsburg district (Farther Pomerania), the Conservative owner of the knight’s estate, von Gouedies, has dissolved almost the whole peasant commune by buying it up and has incorporated it in his knight’s estate; only two independent peasants are still left. These two now form the ‘rural commune’, while the knight’s estate forms an independent manorial district. Now the schoolhouse was to be rebuilt; but the burdens fall exclusively on the ‘rural commune’, that is, on the two peasants, while the owner of the knight’s estate, as ‘lord of the manor’, goes free. The two peasants wanted to go to law against this, but they were advised not to: nothing would come of it anyway.” (Die Epigonen der Raubritter, p. 46.)

No less is the Prussian Junkers’ friendliness to the peasants illuminated by the game law that they have created. The game law, however, not only in Prussia but in the whole of Germany, in Austria, etc., contains manifold remnants of feudal privileges.

The feudal privileging of hunting was twofold. First, it became a sport of a select kind, a “feudal” sport, reserved to the nobility. Only the landowning noble was allowed to indulge in it. The French Revolution overthrew this, like many another privilege, and put the privilege of landed property in place of the privilege of estate. Everyone was free to hunt on his own land. The revolution of 1848 had the same result in Germany. But here the reaction swept away again the equality of the peasant with the large landowner, even if it was unable to restore the old feudal privilege. The large landowner (in Prussia, from 75 hectares upwards) may hunt freely on his property, the smaller landowner may not, except on enclosed ground. The open ground of a number of small landowners (say of a commune or a district) is combined into a hunting district, in which hunting may be practised only by employees or by hunting tenants of the commune or district.

This restriction of the right to hunt leaves us fairly cold. Hunting is certainly not a means of raising the proletariat, or the mass of the people in general, economically or morally, and it remains withheld from the proletarian in any case, whether it is a privilege of all landed property or only of large landed property.

More important for us is the other privileging of hunting, taken over from the feudal era: its legal supremacy over agriculture. Agriculture, peasant agriculture especially, has to serve hunting, not the other way round.

In the declining period of the feudal era the peasant was obliged to feed the game for his gracious lord. He was forbidden to fence his fields and to drive the game off them (cf. p. 19). That, of course, has come to an end since 1789, but game still holds a privileged position as against the crops of the countryman. Whereas otherwise the owner of harmful animals is obliged to keep them fenced in, this holds for game at most in the case of wild boar. All other game is free, and the peasant may not even shoot it when it lays waste his fields. He is, to be sure, most graciously permitted to fence them in and to chase the game off them, but this means nothing other than that the cost of the arrangements for keeping the game off the peasant’s field is shifted from the lord of the hunt on to the peasant.

At the same time the peasant has not the slightest influence on the number and kind of animals that are preserved in the neighbouring forests of the large landowners. And the policy of the hunt is diametrically opposed to the interests of agriculture.

Beasts of prey do the countryman only little harm. Even the tiger counts with the East Indian peasant as a helper, not as an enemy. Only a few, particularly vicious tigers attack man, and the cattle he tends, unprovoked. Nor does the tiger need this prey, in view of the enormous abundance of game in the tropical forest. By decimating the game, which can hardly be kept off the fields, he earns the peasant’s gratitude.

In Europe we have no royal tigers, as a rule not even wolves any longer, but only little foxes and martens. These, like the birds of prey, hardly harm the attentive countryman who keeps his poultry well shut up at night. They are of far more use to him, by counteracting in the most energetic and effective manner the excessive multiplication of the mice and other rodents that ravage his crops. But the huntsman hates the small vermin because it now and then makes an end of a hare or a partridge — to the vexation of the sportsman, but not of the countryman.

The interest of the countryman demands, at least up to a certain point, that the greater part of the predatory game be spared, but that the number of individuals of the herbivorous kinds of game be restricted. The policy of the hunt that prevails today demands the opposite, and it carries the day over the interest of the countryman.

Now we have, to be sure, the obligation to pay compensation for damage done by game, but how meagre it is! For some animals (hares!) the hunting tenant or lord of the hunt is altogether exempted from any obligation to compensate. Here again the most shameless were the Prussian Junkers, who in 1850 expressly excluded in the game police law any obligation to compensate for damage by game. After several motions of the Liberals for the abolition of this privilege had been rejected, in 1891 the Centre too at last brought in a bill on damage by game, in which it demanded the obligation to fence in all wild boar, then compensation by the holder of a hunting district for damage done by migrant game coming from that district, and compensation by the hunting tenant for damage by the rest of the large game (small game remained free to feed). This bill, a very modest one in any case, was twisted by the Junkers in such a way that (1) every claim to compensation for damage by migrant game and likewise (2) the obligation to fence in were struck out, (3) the obligation of the commune to compensate was put in place of the obligation of the hunting tenant, that is, the peasants as a body are to make good the damage done by game, and (4) all judicial proceedings in matters of damage by game were excluded; in disputes about it the decision lies with the local police, that is, mostly the large landowners, and with the district committee, that is, again the large landowners.

It takes the brazen face of the Prussian Junkers, it takes the Prussian government and the Prussian three-class electoral system, to offer the peasantry such compensation as this for damage by game!

Elsewhere things are somewhat better in this respect, but nowhere in Germany and Austria satisfactory for the countryman. It is well known that the Reichstag expressly recognised in the Civil Code the hares’ freedom to feed. The pleasure of the hunt is more important than the nourishment of the people. This remnant of the feudal era has still to be removed.

But in what way is this to be done? The free right of every individual to hunt on his own land would protect very little the peasant surrounded by large hunting grounds, unless he were to neglect his field work and spend his time lying in wait. And if in districts rich in forest and game the peasantry that is surrounded by large continuous hunting grounds is ruined by damage from game, there are on the other hand peasant communes that draw advantages from letting the hunting, especially communes near large towns, where little forest and game are to be found, but all the more sporting huntsmen, who are glad to pay a pretty sum for the pleasure of shooting a hare or a partridge now and then. Freedom of hunting for every individual landowner would there deprive many a commune of a valuable income, without being of the least use to the peasants, in particular to the peasants on small parcels.

Not in the extension but in the restriction of the right of private property in land do we see the best solution of the hunting question in present-day society. The privilege of large landed property to form its own hunting districts must fall, just like the privilege of forming its own manorial districts. Both must be incorporated in the communes or, where this is more beneficial, in the districts, and the disposal of the hunting in the large landowner’s forest, just like the hunting on the peasant’s field, must be granted to the communal or district representative body (which must, of course, proceed from universal, equal and direct suffrage), which is to decide on the policy of the hunt in the whole hunting ground.

The question of the policy of the hunt would be very much simplified by the nationalisation of all forest property — at least in democratic states. A suitable adaptation of hunting to the needs of agriculture in the various districts would then be easily attainable. Any curtailment of hunting as a sport by these reforms we should no doubt get over.

No less harm, and sometimes even far greater harm, than through hunting is suffered by agriculture in districts of small peasant property through the intermixture of the individual parcels, which is also a remnant of the feudal era, a remnant of the medieval mark constitution with the three-field system and compulsory rotation, as we described it in the first part. We have seen that under this system the strips of arable of the individual farmers did not form a continuous whole, but lay scattered in the various furlongs. The overcoming of feudal rule and the introduction of full private property in land did not simply remove the fragmentation of the individual’s landed property; in many cases it increased it still further, in particular through the division of the individual parcels in consequence of the equal right of inheritance of all the children of a testator. A rational cultivation of such small and tiny parcels is impossible. On top of this come the great losses of time in going from one to another, and the amount of land lost to paths, balks, etc. — in short, the intermixture of holdings is one of the most effective means not merely of preventing peasant agriculture from any advance, but even of pressing it down ever lower.

How far the fragmentation of landed property has sometimes gone may be shown by a few figures from Saxe-Meiningen:

“The parish of Leutersdorf, Meiningen district court, with 520.6 hectares of arable land, 37.6 hectares of meadows, 1.8 hectares of gardens, 55.7 hectares of pastures, 191.2 hectares of forest — in all, including roads, waters, yards and the area under buildings, 835.9 hectares — has with 76 (!) households and 363 inhabitants 7,785 (!) parcels; Herpf, 598 inhabitants, in the same district, with an area of 1,808 hectares, of which 856 hectares are forest, 10,973 parcels; Behrungen, 695 inhabitants, Römhild court, 13,910 parcels with an area of 1,378 hectares, of which 320 hectares are forest; Wolframshausen, 423 inhabitants, in the same court, 9,596 parcels with 804 hectares, of which 145 hectares are forest.” (Heine, “Die bäuerlichen Verhältnisse im Herzogthum Sachsen-Meiningen”, in Bäuerliche Zustände in Deutschland, I, p. 10. Cf. also p. 28, p. 137, etc.)

The consolidation (rounding off, enclosure, separation, etc.) of the parcels belonging to each individual landowner into a continuous complex of land has the best effects. Thus, for example, it is reported from the Eisenach Oberland:

“In spite of the often considerable contribution to the new common works, 4 to 6 per cent, very much more is harvested after consolidation has taken place than before, considerable areas of land hitherto unused are made productive by improvements, borders, hedges and balks disappear, and the value of the land often rises considerably soon after the new plan has been laid out, often by a third; a striking improvement in economic conditions can thus very soon be recognised and perceived in the separated parishes.” (Op. cit., p. 31.)

According to Meitzen, the annual increase of yield obtained by the consolidation of the holdings in the parish of Großen- and Altengottern (near Mühlhausen in Thuringia), with an area of 12,934 morgen, was reckoned at 59,339 marks a year, or 4.58 marks per morgen. The costs, including irrigation ditches, new roads, bridges, etc., came to 139,902 marks, or 10.50 marks per morgen, an unusually large amount because of the extensive drainage works. (Der Boden etc. des preußischen Staates, I, 438.)

In spite of these advantages consolidation makes only slow progress. One of the causes of this is to be sought in the costs it entails. Not only is the procedure itself, as we have just seen, a fairly expensive one; consolidation also mostly involves the transition from the old three-field system with common grazing to a higher, more intensive cultivation, which requires more capital. Where the necessary money is not available, consolidation can become the cause of the farmer’s indebtedness; where he is already deeply in debt, it can ruin him.

On the other hand, however, consolidation is not possible for the individual alone; it requires the consent of everyone with a share in the parish fields, since it can of course take place only by the exchange of the individual parcels among them. This is hard to carry out in such a way that no one is short-changed, and harder still in such a way that no one feels himself short-changed. If we further consider the conservative and mistrustful character of the peasant, it is clear that here once more we have before us a case in which private property in land puts an insurmountable obstacle in the way of progress.

Already in the time of enlightened absolutism this led to private property in land being temporarily suspended in order that progress could be carried through. Liberalism, to its sorrow, saw itself compelled here too to lay hands on the sanctity of private property. Where a certain fraction of the parties concerned demands the rounding off of holdings, the others are compelled by law to submit to it and to exchange their property for other property.

In spite of this the intermixture of holdings is still by no means a thing of the past today, and in this respect much remains to be done for the improvement of agriculture.

Social Democracy has every reason to favour this progress from fragmented, irrational, medieval cultivation to larger, more intensive, more modern cultivation, and so far as this can be done by legal means, through further restriction of the rights of private property, it will certainly not be found wanting wherever it has influence on these matters.

On the other hand it will have to be very cautious with regard to state subsidies for consolidation, which are frequently demanded from the agrarian side. The whole procedure means an increase of ground-rent — the value of the land can, as we saw, rise by a third. The state subsidy has to be paid by the whole body of taxpayers, among them proletarians and petty bourgeois in the most straitened circumstances. Is it their task to sacrifice part of their meagre income so that a number of landowners may pocket increased ground-rents? Cases are, of course, conceivable in which such a subsidy is in place, from the proletarian standpoint too; but it cannot possibly be the task of a proletarian party to take such presents to landed property into its programme.

Besides the restriction of the rights of private property, its task in the matter of enclosure will rather have to be a different one. If enclosure is in the end, once the transitional stage has been overcome, of undoubted and considerable advantage to the landowner, it means a kind of expropriation of the rural proletarians.

The balks, stubble pastures, etc., gave them the opportunity of keeping a goat, even a cow. Consolidation removes these little public grazing places — in the parishes of Großen- and Altengottern 637 morgen of cultivable land were gained by the reduction of the balks and boundary furrows — and so deprives the rural proletarians of the possibility of keeping the head of milch cattle that is so important for their household.

On the other hand the dwarf peasants too are often harmed by consolidation. It benefits chiefly the middle and large peasant, not the owner of a few plots. But the small owner has to contribute just as much to the costs of consolidation per unit of area as the larger one. Often, too, he was downright cheated in the consolidation, by being allotted, since he has little say in the village, the fields on the periphery, that is, in the least favourable situation, involving the greatest loss of time.

Regrettable as all this is, it cannot make Social Democracy hostile to consolidation. Here is one of those cases in which the interests of a proletarian stratum come into contradiction with those of economic development, and in which Social Democracy may not stand in the way of the latter. But here, as with the abolition of common pastures, of the taking of litter from the forest and the like, it must strive, on the one hand, that the abolition of a right should not become a simple confiscation, but should be made good by corresponding compensation, say the grant of shares of land and the like, and, on the other, that injustices in the carrying out should be avoided as far as possible, partly by giving the small owner an equal vote with the larger one in the village and in the reallotment of the fields, partly by raising the costs through a progressive land tax. Even if we cannot and may not hinder economic progress, we must yet strive that it take place as painlessly as possible.

The principles that come into consideration in the question of consolidation will also have to guide us in the other tasks that arise from the endeavour to promote agriculture.

We already demand today the nationalisation of forest and water. But where and so long as private property in them is not abolished, we shall approve every appropriate restriction of its rights to secure a rational management of forest and water.

In the closest connection with the question of water management stands that of the great improvements of the soil, or of so-called land improvement, which is essentially nothing other than the part of public water management that serves agriculture: the construction of drainage and irrigation works, the draining of marshes, the winning of land by embankment and the like.

It is impossible to leave such works to individuals. In the beginnings of the capitalist mode of production it was the absolutist state that undertook such works and so raised the landowners’ ground-rent at its own cost, just as it also increased the profits of the industrial entrepreneurs by subsidies. The liberal state introduced other principles into the policy of land improvement. Thus Meitzen says of Prussia:

“Now (in the forties and fifties) there took shape with complete definiteness, in contrast to the older system of state works, as the leading idea of the newer system of improvements, the aim, on the one hand, of laying decided claim to the lively activity of private persons on the basis of the profitability of the undertakings, but on the other hand also of strengthening and sustaining their enterprise and self-help by every suitable means. In the spirit of the law there was no hesitation, where police care to avert greater evils was justified, in compelling private persons to carry out appropriate improvements; other works that promised to be useful were at least encouraged by suggestions, preliminary work, technical reports and promises of help; on the other hand, too, in the perilous period of construction, stoppages were as far as possible removed by assistance and advances, the active co-operative help of all who benefit from the works was brought about in the most practicable way, and the co-operatives were assured, in law and in fact, of the full development of strength of which they were in any way capable and to which they were ready, in the circumstances.” (Der Boden etc. des preußischen Staates, I, p. 468.)

Social Democracy introduces yet another principle: it strives for the nationalisation of water management, but not in the sense of the absolute state, in which the state was to bear its costs and the landowners to have the advantage of it; the community is to remain master of the watercourses, and their yields, as well as the increases in the yield of the land that spring from its water management, are to accrue to it.

Where that is not possible, where private property in land stands in the way of it and cannot be removed, nothing remains but to persist in the liberal standpoint: the carrying out of improvements not by the state but by co-operatives of the landowners concerned, at their cost; state help in land improvement must then consist not in presents to the landowners but in the restriction of the rights of their property, in overcoming the resistance of the reluctant elements without whose participation the work of improvement could not be carried out.

An exception would have to be made only when an improvement served not, or not exclusively, the interest of landed property, but also a public interest, say in the improvement of the climate by the draining of a marsh, or in the creation of a route of communication by a canal. There the state’s water management can and must intervene directly.

But even in this case one will have to demand that the landowners concerned contribute to the costs of the undertaking in the proportion in which their ground-rent grows through it, and one will have to demand their expropriation if they will not agree to an appropriate contribution. If the Italian government, say, wanted to drain the Roman Campagna, Rome and the whole of Italy would gain by it. Nevertheless it would be quite superfluous for it to transform this desolate area into a flourishing tract of land for its rich owners, the Roman Church and the Roman princely families, at the expense of the poor Italian people.

But it is not only consideration for the proletariat that speaks against the expenditure of public means on works of cultivation that are not urgently required in the public interest; so too does consideration for the profitability of these works. It looks, of course, very friendly to civilisation to speak, say, of the cultivation of moors or the winning of land from the sea for tillage; but it is evident that such works — excepting, as we have said, those that serve public purposes, say hygiene, etc. — are to be taken in hand only when they promise to yield a surplus over the cost of the labour.

The enlightened absolutism of the last century, which developed a great capitalist urge to action but understood very badly how to reckon in capitalist fashion, paid quite dearly several times for such attempts to extend its cultivated land bearing ground-rent. But particular caution is called for today, in the period of falling ground-rent. A time in which capitalist accumulation daily opens to commerce enormous new areas of the most fertile virgin soil outside Europe, in which in Europe itself fertile arable land is turned back into pasture for cattle, and even into forest, is just not the most suitable for spending great sums in order laboriously to turn a few patches of infertile ground into cultivated land. Roscher quotes a work (Aufzeichnungen eines nachgeborenen Prinzen) which already said in 1841 with regard to Bavarian land improvement:

“When one finds in Bavaria, in the middle of the forest and on the most splendid soil, the ruins of villages from the time before the Thirty Years’ War, one regrets all the more the capital and human powers that have been sunk in the wretched Donaumoos.” (Nationalökonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 122.)

Still less can there be any question of relieving the distress of agriculture, let alone of the peasantry, by such works of land improvement. What it lacks is not land.

It is true that numerous improvements also remain unexecuted that would be profitable; what hinders their being carried out is less the lack of money than private property in land, the fragmentation of the land among many landowners. Money can be borrowed, and one gets it lent if the undertaking it is to serve has good prospects; but most improvements can be carried out only over a large area, not by individual landowners each on his own. They become possible only if all the landowners can be brought under one hat. That, however, is very hard. Inertia, ignorance and mistrust stand in the way, and the advantages of large improvements are also different for each of those concerned.

Only the restriction of the right of property can establish the necessary unity here: compulsion by the state. As soon as a certain proportion of those concerned demand it and the project proves appropriate, it must be possible to compel the reluctant to give up their land for carrying it out and to share in the costs. Social Democracy will always be ready to support this method of promoting land improvement.

No less important than the system of improvements is the combating of the pests that threaten the cultivated animals and plants, and with them the conditions of existence of civilised man.

We have already pointed out in the first part that the modern mode of production conjures up ever graver dangers to the health of cultivated animals and plants, and throws the door wide open to epidemics of cattle and plants.

One consequence of these conditions is the latest restrictions on the import of cattle and fruit. But however great the real danger may be that the agriculture of whole tracts of land and whole countries will be brought to ruin by the import of infected specimens, in the restrictions on imports this danger frequently forms merely the signboard behind which not hygienic but protectionist intentions are concealed, since in the case of cattle, for example, these restrictions make difficult, or downright impossible, not only the import of infected cattle but the import of cattle in general. What must be demanded is not isolation from abroad, but solely and simply isolation from the centres of infection, no matter whether they lie at home or abroad, and those at home are evidently the more dangerous, because they lie nearer and are in livelier intercourse with the country. All precautionary measures at the frontier are useless if they do not go hand in hand with an energetic combating of the epidemic at home.

But here once again the greatest difficulty is presented by private property. Any combating of an epidemic, whether it be one of plants or of animals, is hopeless unless it proceeds simultaneously at all threatened points, resolutely and expertly. If all the cattle-owners disinfect their infected stalls and one omits to do so, that is enough to make the evil just banished break out anew. If all the vineyard owners of a district go for the phylloxera and one excludes himself, the vine-louse will keep on visiting the vineyards of the others. Here only a suspension of the rights of property, at least a temporary one, will help; compulsion by the state must take the place of freedom of enterprise.

And this compulsion is called for not only to combat the evil once it is there. Here as everywhere prophylaxis is the best policy. Not only are any enemies of the pest, of the Colorado beetle for example, to be spared and bred, but the precautions in the cultivation of the soil, in the construction of cowsheds and the like that prove necessary are to be carried out compulsorily. As for dwellings, so too for cattle stalls definite hygienic regulations can be issued and their carrying out ensured by inspectors.

To combat tuberculosis in cows, their compulsory inoculation with tuberculin, the separation of the sick from the healthy animals and the rearing of the calves on sterilised milk have been proposed. In Denmark the inoculation is said to have given excellent results. In France all imported cattle are subjected to it. We venture no judgment on the usefulness of tuberculin inoculation, but if it is established, its compulsory application would certainly have our approval.

Social Democracy will never let awe of the rights of property frighten it away from compulsory measures that prove necessary in order to go for the pests of agriculture. To be sure, it will also have to see that such measures are carried out in the way best suited to their purpose.

Already today the state power finds itself compelled, obeying necessity and not its own impulse, to interfere with the rights of property by compulsory measures in order to combat epidemics of animals and plants. These measures are in the interest of the farmers themselves, and yet they often meet with their most stubborn resistance. To blame for this is not only ignorance and inertia, but also the mistrust that the peasant cherishes towards the organs of the state power, which as a rule confront him as organs of oppression and extortion, as policemen and tax-collectors, and from whose bureaucratic pigtail-pedantry he expects no understanding of the needs of agriculture.

The further the coercive power of the state is extended in the combating of epidemics, the more one will have to see, on the one hand, to the enlightenment of the rural population, and that not merely occasional but systematic, and, on the other, to it that the compulsory measures are issued and carried out not by lawyers, policemen and former non-commissioned officers, but by experts trained in theory and in practice, in the closest possible agreement with the organs of the democratic self-government of the communes or districts.

But who is to bear the costs of these measures? The state? That means saddling the consumers with part of the costs of production of agriculture, raising ground-rent at their expense. On the other hand it would be unfair to lay the payment for measures that are in the interest of all farmers solely on those farmers whose enterprises suffer from the epidemic. That would also give the individual a strong inducement to conceal the outbreak of an epidemic in his stall or on his land.

These costs are therefore in many places laid on the whole body of the farmers concerned, and things have come to the point

“of awarding compensation, for certain epidemic diseases — cattle plague, glanders, pleuro-pneumonia, anthrax and black-leg — if they are reported in good time, in the event of slaughter, or in the event of a loss occurring after they have been reported; in so far as this is the case, the owner can thus consider himself insured against loss from certain cases of epidemic disease, and where the payments of compensation are apportioned among the whole body of owners of animals, one therefore speaks of a compulsory epidemic insurance. The wish of the rural population that other epidemic diseases too, such as in particular bovine tuberculosis and swine erysipelas, should in time be included in this compulsory epidemic insurance deserves to be granted.” (Buchenberger, Grundzüge der Agrarpolitik, p. 188.)

Against this kind of state insurance there is certainly nothing to object.

With this, however, we have arrived at a new question, that of the significance of state insurance in agriculture.

It is often maintained that insurance plays quite a different part in agriculture from that in industry, and that even if in the latter one cannot think of insuring private enterprises through the state against the consequences of every possible accident, in the former this is called for. For agriculture, it is said, is wholly subject to the caprices of the natural factors, which in industry confront man tamed.

But the uninterrupted continuance of production depends for the commodity producer not merely on natural but also on social factors, and these are more capricious for industry than for agriculture. If agriculture depends more on the caprices of nature, it depends less on the caprices of the market. The raw and auxiliary materials that the industrialist must buy the farmer for the most part produces himself, and for all foreign competition the market for the farmer’s sales is a more secure one, far less dependent on fashion, than for the industrialist. Indeed, for the farmer the injuries of nature are often turned into their opposite by the market; a bad harvest can bring about a rise in prices that more than makes up for the smaller yield.

Besides, against precisely the most devastating misfortunes of agriculture insurance is not possible at all; for insurance has its place only for such mishaps as, among numerous individuals, as a rule befall relatively few, so that a small contribution from each individual is enough to compensate sufficiently those struck by misfortune. But dry or wet summers, hard winters and high floods are visitations that strike whole tracts of country, indeed whole states, and which, like inundations, for example, call forth such mass misery that insurance against them would be powerless. Here only the application of all the forces at the community’s command can help, and even these not always sufficiently.

So long as Social Democracy has no reason to demand the nationalisation of the whole insurance business in town and country, it should hardly have any reason to want to nationalise lock, stock and barrel the insurance business in the countryside in particular.

This is not to say that particular branches of insurance peculiar to agriculture may not already today require a certain intervention of the state if they are to fulfil their purpose. Such branches of insurance are cattle and hail insurance.

The insurance of cattle is twofold: insurance against the danger of epidemics is from the outset a state affair, as we have seen, since it forms a part of the state’s epidemic police. But besides this there also comes into consideration insurance against deaths of cattle that are not caused by epidemics.

This kind of insurance is confined to the small cattle-keeping enterprises. In the large-scale enterprise the death of a single head of cattle is not an event that disturbs the enterprise in any serious way. The larger the stock of cattle, the more the loss of a head of it becomes an occurrence recurring at fairly regular intervals, which forms part of the unavoidable expenses of the enterprise. Like a great shipowner, the owner of a large stock of cattle insures himself best with himself.

Not so the small peasant. If a cow, say, dies on him, that means a serious loss for him, often a fateful check to the whole enterprise. His receipts are too meagre for him to be able to lay by regularly out of them a fund for the amortisation of his stock of cattle, and particular accidents can carry off his cattle before they have served their time. In such cases nothing remains for the uninsured peasant but to make use of the credit of the cattle-dealer, who thus gets the opportunity to exploit him in the most effective way as dealer and usurer at the same time.

It is natural that the cattle-owning peasants of a village, say, should combine to insure themselves against such accidents by bearing the costs of each individual accident in common. This kind of cattle insurance belongs to those endeavours that seek to procure for the small-scale enterprise the advantages of the large by co-operative combination. Useful, indeed necessary, as these endeavours are, here too they show themselves to be only a meagre substitute for the large-scale enterprise.

The large enterprise, which insures itself, loses through the insurance neither the means nor the interest to forestall losses of cattle as far as possible by appropriate prophylaxis. Quite otherwise the peasant. His cattle are endangered from the outset above all by his lack of means, by defective stalls and defective feeding. The payment of the cattle insurance premium certainly does not improve his situation in this respect. Up to a certain point the peasant can make up for his lack of means by greater care bestowed on his cattle. But insurance works to make this care seem superfluous to him. Insurance can often become a positive temptation for the peasant to let inadequate cattle die off so as to be able to replace them with better ones at the expense of the insurance company.

Old as the attempts at peasant cattle insurance therefore are — cow guilds are found as early as the sixteenth century — and eagerly as capital seeks fields that it might subject to itself, it has kept well away from cattle insurance to this day, and where it approached it, it has mostly had bad experiences with it. Where the peasants insure one another, they can to a certain extent check one another’s keeping of cattle. In cattle insurance by capitalist undertakings that becomes quite impossible. Capitalist cattle insurance is always in danger of being cheated by the peasant. If it wants to do business, it will seek to cheat the peasant. But this cattle-dealer’s practice on a small scale does not suit large capital. It therefore generously leaves cattle insurance to the state and the commune — another kind of socialism.

Up to now cattle insurance has as a rule not got beyond small local associations, which came to the aid of the individual member in one way or another in case of losses of cattle. These are associations of people who know one another well, so that supervision is easy and simple, and injury to the whole body through the negligence, or even fraud, of the individual is made as difficult as possible. But against these advantages stands the disadvantage of the smallness of the circle of the insured, which easily fails in a local accumulation of accidents to cattle, say in consequence of a shortage of fodder, whereby the whole insurance is made illusory.

Here, then, the state is to intervene, either merely by bringing the individual local associations into connection with one another, so making it possible for a temporary and unusually heavy burden on one or another of these associations to be borne by the others as well and thereby made more bearable, or also by decreeing compulsory membership for the individual owners of cattle and thereby widening the circle of the insured.

The proletariat, where it can, prefers free, democratic organisation to the organisation imposed on it by the state bureaucracy; this holds for its insurance organisations too; it needs no help from the state power to give its trade unions and benefit funds a national extent. But if the peasants feel the need for a national combination of their local insurance associations, but at the same time declare themselves incapable of carrying it through themselves and call for the help of the state bureaucracy, which they otherwise regard with no great friendliness, the proletariat need put no obstacles in the way. If it can be of assistance in this, there is no reason why it should not give this help.

The matter would be different, of course, if appeal to the state were to become a means of slipping subsidies to a number of farmers at the expense of the taxpayers, if the state, say, by a generous endowment of the insurance fund, wanted to make it possible for the farmers to renew their stock of cattle at the state’s expense. A proletarian party cannot stand up for such charitable gifts.

With hail insurance things are different from cattle insurance. The possibility that insurance leads to negligent or fraudulent farming is here completely excluded. On the other hand, the danger of hail is one that threatens the large-scale enterprise just as much as the small; a hailstorm can lay waste a large estate at one stroke, utterly, as it can a small one. If state cattle insurance can in certain circumstances become a check on agricultural development, a strengthening of the small, irrational enterprise at the state’s expense, that is quite impossible with hail insurance.

This, however, also differs from cattle insurance in that, whereas the latter insures against dangers that threaten here and there one farmer or another in a part of his stock, the former insures against dangers that bring every enterprise in whole localities, indeed whole tracts of country, completely to a standstill. In this respect the damage done by hail resembles the damage done by floods, but is mostly confined to smaller tracts of country, so that, unlike the latter, insurance against it is possible without too great a burden on those concerned, provided their circle is wide enough.

“How little viable an organisation of hail insurance over a narrowly circumscribed area is, is shown by the collapse that took place in its time of the hail insurance associations in Württemberg and Hesse, and by the fact that small mutual societies must frequently raise extraordinarily heavy contributions (for example the Ceres in Berlin, in the four years 1887–1890: 175, 99, 133⅓ and 100 per cent of the advance premium).” (Buchenberger, Agrarpolitik, p. 176.)

But where insurance is left to private undertakings, its becoming general is hindered as much by the irregularity of hailstorms in most districts as by the predilection with which they seek out particular localities. In districts in which no hailstorm has occurred for some time, a feeling of security easily arises, which makes the peasant in particular, who does not suffer from a superfluity of ready money, shy away from insurance. The districts particularly endangered by hail, on the other hand, the private companies will not insure at all, or only at prohibitive premiums.

Hence the need has emerged for a state organisation of hail insurance, which has already been introduced to a certain extent in Bavaria and Baden; and the demand for compulsory state insurance can also be justified by the devastation that a hailstorm can cause, which, where there is no insurance, creates such a mass of distress that in many cases, as with flood damage, the state is compelled to intervene and give help. But precisely this necessity of state help where insurance fails also justifies a subsidy by the state, since it relieves the state of the costs of extraordinary relief actions.

Little as we are otherwise enthusiastic about the extension of the powers and of the social functions of the police state, state hail insurance seems to us a very appropriate measure.

But one must not underestimate the possible effects of insurance, private or state. Useful as it is for the individual who is struck by damage, for the others, who have to bear the damage, it means a new tax, which grows the more, the more numerous the fields of insurance and the greater the extent of the damage whose costs the insured have to bear.

But this damage increases more and more with the growth of modern civilisation — not only epidemics of cattle and injury to useful plants, as well as floods, are called forth by it to an ever-increasing extent, but also hailstorms, which, if the theory of Chief Forester Rinicker in Aargau is correct, form most readily over deforested heights, and so are favoured by the decrease of the forests. Insurance leaves the causes of the damage completely untouched; as we have already remarked above, it fails precisely in face of the worst visitations that strike the farmer. It can therefore count only as a meagre substitute for measures designed to make the farmer more independent of the caprices of nature and to subject nature to him. Rational management of forest and water, which reduces floods and hail damage, irrigation works that counteract drought and drainage works that counteract wet, rational selection in breeding useful animals and plants, which seeks to raise not merely the productivity but also the power of resistance of the improved breeds, protection of the insect-eating birds, hygienic cowsheds, suitable feeding and the like: these are measures far more important than insurance. But, to be sure, many of them stand too much in contradiction with the conditions of existence of the small peasant! Just ask him for rational cattle-breeding and cattle-keeping in roomy, clean stalls!

The cattle insurance of the local associations is, as we have seen, at bottom an attempt to gain one of the advantages of the large-scale enterprise by co-operative organisation. In discussing the system of improvements, too, we had to touch on the question of co-operatives. A few more words may be devoted to it here, as the conclusion of our consideration of the means of promoting agriculture that Social Democracy is to champion. We can be brief, since we have expressed ourselves in more detail in an earlier chapter on the role of co-operatives in agriculture.

It may well be said that Social Democracy regards co-operation in general, and so agricultural co-operation in particular, with sympathy. We by no means overestimate it; we do not regard it as a means of saving the peasant mode of production, for it is just as accessible to the large-scale enterprise as to the small, and where it strengthens the latter it at the same time transforms its owner either into a capitalist exploiter or into one of the exploited. Nor do we regard the co-operatives of farmers as a transitional stage to socialism, except in the sense in which every joint-stock company, every large-scale enterprise in general, represents such a transitional stage. But the co-operatives are in any case — and in agriculture far more than in industry — a powerful means of economic development and of the transition from the small to the large-scale enterprise, and they are far preferable to the proper capitalist means of this development, the expropriation of small property. We cannot hinder the latter method of development in present-day society, but we may not support it. With regard to co-operation, on the other hand, one may well do so.

But we must confine ourselves to clearing away any legal obstacles to its unfolding. State subsidies to it, on the other hand, would here again mean nothing other than slipping to particular circles of the propertied a subsidy from the proletariat for the improvement of their personal position. They are not even in the interest of the co-operatives themselves, since they favour unsound foundations and careless handling of money. We will leave quite aside the fact that the disposal of a fund for subsidising co-operatives can become for any government, especially in states that are not democratic, a means of buying political sympathies, a means of corruption after the manner of the Guelph Fund.

A good part of the co-operatives themselves therefore reject subsidies from the state. (Cf. on this, for example, the articles by Dr. H. Crüger in Soziale Praxis, VI, 338, VII, 203.) One may call that Manchesterism, but state help to private persons for the promotion of their private interests is by no means socialism. A social reform that preserves agricultural commodity production by leaving the profit to the entrepreneur and loading the risk on to the state, that is, on to the mass of the population, is no doubt a tempting ideal for the agrarians, but it can neither be carried out on a large scale nor does it lie in the interest of the proletariat.

Besides those mentioned here there is yet another important means of promoting agriculture without holding up economic development, indeed a means that rather accelerates it in the strongest degree: the spread of technical education.

The most important things to be said about it we have already said above, where we dealt with the elementary school. That Social Democracy is ready to promote agricultural education, like industrial education, in every way, beyond the level of the elementary and continuation school as well, that it is not niggardly where it is a question of introducing or improving agricultural secondary schools and colleges, agricultural laboratories and experimental stations, of laying out model farms, of arranging exhibitions and the like, needs no further elaboration.

We believe we have now touched on the most essential factors that come into consideration for the development of agriculture in capitalist society and for the intervention of Social Democracy in this process. After our exposition, no one will any longer want to maintain that our standpoint means “social Manchesterism”. But we readily admit that our demands in many cases do not go beyond the limits of a bourgeois, democratic, social-reforming agrarian programme, and that in “radicalism” they are surpassed by many a programme of agrarians or land reformers. We console ourselves for this shortcoming with the hope that in our agrarian policy we have preserved the unity of industrial and agricultural development, that our standpoint here and there is in full harmony, that in agriculture we do not demand the opposite of what seems to us necessary in industry. Agrarians and land reformers need not trouble themselves about this; to them agriculture appears as an independent whole; but the Social Democrat may regard it only as part of an organism, which can develop only in harmony with that organism.

Practical men will perhaps not find many a demand we have raised appropriate. In testing their appropriateness, what matters is whether they are suited to promote the development of agriculture, not, say, whether they are suited to win the peasants. We admit from the outset that many of our demands, not only those that relate to the protection of labour but also those directed at the restriction of the rights of property in land, may well bring about precisely the opposite of winning the peasants.

But should it turn out that methods appropriate for raising agriculture to a higher level are not appropriate for winning the applause of the peasantry, that would surely indicate not the inappropriateness of those methods but the inappropriateness of the present-day small-peasant mode of production.