HOME SOCIAL CRITICISM LIB. CAT. GO TO NEXT CHAPTER
THE form of cultivation of the soil by peasant-owners is by no means defunct in western civilization. It is in the United States and England that it is insignificant. In France, Germany, Italy, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Bulgaria it still forms an important and, in many countries, a major part. Its unique story in Denmark will be related at the end of the chapter.
"India's 700,000 villages, with their 250 millions of people," writes their stout champion, Sir Daniel Hamilton, in New India, "are India's foundation stones, and most of them are as shaky and unsound as they can be. The rayat is India's key man."
Unsound the present-day ryots are; nevertheless they still have amongst themselves many relics and assets upon which a sound foundation might be built. Let us review these assets as they were in the past, and as relics in the present day.
The peasants still largely preserve their dominant ideas. Mr. W. H. Moreland in The Agrarian System of Moslem India, 1929, contrasts these ideas and those of the present day in the two words "duties" and "rights." Questions of rights are a recent development in Indian agrarian history, and "belong almost entirely to the British period: in Moslem India, as in the India of the Hindus, the agrarian was a matter of duties rather than rights . . . . It was the duty of the peasants to till the soil and pay a share of their produce to the State."
The duties or functions of the peasants were based upon the fundamental unit of their agrarian association; that of the large or joint family. The character of the joint family is, of course, well-known, but its leading features may here be summarized. It consists of an elder man as the head, his wife, his sons, their wives and children; or it may be larger owing to the association of two or more such families due to brothers of the elder generation living together. The links of the family are males of close blood-relationship.
The wives join, the daughters leave the family at marriage. The men of the family pursue the same kind of work. It is this common pursuit and common blood which constitute the family's strength as a social unit and which enables it to perform many co-operative functions automatically, which under the western idea, if not left to chance, have to be undertaken by the State. It is this co-operative character which gives to each Indian agrarian a home of a kind, which can now scarcely be comprehended by a western society, in which the dominant idea of each for himself has so broken up the family that the word "home" may mean a cottage, a room or a flatlet, in which one lives alone. The term home is applied to both, but its significance is widely different in each case.
The joint family supplies each individual with a home, in which there are other individuals to love or it may be hate, to share work with and pleasure with and so have a human basis to life, which seems to be dehumanized by progress. It gives also to the people a close interest in common inevitable things, birth, marriage, children, death, the order of domestic rank and authority, all things that spring instinctively from human association, in which the mutual interest makes individuals accept each other and not shun each other, as is the tendency of the relative isolation of the members of the small western families.
This large family system was the unit of the wider village system, without which that system would not have been possible, without which, indeed, the sectarianism of caste might have overweighed the village associative spirit. The village committee or panchyat (literally a meeting of five) is an association of the different components of the village. As far back in time as the Code of Manu, perhaps three thousand years ago, the formation of village committees by members of various castes was laid down, and in recent times, Brahmin, Vaishya, Sudra, and Moslem have sat and decided on village affairs in mutual fellowship.
The village organization in India has been much weakened under the British. As Mr. C. F. Strickland said in a recent article in The Times, wherever Asiatic countries "have for many years enjoyed the benefits of a regular and `legal-minded' administration, the old spirit of unity has decayed." It is only in China that it is "strong and lively." Nevertheless there are still some striking survivals in India. On these and their originals Mr. John Matthai has written a well-arranged book, Village Government in British India. Mr. Ramesh Chandra Majumdar's Corporate Life in Ancient India is essential for Sanscrit scholars.
In harmony with his subject, Mr. Matthai devotes a special chapter to each separate function of the system. The way in which these functions were carried out give one practical manifestations of the core or heart of the people and offer one practical possibilities of reviving continuity at the present day.
Mr. Matthai at the outset distinguishes a town and a village of approximately the same size by noting that a town, being mainly industrial, has a municipal council, whereas the village has traditional hereditary functionaries, who "have survived in recognisable form almost everywhere." These functionaries are the headman, the accountant, the watchman, the schoolmaster, the superintendent of tanks and water courses, and so on. There is also the village council or panchyat. This and the functionaries carry out public work. The construction and repair of public buildings and wells, the distribution of the irrigated and common land, the administration of village co-operative societies, are matters "in which village communities even now show a perceptible amount of common life and purpose."
The village self-governing community, which Munro and others sought so carefully to preserve, is not defunct and is still capable of restoration. Indeed its restoration has powerful advocates, as we shall see in this chapter. One may here be quoted. The Royal Commission on Decentralization in India of 1909 concluded: "We are of the opinion that the foundation of any stable edifice which shall associate the people with the administration must be the village as being an area of much greater antiquity than administrative creations such as tahsils, and one in which people are known to one another and have interests which converge on well-recognized objects."
The method of election of the village panchyat, as might be suspected, differs from that of public bodies under the western system. In the west each vote is individual and, by the secret ballot is made the secret of that individual. The general associative principle, based on the large family system, alters all that. Under it the people gather together and talk and argue as in a family, until a general associated opinion emerges, which is accepted by all. There is, therefore, no voting, and no majority rule. The panchyat, when assembled, comes to its decisions in the same way. It hears evidence and discusses until a common opinion emerges, which all accept.
Mr. Matthai, after an introductory chapter, begins with one on the first function, that of Education. The village schoolmaster was one of the regular hereditary functionaries of the old system. He had his recognized place and was paid by the land, which was the general paymaster, that is to say he was given a piece of land rent-free or/and, he was given, what Mr. Matthai conveniently terms "grain-fees," that is to say his share in the produce of the village. Some such schoolmasters still exist and belong to the ancient hereditary class of "gurus." There are to-day also quite modern teachers, who come to the villages with a view to making a living and start "venture schools." These teachers may be "gurus" who have not found a place in their own villages, or they may be University graduates or failed graduates, who have not been able to get official or urban employment.
A stronger urban influence is the official education in the hands of District Boards and other agencies. It is interesting, however, to learn that the Government has become fully aware that schools set up in villages by the District Boards will not flourish until they are injected with the old communal village interest. To effect this, the Government has introduced village committees in connection with schools under the management of District and Local Boards. They have, in fact, tried to engraft the old upon the new rather than replant the old. Without a radical change of principle, it is difficult to imagine what else they could do. "The degree of success attained by these schools," writes Mr. Matthai, "varies in the different provinces. There is a widespread tendency among inspecting officers to lament the so far discouraging achievements of the village committee system," but "in one province at any rate, namely the Central Provinces, it has justified in a large measure the expectation of its founders and the cause of its success here is a proof that in India local institutions of the kind do not altogether fail where a sufficient degree of genuine responsibility is laid upon them, but they flag and droop where the forms of local autonomy are emptied of real responsibility and power. The unanimous testimony of imperial and provincial reports attributes the success of village school committees in Central Provinces to the power given to them to utilize the fee collections of the school. This amount of financial responsibility, apparently small but in a village not to be lightly regarded, has acted as a strong force in stimulating interest in local matters."
The next function of the village taken by Mr. Matthai is that of Poor Relief. In the words of the Report of the Indian Famine Committee of 1880: "India has a poor law, but it is unwritten; it is owing to the profound sense which is felt by all classes of the religious duty of succouring, according to their means, the indigent and helpless who have claims on them as members of the family, the caste, or the town or village that in ordinary times no State measures of relief are needed."
The relief of the poor then is another automatically performed function, which is possible when a group of people is co-operative. Something of the same effect was produced by the co-operative spirit of the Middle Ages in Europe. "Up to the end of the Middle Ages poverty had never been a problem. On the land everyone had a status which gave security; in the towns the merchant guilds and then the craft guilds took care of the unfortunate or sick members; and the very few people who moved about the countryside could always count upon the monasteries for relief. Poverty was of so little importance that it was regarded as a divinely ordered institution which gave the charitable a means of acquiring merit through almsgiving." (Milner.)
The poor relief of the village system has, like so much else of the humble. agrarian's system, been grievously injured by the urban influence and its dominant idea in practice. It is not, however, altogether dead, for land is still set aside for the purpose of poor relief, cesses still put upon village artisans for the maintenance of their unfortunates, and a part of the crops set aside for the poor.
Not very long after the time of the thirty officials of our first chapter, the village system of poor relief was rediscovered, as it were, by the British. They found that it could be organized against the chief danger of the peasants, famine. The British, with their characteristic practicality, felt the challenge of this great problem. And here they applied studentship. They set commissions to enquire what exactly was this village system in its service during famine time. And the result was that they found an instrument to which, by applying their superior resources and power of organization, they were able to impart an efficiency which brought the appalling features of famine to an end. It was a fine, perhaps the finest combination of British officials and traditional Indian methods. It was, indeed, a feat with all the quality of the Genro, objective study and applied added power. The British themselves had no doubt of the value of these village organizations with which they had worked. In the Report of the Indian Famine Commission of 1880, they wrote: "For the future progress of the country, the encouragement of the principle of local self-government by which business of all kinds should be left more and more to local direction, is of much moment and nowhere more so than in dealing with local distress, and however great be the difficulties in the way of its early practical realization, it will be well never to lose the opportunity of taking every step that may lead towards it." Such was the result of coming into an exceptionally intimate and urgent comradeship or partnership with the village system.
The next function of the village, dealt with by Mr. Matthai, is that of Sanitation. The village system, it seems, mostly combined the service of scavenging with police work. "This class of village servants have furnished the material in most provinces for the useful body of rural policemen. Their duties are multifarious, of which menial sanitary service forms not the least important part. They sweep the lanes and remove impurities, keep the village meeting-house clean, patrol the village at night, act as messengers to the headman, serve as referees on matters affecting the village boundaries, guard the crops, assist in agricultural operations, attend on Government officials who visit the village, and carry palanquins and torches at festivals. As a rule they are menials of the lowest caste, and take up their residence on the outskirts of the village." Their duties, nevertheless, show what an important part the lowest caste does form in the general village life.
Sir F. S. Lely, writing his suggestions re "Better Government in India" in 1906, with special reference to his own province of Bombay, has some very interesting remarks on the modern government's interference with this system. "Our village sanitary requirements are a constant irritation. The truth is the habits of the people are more cleanly than those of corresponding Europeans, though, following up the old, old mistake, we imagine they are not simply because they are different." He believed that if powers be given to the panchyat, it would have brought in better sanitation on village lines. "I cannot but think legislature in touch with the people," wrote Sir Lely, "would have included in the Village Act optional provisions enabling the Panch, in lieu of contributions and establishments, to compel each and every householder to keep his house clean, both back and front, by private arrangement with one of the village sweepers, and also to give his quota in labour, if he chose, when any public work had to be done, such as cleaning the tank (reservoir), emptying the well, or filling up a hole. This would have been working up from ancient village custom instead of down from a foreign and not yet assimilated institution."
Mr. F. L. Brayne, of the Gurgaon District of the Punjab, is of a different opinion as to his district to that of Sir Frederick Lely of the Bombay Presidency. Brayne found his villages so filthy that in this particular he suspended the admirable principle of his "village uplift," namely to make the villagers themselves first wish to carry out works of betterment, and brought his official authority in to enforce greater cleanliness. It is true that he says that Gurgaon is "one of the most ignorant, backward, and poverty-stricken districts in the Punjab" (1926). But he claims that what he writes is not overrated "for Hindustan proper." It is to be noted that he writes twenty years after Sir Frederick and nearly half a century after the Famine Commissioners and that he is a practical man, writing only of what he himself observes. In that period the authority of the panchyats has weakened owing to the working down from foreign and not assimilated institutions in place of working up from ancient customs, as Sir Frederick recommended. The general weakening of old agrarian methods and the strengthening of urban methods have accelerated since the war and the birth and upbringing of the Reforms. This antagonism and discouragement have led to a great indolence settling down upon the village co-operative spirit. Any village lad of enterprise, instead of putting his energies to the improvement of village life, tends to escape to the place which power patronizes: the town. One has something a little comparable to a feature of our first chapter, that of the migration of more adventurous peasants from the defeated native system to the victorious and more powerful British system.
The next village function is that of Public Works, such as the erection of public buildings, the making and protection of water reservoirs or tanks, the making and care of canals. These being for the common weal were carried out by the common will, that is by free labour. Nowadays Government puts a cess or tax upon the villagers and pays labourers to do the work, which is against the will of the ryots, who "would much prefer supplying the labour to paying a cess." The Indian Irrigation Committee of 1901-1903 recommended that the administration of the cess should be given to local panchyats as the people would then "feel a proprietary interest and pride in their tank." The old spirit of self-government alone would make the reservoir, canal, etc., really live, one might say. Otherwise, if administered by government in a foreign way, the tank or canal becomes uncared for, and itself loses its function with that of the supplanted panchyat. When one realizes that in the Madras Presidency, for example, irrigation by small tanks and canals, which the villagers managed themselves, irrigate "collectively an area equal to that irrigated by all the larger works which have been constructed by the British Government in that Presidency," one realizes that decay of agriculture and village enterprise, which is put down even by such well-wishers of the village as Mr. F. L. Brayne to "a set of customs which are utterly opposed to any progress--moral, social, physical, or natural," may well have been caused by the disintegration of those same customs and of the traditional village spirit. One can be intimate with the villagers, one can work for them in that truly admirable way which has been Mr. Brayne's great practical achievement, but even then one may miss the first principle of "customs," namely that if the spirit is alive, active, responsible, and reactive, those customs are living, pliant, adaptive. Injure the spirit and the customs partake of that injury and themselves become injurious.
"In the ancient village community, the headman had the principal direction of the arrangement of Watch and Ward," writes Mr., Matthai. "His chief executive assistant was the village watchman, who stood to him practically in the relation of a personal servant." The watchmen acted as police within the village. For outside protection, at the time of the breakdown of the Moghul Empire, a village might enter into an agreement with a robber chief. The British replaced these outer police with their own police and at first linked up the watchmen with the official police. This subjective arrange;ment aroused the wrath of Munro in 1824. To absorb the watchmen in a British-modelled police, he proclaimed, would be fatal to any true police decency. In its place would be a native official organization to squeeze the people. No system "can ever answer that is not drawn from its ancient institutions and assimilated with them." Various different adjustments of the police have been made since the clear enunciation of Munro. Most of these are infused with his principle that the village watchman must not be placed in direct subordination to the regular police.
Lastly, Mr. Matthai has a most interesting chapter of the village function of the Administration of Justice.
Panchyat justice was informal; it was the effect of a general common sense being brought to bear on the case in hand. A chosen body of men met to arbitrate, conciliate, punish, or come to no conclusion according to how the evidence impressed them. It was not a system, for the joint family spirit is not given to systems. As Mr. Lin Yutang says of another huge joint family people: "The Chinese as a race are unable to have any faith in a system. For a system, a machine, is always inhuman."
In the panchyat, directed by men chosen amongst others by himself, the peasant spoke the truth. In the Adalat or British courts, he did not speak the truth, he tried to build up the best case for himsellf, or the side for which he was appearing, that he could. As Sir William Sleeman said in his Rambles and Recollections, 1844, it was almost impossible to arrive at the truth in a British court, whereas it was easy to get it from the same men in a panchyat. "I believe there are no people in the world from whom it is more easy to get it in their own village communities where they state it before their relations, elders, and neighbours, whose esteem is necessary to happiness and can be obtained only by an adherence to the truth."
It is the same to this day. Evidence in a British Court is fantastically unreliable. I know no illustration of subjectivity more distressing intellectually in India than that of the legal profession. The profession's ideal is to establish the truth and its actuality is that it creates a mass of untruths, to which judges and magistrates listen day after day, fully aware of the anomaly.
The panchyat, on the other hand, whenever set up "almost instinctively shows a tendency to settle disputes among the villagers." This illustrates particularly well, what I have called the automatic quality of the village system. Where, however, the panchyat is incorporated as part of the judicial system, it wilts and loses its spontaneity. In its free form, it has been set up but rarely in the last thirty years. Government welcomes it, but it must be willing to attire itself in official uniform. With this proviso, the Government in 1915 approved of the very important recommendation of the Royal Commission on Decentralization in India of 1907 for "the constitution and development of village panchyats possessed with certain administrative powers and with jurisdiction in petty civil and criminal cases." The difficulty was to fit them to Government's central authority and this led to Government's decision to decentralize only in part and to "leave the matter in the hands of local Governments and Administrations."
Central Government, however, laid down seven interesting and distinctive general principles. The first was that the experiments in the creation of these panchyats should be made where the villagers were willing to try. The second was that the form of the panchyat should not be identical in every village but allow for the old variety. The third that the same panchyat should be administrative and judicial. The fourth than any present form of panchyat should be merged in the new panchyats. The fifth and sixth that the panchyat should have control of certain fees, and be permitted a limited right to tax. The seventh that, if financed by district and sub-district boards, some supervision by these boards must be allowed. The whole constitute a remarkable reversion to the wisdom, that only that is beneficial to a people, which comes from its core; or, in the words of Munro, no system "can ever answer that is not drawn from its ancient institutions and assimilated with them."
Mr. Matthai writes from the London School of Economics. Nevertheless he himself confesses in his introduction to a limitation of his book, namely the exclusion of "the whole subject of land revenue," though "in the administration of land revenue, village communities and officers play an important part, both in the collection of the taxes and in maintaining the necessary accounts. This, in fact, is their most important share in village administration. Every other thing they do comes a long way behind it in importance. The subject, however, is dealt with in such detail in Baden-Powell's book, The Land Systems of British India, that it is profitless to attempt a less full and clear account here. Besides, the subject of land revenue in India is so enormously complex that on a short and second-hand study it seems much the safer thing, in spite of its obvious disadvantages, to leave the subject alone as far as possible."
The Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, confined by its terms of reference, follows the same course. Although, as Mr. Matthai says, this is the most important subject, there is nothing about it in the Commission's Report, and "Land Revenue" neither heads a chapter, nor appears in the index. It is the same with the subject of taxation. That neither heads a chapter nor appears in the index. Yet what Munro wrote in 1822 : "the welfare of every class of the community depends so much upon the amount of public burdens and the manner in which they are distributed and levied," is certainly not untrue to-day for the peasantry. It is this which Mr. Matthai, in fact, still singles out as the thing which is of greatest importance to the village communities.
One would have thought, then, that a discussion of land revenue and taxation would have some bearing on the Commissioners' duty to make recommendations for "the promotion of the welfare and prosperity of the rural population." One feels how absolutely the present of the peasantry is set within the ambit of the great centralized money system, which has become as automatic to us of an urban civilization, as once was the village system in its functions. Everyone assumes that the agrarian is but a part of this money system, as unquestionably as that he has to breathe the air. Because of this automatism of habit and authority, it is very difficult to think oneself or to persuade anyone else to think of the agrarian as historically outside that ambit.
As regards Land Revenue, I feel myself unequal to the task of describing it far more than does Mr. Matthai of a School of Economics, or, further, of showing the effect which the English system had upon those varied land systems of India, which are the subject of Mr. Baden-Powell's three substantial volumes. There can be no doubt that such subjectivity was considerable. Munro in 1824 was, as usual, very clear. "The ruling vice of our Government is innovation; and its innovation has been so little guided by a knowledge of the people that, though made after what was thought by us to be mature discussion, it must appear to them as little better than the result of mere caprice. We have in our anxiety to make everything as English as possible in a country which resembles England in nothing, attempted to create at once, throughout extensive provinces, a kind of landed property which had never existed in them; and in pursuit of this object, we have relinquished the rights which the sovereign always possessed in the soil, and we have in many cases deprived the real owners, the occupant ryots, of their proprietary rights, and bestowed them on zemindars and other imaginary landlords. Changes like these can never effect a permanent settlement in any country; they are rather calculated to unsettle whatever was before deemed permanent."
Munro, in brief, stood for the principle which had prevailed for a long series of centuries, the principle which the great economist, Kautilya, laid down in the Arthdsastra: "The rise of a body of non-cultivating proprietors is to be avoided."
As regards the payment of the land tax, it was in the past paid in kind as a produce-share to the king, who was held to be the final owner of the land.
This produce-share, says Baden-Powell in a Short Account of Land Revenue (1907) "became general at a remote period. It is mentioned as a thing long known and established in the 'Laws of Manu.' The share was one sixth, or one fourth at times of war or emergency. It later sometimes rose to a half. The Moghul Emperors fixed one third as a fair rate."
There were many advantages of this plan, writes Baden-Powell: "Being a share of gross production, there was no question of any complicated calculations of the cultivator's profit, or the costs of production, nor about the relative value of the land, or the productiveness of the season. Whatever the land produced, little or much, was heaped on the threshing floor, and the king's officer superintended its division in kind. In a famine year there might be nothing to divide and so revenue relief followed automatically." Being a share of gross production, moreover, the tax entailed an active interest of the king in the peasants' agriculture.
This system, then, does stand quite outside the ambit of modern finance. It shows, morover, that payment of the tax in money is not relative to the agrarian. When the agrarian principle dominated, the king's officer took the tax in kind.
This simple system did not, however, pursue an uninterrupted course from the ancient Hindu period, through the Moghuls, to the British. The Moghul law, as given in the Futawa Alumgerree, had two forms of tax, one for the faithful, and one for those not of the Moslem faith. That for the faithful was the Khiraj Mookassimah and was in fact payment in kind. The other for the non-Moslem was the Khiraj Wuseefa and was a tax, and if possible a money tax, levied on the land. Akbar made this a cash assessment for ten years and based it on the average price of grain for the previous nineteen years. It could not always be levied. "When a providential calamity happens to a crop, which could not be prevented, such as an inundation, conflagration, excessive cold and the like, there is no Khiraj," was the ordinance. Some flexibility of agrarian necessity had to be given to it, but the absolute flexibility of the Hindu method was taken away from it by the introduction of money. Money related the tax to other things and circumstances not agrarian. It weakened the peasant by a partial separation from the soil. It was as if the Herculean Money uplifted him from the soil like a humble Anatæus and weakened him, but as yet not mortally for the uplifting separation was not complete.
Payment in kind the peasant understood and trusted. It depended upon things which were under his eyes and the skilled control of his own hands, and upon the king's officer, whom he knew, and upon his own panchyat, but when once he began to pay in a substance which he did not himself cultivate, he became subject to the unknown forces of unseen masters, who themselves controlled that substance.
Akbar "softened the novelty of his system by leaving it optional with the cultivators to give grain or cash as they preferred" (Baden-Powell). As the Moghul Empire declined, so did the method of taxing the agrarian, until with increasing anarchy it degenerated into "what could be extracted from the cultivator without reducing him or his cattle to semi-starvation." The increasing difficulties of an enfeebled government led to the farming of the revenue. "The Revenue Farmer, or Zemindar as we may now call him, was at first carefully appointed and watched, but as Treasuries grew empty, they, the bankers of their time, were the only persons who could be looked to for money. They naturally felt that they were indispensable and enlarged their pretensions accordingly . . . . The Zemindars, in fact, did just as they pleased, and made the villagers pay whatever they demanded or whatever they could extract from them."
Such was the degenerate mode of taxation of the peasants when the British began to build up their power after the ruin of that of the Moghul. It may be recalled that it was the form of taxation in certain Native States, upon which some of the officials of our first chapter reported upon as so disliked by the peasants in comparison with the honest British method. In some parts of India the tax was paid in kind, but in others it was paid in cash. In Bengal and other parts of the Moghul Empire, writes Baden-Powell, "the Land Revenue had for generations past been levied in cash payments; its assessment (often by contract for the year) was determined by no known principle. All traces of a share in the produce and a valuation of that share in money had long disappeared."
The confusion of the essential relation of the food-producing agrarian and the non-food-producing classes in this period was due not only to the decadence of the Moghul governments, but also to the making of the peasants' tax a money tax. The essential thing about the relation between the productive and non-productive is that the peasants shall deliver a portion of the soil's produce, which the others must have to live. This was done under a Hindu custom by a direct payment of the soil's produce, a payment in kind, which linked the two classes together. Money necessarily led to a separation, and made the whole relationship subject to all sorts of outside influences. Baden-Powell says that the payment of the tax in kind has many disadvantages as well as advantages. The disadvantages do not seem very great, as he states them. They are that "unless actively supervised, the peasantry conceal or make away with grain, and local collectors, on their part, cheat both the peasantry and the treasury." Two pages later he describes the evils that came from the Moghul system. In this case also there was pilfering. In the first case he does not say whether the townspeople were ever actually starved because the peasantry cheated the revenue officers, but in the second case he does say that the revenue officers sometimes nearly starved the peasants. They became adepts at "squeezing and letting go. It was only a few rapacious tyrants and short-lived Revenue-officers who habitually transgressed the rule of not killing `the goose who laid the golden eggs.' " On the whole there seems to be little question that the peasants were much the less dangerous oppressors to the townsfolk than vice versa.
It may be claimed that the payment of the agrarian tax in kind is antique and finished. Has not Baden-Powell said that in many parts of the Moghul Empire, when taken over by the British, revenue had for generations been levied in money and "all traces of share in the produce had long disappeared"? But the method is by no means dead, for the same author writes: "The collection in kind is still largely practised in India. In many Native States (especially in the Hill country and in the more primitive districts) the State is still paid in grain; and in some British districts (very commonly e.g. in the Punjab) where the land has passed into the hands of the landlord class, what was once the State share, and is now the landlord's rent, is taken in kind."
Here, then, is another root to which the present-day peasantry could be linked up to recreate continuity. I am fully aware that every kind of objection can rush into a reader's mind. I am aware that there are two sorts of agrarian crops, the subsistence crop grown for the subsistence of the village, and the money crop grown for the outside market. Clearly the first, the subsistence crop, is in history the more ancient, it is the one to which payment in kind belonged, and is therefore the one to which it is particularly fitted. There is no reason to think that payment of this tax in kind would be impossible to-day. If it was possible in the past, it is, with modern accessibility, certainly possible to-day.
But, essentially, it needs re-thinking out objectively, leading to a transvaluation of values in the sphere of economics, which, I suggest, is possibly of supreme importance. Payment of taxes in kind, namely in products of the soil, relates economics at the outset to foods. With such taxes, the nation starts to be wealthy actually in terms of food, i.e. in the quality and amount which it receives of them through this payment in kind.
Economics, finance, currency, consequently all take upon themselves a different character and direction. The ship of state and state-finance is seen tohave a different rudder, which, though its small-scale movement is separate from the bulky movement of the great vessel, nevertheless determines the dirction of that movement.
Through payment of taxes in kind, then, money and finance receive that for which many economic reformers of the day are groping, namely a primary initiation of national economics in things that are vitally necessary to men and without which they could not exist. It may, indeed, be questioned whether there is any other way by which this relation, this initiatory consecration, can be achieved.
Such a primary linkage is certainly attained by payment of taxes in kind on the part of the class which carries out subsistence farming, according to the customary methods of their own countries; for example, in England by mixed farming. The adoption of payment in kind would, I believe, have a particular and unique effect in bringing national finance actually to earth, and to forcing it to start, as does almost all else that is human, from the creative soil itself.
The revival of payment in kind by the peasant or subsistence-farmer is not, therefore, without promising clarifying effects upon the revaluation of economic values. But, apart from this, its revival has for its justification the claims of peasant tradition. Payment in kind is essentially the method of payment relative to the subsistence-farming peasant, and it is the only way by which he can be placed and preserved outside the ambit of the money system.*
*The danger of peasants coming undefended within the ambit of the money system has been shown recently in the Nyasaland Protectorate. A Committee was appointed by the Governor in 1933 to enquire into the cause of the exodus of working males from Nyasaland which "brought misery and poverty to hundreds and thousands of families . . . the waste of life, happiness, is colossal." One half of the young able-bodied is said to be abroad working chiefly in the mines of neighbouring countries. The chief reason is that these agrarians have to get something to which they are unaccustomed, namely cash for the cash payment of the hut or poll tax. This, says the Report, is the "omnipresent and overwhelmingly important cause of the exodus." Like trouble and like cause are reported from Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and Basutoland, and also from the Belgian Congo. They form striking examples of the effect on peasants of what seems natural enough to an urban. a money tax.
With purely money-crops grown by the agrarian, a money tax seems more congruous. It is the growing of money-crops which takes agrarian India into "the vortex of world prices and markets and whether she likes it or not can never get out of it," as Mr. Brayne fatedly expresses it. The danger is much lessened by a combination with subsistence farming. In West Africa, for example, where the peasants cultivate such money-crops as cocoa, their subsistence farming enables them to carry on throughout a slump or period of depression, though they forego their luxuries.
The next subject to discuss, but one to which Mr. Matthai does not allude, is the actual nature of the peasants' money.
The use a peasant makes of actual money is small. His income, according to the Central Banking Enquiry Committee, averages Rs 42 a year. The traditional nature of this money of India may be indicated by a passage from the letter to Colbert written by the French traveller, Bernier, nearly three centuries ago: "Although this Empire of the Mogol is such an abyss for gold and silver, as I said before, these precious metals are not in greater plenty here than elsewhere; on the contrary, the inhabitants have less the appearance of a moneyed people than those of many other parts of the globe. In the first place, a large quantity is melted, re-melted, and wasted, in fabricating women's bracelets, both for the hands and feet, chains, earrings, nose and finger rings, and a still larger quantity is consumed in manufacturing embroideries; alaches, or striped silken stuffs; touras, or fringes of gold lace, worn on turbans; gold and silver cloths; scarfs, turbans, or brocades. The quantities of these articles made in India is incredible."
Bernier, it must be noted, wrote as a Westerner when he used the word "wasted." But, apart from the ornamental effect, this use of metal had traditionally something very important to the Indian peoples. It was a storage of wealth in a form which could, if need be, be turned into cash, in short the word "stored" would have been a better word than "wasted."
The peasant stored up such precious metal as he could accumulate as bracelets and anklets for his women folk, who wore it continuously and were therefore its obligatory guardians. When he was in distress he took one or more bangles and had them coined into silver rupees. Silver was essentially his money, though there were also smaller coins of baser metal. A richer man adorned his family with gold ornaments and gold and silver brocades and cloths, all of which could be turned into gold coins. Lastly, the princes and kings, in addition to gold and silver, had precious stones. Royal jewels could not, however, be turned into cash with the facility of gold and silver, because they were considered as the sacred property of the Crown and not as the private property of the king.
The chief means, therefore, of this private hoarding was the precious metals. Of these there were plenty, for India exported more than she imported. The Roman writer, Pliny (A.D. 23-79), had termed her "a veritable sink of the precious metals" for this reason; and a writer in Blackwood's Magazine in November, 1928, states: "India's total absorption throughout the 430 years (from the discovery of the sea route to India) to date has been 553 million sterling in gold and 4,556 million sterling worth of silver." The amount absorbed before the discovery of the sea route, he adds, must be immense, but cannot be calculated. Together they show that a great amount of gold and a still greater amount of silver are held in India and very largely as a safeguard against what in England is called "a rainy day," but in India would be called "a dry day," that is to say a failure of the monsoon leading to poor harvests or actual famine.
The peasant was, then, able to supply his own coin. He took a bangle to the sowcar, who weighed it. The sowcar it was who knew how to send it to a mint and get it turned into equivalent rupees, which were themselves weighed by the recipient. As a decentralized method of the creation of money, it was both simple and close to individual needs. With this control of such little actual cash as he required, and with the panchyat's control of the village moneylender, the peasant's financial system was in the past a thing much of his own self.
All this the British Government has changed. There were, in the past, a number of mints in India. In 1835 the Government standardized the rupee at two mints, that of Calcutta and of Bombay. Coins of different kinds continued, however, to be minted at various centres and in Native States, and, though not legal, in the British sense, were readily used by the agrarians. In 1862 the Government, as a further step in money centralization, took over the printing of banknotes from the private banks. This, however, did not affect the peasant, who did not use banks, and, moreover, with his average income of forty rupees odd a year, had and still has little use for perishable paper with rupees five or ten printed on it.
The time-honoured custom of the people to turn women's ornaments into rupees, however, was abolished by the Government in 1893. By Act VIII of that year the Indian mints were closed to the unrestricted coinage of silver.
With the technical reasons for this uprooting of custom I am not concerned, but only with its subjective character. That is clearly shown in the Report of the Indian Currency Committee upon which the Act was based. It is stated in the very first paragraph: "1. The question referred to the Committee by your Lordship is whether, having regard to the grave difficulties with which the Government of India are confronted through the heavy fall in the gold value of silver, it is expedient that Her Majesty's Government should allow them to carry into effect the proposals which they have made for stopping the free coinage of silver in India with the view to the introduction of a gold standard."
The loss to Government was shown by a number of figures. If the Government could have paid its dues in England in 1892-93, at the rate of exchange of 1873-74, it would have saved itself 872 lacs of rupees, which was less than one seven hundredth of the silver in India as given in Blackwood's Magazine. It was a trifling sum also when compared to recent agrarian losses, which are said to have amounted to 54,786 lacs between 1928 and 1933.
What was the Government's immediate gain was the peasants' immediate loss. The uncoined silver of the peasants "would certainly be depreciated in value," says the Report. A far more important loss to the peasants was also clearly recognized in the Report: "In times of scarcity and famine a considerable quantity of silver ornaments has found its way to the mints. During the period of the great famine in 1877 and the following years, for example, large quantities of such ornaments were minted" and thus turned into cash. The Committee men, in fact, realized the safety this ancient system afforded to the peasantry, yet they destroyed it because of a temporary upset of their money system.
As regards the important functionary of the Indian village, the moneylender, sowcar, or mahajan, there is no need to repeat what has been written in Chapter VII. The correction of the evils done to villagers by the moneylenders under the dominant idea of modern civilization, has become a burning question of the day. Not only in India, but in almost all countries of the world, agriculturists are now shackled by debts. As regards India, "the most outstanding feature of Indian rural economy," says the Indian Year Book (1936), "is the chronic and almost hopeless indebtedness of the cultivator. The Central Banking Enquiry Committee has estimated that the total rural indebtedness in India is about Rs 900 crores. Though indebtedness of the agricultural population has been there from old times, it is acknowledged that the indebtedness has arisen considerably during the last century and more especially during the last 50 years. This colossal burden of debt is the root problem which has to be faced in any attempt towards the economic regeneration of the masses."
In order therefore primarily to loosen the hold of the modern, law-supported, sowcar upon the peasants, another method of village finance has been set up, the well-known co-operative system which was first reported upon by Sir Frederick Nicholson in the year following the taking away by Government of the peasants' customary right to turn their silver into coins. In 1927, after considerable trial in many countries, the League of Nations gave its official blessing to this system at the International Economic Conference: "The first condition for surmounting the difficulties of agriculture is the organization of suitable credit institutions. The best form of institution appears to be the co-operative credit society operating by means of resources which the very fact of association enables it to procure and to increase with or without the assistance of the public authorities."
This resolution of the League seems clearly to indicate that a separate financial system was needed for the agrarian, one which depended on the very fact of the association of agrarians together--in short, upon such a thing as the old village system of India in which the peasants were accustomed to act together. Agrarian co-operation had been very successful in Germany, where it had its origin, in Italy and other countries, and in India in 1909 it received its governmental recognition in the Co-operative Credit Societies Act. The aim of the Act was to encourage thrift and cooperation by the establishment of small credit societies for the agrarian and village artisan by the loan of sums at much less interest than the sowcar charged. The object, indeed, was to put in the midst of the village a better sowcar, a sowcar which considered its function first and its personal profit second. The new sowcar was to be a controlled sowcar, but the final control was not to be that of the panchyat but that of the assisting and supporting Government.
The growth of these credit or moneylending societies has been very great. The Indian Year Book of 1938 says there are now about 94,000 agricultural societies with funds that have increased from about 68 lakhs in 1910 to about Rs 100 crores of which the members contribute 40 crores. The present number of members is about 4,500,000. Nevertheless, says the Year Book, though these figures are so satisfactory it must be admitted that they in themselves are not sufficient to base conclusions upon. The organisation may be admirable in appearance, but the spirit actuating it may be foreign and ill-adapted.
The system has now the many thousand village credit societies or banks, and co-ordinating them are central banks and the provincial banks or Apex banks, of which there are at present seven. These Apex banks have connected up "with the Imperial Bank of India and have secured cash credit accommodation on furnishing security." This string of banks leading up to the Imperial Bank shows that this agricultural money system is not independent of the dominant money system. It is still within the ambit of that system.
The security of all these institutions is ultimately the property and produce of its members, the humble agrarians. The large landowners do not take much part in the credit societies, whose small short loans are less suitable to their needs. For them there are land mortgage banks. The co-operative system, then, is a plan by which the land, in particular of the ryots and the lesser landowners, is made the basis of a great centralized credit organization, like the great centralized urban banking system, except that the agrarian credit banks are co-operatively managed.
As the Year Book says, mere figures are not enough to prove success. Success also depends on the system being adapted to the innate character of its members. The Year Book's own present conclusions are that in 31 years, the movement has fallen far short of its objective. One test of success is the promptness with which loans are repaid by members. "On the 30th June, 1933, the overdue loans in agricultural societies amounted to Rs 13, 00, 76, 376 as compared with Rs 11, 63, 33, 585 the year before; the working capital of the agricultural societies was Rs 34, 38, 74, 459 ; the loans due by individuals were Rs 27, 94, 72, 035. The overdue loans were therefore 38 per cent of the working capital and 47 per cent of the total loans due by individuals . . . . This continued growth of overdue loans is an ominous portent and reflects very badly on the soundness of the co-operative structure. The loans, having been based on the basis of the assets of members, the ultimate solvency of the societies is beyond dispute; but the severe pressure on members and consequent wholesale liquidation of the societies would react very seriously both politically and economically." The reason which the Year Book gives for this unsoundness is not the slump, though that has "increased the terrible load of overdue loans in rural credit societies," but it is something inherent in the borrowing ryot.
The ryot, indeed, found the new sowcar a better sowcar, so he joined a society and did his best to get away from the old sowcar. As the Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India says: "Experience has shown that the chief object of borrowing from village societies has been to substitute a loan on reasonable terms for the usurious contract with the moneylender." At first the societies encouraged this wish and advanced enough money to pay off the sowcar. But it was found this did not free the agrarian from his habit of debt. "The debtor fails to make an effort to pay the regular instalments even when they are well within his capacity, and slips back into his old state of bondage. It is now generally accepted that such attempts should not be made by co-operative societies until the debtor has learned habits of punctuality and thrift."
Similarly the ryot uses his new sowcar for his old habits. He borrows for marriage and other ceremonies, which play in his life that place of festival which seems a necessary relief to life's routine. "Loans are also required for marriage and other ceremonial expenses. It is the duty of committees of cooperative societies to use all their powers to reduce extravagant expenditure on this account."
There now comes again one of those subtle differences, which can make a good an evil. The sowcar, in his function as shopkeeper to the villagers, allows them the goods they require, though often they have not the grain or cash wherewith to pay him, at such times as before harvest for instance. He waits for payment and even then prefers part to full payment, which would lose him his debtors and suppliers of produce. Consequently the ryots pay him a share of each crop according as they get returns from the land, that is to say at irregular intervals and in irregular amounts in proportion to the size of the crop. Not so the bank with a precise and regular Audit, which is the statutory function of the important government official, the Registrar. Unlike the sowcar the bank wants its loans repaid regularly and precisely. So, though both moneylenders have the British law to support them, the bank is much more inclined and even forced to make use of it than is the sowcar. "It seems advisable," write the Commissioners, "to add a final warning against a tendency, which besets all institutions of this character, to become possessed of land by foreclosure . . . . If the Committee rests satisfied with the covering of the loan by a sufficient security and neglects to measure the prospects of repayment in the light of the character and business reputation of the borrower, their institution will merely develop into a machine for dispossessing the ancestral owner." They give an example of this in Burma, where it was found that, owing to overborrowing and defaulting, the bank adopted a policy of foreclosure and in three years rapidly became possessed of many acres of peasants' land. "A situation of increasing seriousness had arisen. The weapon placed in the hands of the cultivator to enable him to defeat the usurious moneylender had proved itself to be two-edged. The business of the bank was operating in the direction of expropriating the smaller cultivating owner in favour of the larger landlord." Similarly the Year Book states that the cooperative banks particularly in Bombay and Madras have "lost their cooperative character in a great measure and have become business bodies," and moneylending businesses, of course, make use of foreclosure.
So the instinct, which resulted in England in the dispossession of the yeoman and small landowner in favour of the large landowner, lies hidden, with all its possible consequences, like a snake in the grass in this generous co-operative system. It might well prove better for the ryot, in the main thing that matters to him at the present day, the holding of his land, if he had remained debtor to the sowcar, in place of becoming debtor to a co-operative system, whose chief enemy and almost cause of being is this same sowcar.
Nevertheless, the old-fashioned native sowcar, has in some places almost been driven out from any business connection with co-operators. This is especially so in the Punjab, where co-operation has had its best success. "In hundreds of villages the moneylender's ascendancy has been definitely broken," writes Sir M. Darling with legitimate pride, "and in many the members of the local village bank owe him nothing at all." Yet even in such successes for "energy, straight-dealing, and self-reliance," there lurks a possible danger. If the sowcar gets entirely driven out, and there remains only the bank, and if the bank, in the words of the Year Book already quoted, loses its co-operative character and becomes a business body, who knows but that little by little the thriftless and inefficient, those with little thrift, those with thrift but not enough, pledging themselves as individuals, might, one after another, fall into the state of dispossessed and evicted peasants? History is only too crowded with the undesired and appalling effects that steal over a people unawares.
The Agricultural Commissioners contemplate with something like despair the dubious state of the co-operative system and quote with approval from a memorandum by Mr. W. H. Moreland upon the question of the possible "progress" and "better living" of the ryots. For better living "a vague aspiration now exists and, I suspect, always has existed, but it is rendered ineffective by an inhibition, which has to be broken up before large-scale progress is possible. In other words, the central problem is now psychological not technical."
What is this inhibition that suppresses the activity of a desire for better living in villagers whose land can no longer afford them as a whole a bare subsistence? I maintain it is the dominant idea which is foreign to them. They desire to manage their own affairs, to co-operate not in foreign but in ways they understand and from which they could expand to more modern methods from within. The Royal Commissioners themselves agree to this, without, however, being sufficiently objective to realize that the present form of co-operation is of European origin and, therefore, foreign. They write: "The essence of the co-operative movement is that the people should take the management of their affairs into their own hands; if co-operation fails, there will fail the best hope of rural India."
But how do they wish to bring about this management by the peasants of their own affairs? They propose to bring it about by subjecting the peasants yet more than now to authorities, to take away such initiative as they still possess. They propose to force upon them a drive suggestive of that which the Soviets forced upon their peasants, without, of course, the ruthless cruelty of the Russians. It is essential to impel the peasants to "the will to achieve a better standard of living." Hence Government must be stirred to the necessity "that the rural problem should be attacked at all points simultaneously."
Yet this very inhibition, resisting imposition from without, amounts already in the peasants to detestation. Mr. Brayne, for example, testifies: "You have no idea how the Gurgaon villager detests the itinerant, departmental worker, and it was only after years of work that the villager allowed me to see why he was so prejudiced against the people Government sent for his apparent benefit . . . . Every official has a great barrier to break down before he can start helping the villagers, and may never break it down at all; some never try to break it down."
The reason for this detestation is to be found in the primary difference between the agriculturists and the traders, manufacturers, and financiers, who are now dominant. No one has described this fundamental distinction with greater mastery than has Dr. Oswald Spengler in his famous book The Decline of the West.
The peasants are terrene producers, that is partners in the recreative power of the earth. They have to do with goods which they themselves cultivate and the superfluity of which they exchange for other goods. The crops in which they deal are the crops of their own growing; the cattle in which they deal are their own cattle, known each of them individually to those who bred them. In contrast to this close familiarity is the urban. "The decisive point is this--the true urban is not a producer in the prime terrene sense. He has not the inward linkage with the soil or with the goods that pass through his hands. He does not live with these, but looks at them from outside and appraises them in relation to his own life-upkeep.
"With this goods become wares, exchange turnover, and in place of thinking in goods we have thinking in money.
"With this purely extensional something, a form of limi-defining is abstracted from the visible objects of economics, just as mathematical thought abstracts something from the mechanistically conceived environment. Abstract money corresponds exactly to abstract number. Both are entirely inorganic. The economic picture is reduced exclusively to quantities, whereas the important thing about 'goods' had been their quality. For the early-period peasant his 'cow' is, first of all, just what it is, a unit being, and only secondarily an object of exchange; but for the economic outlook of the true townsman the only thing that exists is an abstract money-value which at the moment happens to be in the shape of a cow that can always be transformed into that of, say, a banknote. Even so the genuine engineer sees in a famous waterfall not a unique natural spectacle, but just a calculable quantum of unexploited energy.
"It is an error of all modern money-theories that they start from the value-token or even the material of the payment-token. In reality money, like number and law, is a category of thought."
We can now understand how it is that the peasants detest anything that takes them away from goods into the--to them--variable, uncertain, and unfathomable abstraction, money, particularly money that is not of their own making and which cannot be coined from their women's bangles. They never know what relation this money is going to bear to the goods which is their wealth. They can never be sure that they possess a sufficiency of it, when they come into contact with the outer world, and no well-to-do person can imagine what this means to the poor in money. Hence the peasants detest such contacts, however well-intentioned the contact-wallahs may be; they prefer to set up an inhibition against them, and shut themselves up in their own world.
Mr. Brayne testifies to this detestation. Sir Frederick Lely has given similar testimony: "If villagers can be persuaded to state their troubles, it is not of over-assessment or oppression of the police that they speak, but of the itinerant departmental workers. They will say: 'O Sahib, in the travelling season the Vaccinator comes, the Sanitary-wallah comes, the Akbari-wallah comes, the Police-wallah comes, the Engineer-wallah comes, the Pani (irrigation)-wallah comes, the Survey-wallah comes, the Circle-wallah comes, the Lokil (board)-wallah, and every one demands food, bedding, and service, and where are we to get the money from?'"
This detestation is the inhibition of Mr. Moreland. It discloses the peasants' traditional passion to manage their affairs in their own way, for detestation only arises from a genuine injury to the inner being. Neither the wallahs nor the cash nexus belong to their core.
The traditional method of their payment of taxes is in kind and through their own functionaries. Their traditional money by which they deal with the outer world is silver and some other metals. The metals to them are also goods. As Spengler says, the peasants value precious metals and coin, not as constituting a general measure, but really as "goods whose rarity and indestructibility cause them to be highly prized." But the modern bank is something quite different. "It is not an office for borrowing and lending money; but it is a manufactury of credit," as the textbook, The Theory and Practice of Banking, of Mr. Macleod defines it. In other words, the bank manufactures credit for one who has private property, which property can be taken by the banker in the event of the debtor not being able to repay his loan. It is based upon the alienability of private property; that is to say upon the opposite of the older conception of the inalienability of the Hindu peasants' property, to which the Abbé Dubois testified, provided always that the property was not wasted and land allowed to go out of cultivation. How, then, can "the essence of the co-operative movement that the people should take the management of their own affairs into their own hands" come into being within the ambit of the modern banking system? It cannot. The modern banking system belongs to a dominant idea antagonistic to an agricultural system of ryots.
An agricultural co-operative system must have its own financial system. As Sir Daniel Hamilton, with his unrivalled combined knowledge of the mercantile banking system and Indian agriculture, wrote in The Rayat and the Statutory Commission, 1929: "The men for whom a banking system is urgently wanted are the eighty per cent who live by agriculture, and by whom all others subsist. The Government Co-operative Registrars know better than anyone else what the people require in the way of finance, and they should now meet and formulate definite proposals for an All-India Co-operative Banking Corporation, which will link up the Provincial Co-operative Banks into one concern which will finance India, apart from the mercantile community." Only by such separation, including the restoration of the peasants' traditional custom of turning their silver into coin and the use of National Credit in place of the present bankers' monopoly, for both of which the late Sir Montague Webb strove with such persistent courage, can the peasants be freed from what he called in India's Plight, 1934: "The subjection of India to the control of the powerful Paper Money Forces behind the Secretary of State for India."
Nevertheless, as I was able in Chapter V to bring forward an example of the survival of the open-field system within the ambit of the modern money system and in Java of an example of the survival of an oriental village system under an occidental government, so I am able to bring forward here an example of the restoration of the family-ownership and cultivation of land in a European country within the ambit of the modern money system. That country is Denmark.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the cheap wheat imported into Europe from America and the Argentine, and the tariff raised by their chief customer, Germany, brought the Danish agriculturists to the verge of starvation. They had at that time agriculture of large estates or latifundia privately owned by their landed aristocracy and worked upon a capitalistic basis.
In this catastrophe royalty, the aristocracy and the professional classes, the upper classes generally of the now broken system, did little to help recovery, writes Mr. F. C. Howe in Denmark, 1921. "It was the peasants who slowly found a way out the problems of the country." They set about the reformation of agriculture in Denmark in the interests of the Danes themselves. They ignored the outer world, its markets and its politics, and reduced their army to the functions of the police. To improve themselves individually and as a whole, they brought about a great expansion and improvement of education. In agriculture itself they "turned to intensive small scale cultivation . . . . In forty years time Denmark became in many ways the most contented state in the world."
Mr. Howe adds the following very instructive words on the methods by which the re-creation of a peasant-family-ownership agriculture, and the system based upon it, was erected in the midst of modern urban-minded civilization: "Denmark also demonstrates that agriculture can be made an alluring as well as a profitable profession. The wealth that can be taken from the ground is measured by the intelligence of the farmer and the laws that determine the distribution of the produce. The latter is by far the more important. For if the farmer gives up a great part of his produce to the landlord, or if it is taken by speculators, by middlemen and others, agriculture is bound to decay. It cannot be otherwise. For over a generation Denmark has been working out plans for converting the tenant into a home owner. This probably explains the other achievement of the country. This lies at the back of the educational programme as well as the universal spirit of co-operation that prevails."
Farm-ownership is the economic foundation of Denmark. The majority of the farms are small. Very large farms constitute the few survivals of the old large estates, and they and their owners are now disappearing through legislation, for the legal power has fallen into the hands of the gaardmaend, who own about 6/10ths of the land in farms of 12 to150 acres, and who work them by their families with or without hired labour.
These farmers are quite different to farmers under the dominance of urban civilization; they show in themselves the change of values, which alone establishes agriculture. "They control the politics of their districts and have been now ascendant in Parliament for 30 years. They know about the most technical agriculture, are rather skilled mechanics and frequently good chemists. They are saturated with a knowledge of agriculture, are not consumed with the ambition to be rich or to acquire more land. Their ambition is to be good farmers. They take an active interest in the co-operative societies, in the various saving and credit institutions, and are familiar with the laws that bear upon their business. They enjoy a social and political status superior to any other farmers in the world . . . .
"Denmark was changed by the people themselves, by the peasants or farmers, who a few years ago were scarcely more intelligent than the peasants of Europe. It was the peasants who took control of politics, who have taken over the marketing, the buying and the credit agencies of the country and by their own efforts have developed a culture of their own. It is they who have abolished farm tenancy and substituted farm ownership as the basis of successful farming. As the result they have made agriculture a fine art and converted the raising of horses, cattle, hogs and poultry into a science. This has been achieved in forty years. It is one of the most remarkable revolutions in history."
For the extra wealth which they get from their surplus produce, the Danish peasants are mainly dependent upon the English market. Yet during the Great War when this market was cut off, they did not starve, as eventually the Germans and the Austrians starved and as the British came within a fortnight of doing. On the contrary they enjoyed an exceptional spell of health. They did not starve because they were able to dispense with their gains from their exports and to feed themselves and their urban brethren. Their ability to do this was due to their well-distributed subsistence farming, which is the safety-basis of family ownership and cultivation.
Yet all is not well with the Danish farmers. They have not been able to create a money system which saves them from encumbering debt. Owing to their large export trade they remain within the ambit of the western money system. They, too, have suffered from the world-wide agricultural depression and owe their credit societies large sums. So Agricultural Economics and Society No. 2 of the International Institute of Agriculture reports: "In 1933, the total mortgage debt on rural property was calculated as being 3,750,000,000, crowns, whereas the aggregate value of the farms was 5,400,000,000."
Fortunately the Government is, as has been said,, one largely directed by the farmers themselves, and many measures have been taken to lighten the load of debt, which oppressed the majority of the small owners. Nevertheless, the fact of this great involvement in debt shows that the problem of an agricultural money system has not been solved.
Moreover the Danes are secluded in a small country, very different to the huge variety of India. The Indian peasant question cannot be solved by an imitation of the Danes. But it can be claimed that the recovery of the Indian peasants must in the main come through the re-creation of their self-governing powers. If agricultural reform falls only "into the hands of reforming theorists," wrote Lord Ernle at the end of his story of English farming, "intent on repeating the time-honoured mistake of applying to agricultural problems remedies which are only applicable, if at all, to industrial or urban difficulties (then) to all classes the consequences threaten to be disastrous, and most of all, to agricultural labourers." Similarly they would be disastrous to the Indian peasants. In other words it is urban subjectivity that threatens. What is needed is a realization of the primary nature of agriculture and the terrene producers, the peasants.
"Agriculture," said Napoleon at St. Helena, "is the soul, the foundation of the kingdom: industry ministers to the comfort and happiness of the population: foreign trade is the superabundance; it allows the exchange of the surplus of agriculture and industry . . . . Foreign trade, which in its results is infinitely inferior to agriculture, was an object of secondary importance to my mind. Foreign trade ought to be the servant of agriculture and home industry: these last ought never to be subordinated to foreign trade.