Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 1.djvu/263

AGRARIANISM intended to benefit the poorer classes of society by dealing in some way with the ownership of land or the legal obligations of the cultivators. In modern German, indeed, the prefix Agrar is used to mean rural or agricultural, and a German political party, roughly corresponding to the former "country party" or "landed interest" in England, is called die Agrarpartei, often translated as the Agrarians, though unlike the stricter use of agrarianism given above. Keeping to that stricter use of the word, we can distinguish two social movements running through history, one being agrarian reform, the other agrarian revolution. The border line is indeed obscure, but the difference, as of night and day, fundamental.

Let us look first at the movements of agrarian reform. Conspicuous is the case of the Hebrew Prophets. How far the land organization of the Mosaic Law was ever in full working order is disputed, probably unascertainable. What can be ascertained is the growth, pari passu with the growth of wealth and commerce under the kings, of ill-treatment of the Hebrew peasantry, mainly by over-taxation to pay for a luxurious court, by corn-jobbery and monopoly, and by usurious loans, which made the peasant a debtor-slave or totally dispossessed him. And we see lawless dispossession: witness the frequent complaints of the oppression of widows and orphans, and the case of Naboth's vineyard. Against this oppression the Prophets protested so vigorously that by some moderns they have been taken to be Socialists. But they were eminently social reformers, not revolutionists. They incited to no act of human vengeance upon evil-doers, nor to revolt against authority, even when it was misused; but they denounced immorality in home life, fraud in commerce, harshness to debtors, injustice to the poor; and as, under the technical conditions of production in antiquity, the main social problem was the preservation of a free peasantry, and the social question primarily an agrarian question, the Prophets appeared as agrarian reformers, with the not impracticable aim that each man should dwell in security under his own vine and his own fig-tree, on his father's inheritance. Their exhortations, in fact, kept before the Israelites a high social ideal; and by recalling the ancient law that bond-servants should be freed every seventh year, and that loans in kind and money should be gratuitous, the growth of the slave-cultivation of Punic, Greek, and Roman civilization was restrained, and Palestine preserved as a land of Jewish peasant proprietors.

In secular history two conspicuous examples of agrarian reform are those of Solon in Attica and of the Gracchi in Italy. The release of debtor-slaves and the removal of unlawful enclosures seem the main features of Solon's economic legislation, of which indeed full trustworthy details are wanting. The character of the Gracchan reform is more accurately known, being mainly to promote the colonization of the public lands by small farmers in accordance with old laws which had been disregarded. The Gracchan land laws were akin to those of modern Australasia. They were partly successful in re-establishing and protecting the free peasantry, but were ultimately frustrated, chiefly through the fatal permission to mortgage and sell, allowing the small holdings to be absorbed by latifundia cultivated by slaves. After the advent of Christianity, the two great processes of agrarian reform were: first, the transformation of rural slaves (often working in chains and sleeping in ergastula), into serfs (coloni), attached to the soil; and secondly, in feudal times, the mitigation of the burdens of serfdom, and the transformation of serfs into a free peasantry, from that of England, in the fifteenth century, to that of Russia, in the nineteenth, a gradual movement from restraint to freedom, from feudal immobility to free trade in land, and to unrestricted agricultural improvements. But then also, as a parallel movement, the checks to usury were withdrawn, as well as those to over-indebtedness, exhaustive cultivation, whole-sale evictions of the peasantry, appropriation of vast tracts by individuals or companies, and the opposite evil of subdividing small farms into fragments; so that the seeming freedom of the rural classes was leading to poverty and oppression, while reckless competition was leading to the waste of national resources. Hence agrarian reform, suited to the new conditions, social and technical, of rural life, became a necessity, and is in process of being carried out.

The following are some examples: (1) Legislation in the United States (1862), Canada, Australasia, and some other colonial countries, favoring colonization and bonâ fide agricultural settlers, as against the occupation of vast tracts for pastoral or speculative purposes; (2) analogous laws in older countries favoring the creation of small holdings, allotments, and gardens, like the British of 1882–92 and the creation of Rentengüter in Germany (1890–96);(3) the American Homestead Exemption Laws, spreading since 1849 to most of the States, the maximum value protected from seizure for debt being $5,000 in California; the maximum area 240 acres in Mississippi. These laws have been imitated elsewhere, and the secure homestead, under the title of le bien de famille, is advocated by the Catholics of France; (4) renewed usury laws, notably in 1880, for Germany, and in 1900 for the United Kingdom and parts of British India; (5) establishment of a special peasants law in Germany (Anerbenrecht), enabling one son to preserve the small inheritance; special favors by the Belgian law of 1890 to the succession to small holdings; (6) special legislation against eviction and unfair rents, by the Irish Land Laws of 1881 and 1887, and the Scotch Crofters "Holdings" Act of 1886. Parallel to such legislation, and its essential auxiliary, has arisen the modern agricultural co-operative movement, resulting in associations like those of the Patrons of Husbandry, the Farmers' Alliance, and others, in the United States, or the Raiffeisen popular banks among German and Italian peasants, or the peasants league (Boerenbond) of Belgium, or the agricultural co-operative societies of Ireland. And just as the new agrarian legislation is the expression in modern form of the fundamental needs of rural life, protected at other times by feudal immobility, so the new co-operative movement is the expression of the need of mutual help, protected at other times by the patriarchal family and the village community.

Let us turn from the movements of reform, seen in rural history, to the movements of agrarian revolution. These were conspicuous in the declining days of classical Greece. Hereon Roscher said well: "In the Greek world all that we call tradition, and the feeling of national honor, national destiny, and national justice, had in fact been supplanted by rationalistic argumentation, and the argumentation directed with terrible exclusiveness to the opposition between rich and poor" (Nationalökonomie, § 204). This opposition, in conformity with the technical and legal conditions of the time, took the form, not of any system of land-nationalization, but simply of canceling debts and re-dividing lands, revolution alternating with counter-revolution. In time, the agrarian struggles became mixed up with the national movement for Greek independence against Roman dominion, the Romans everywhere taking the side of the rich against the poor (Livy, XXXV, xxxiv). These social revolutions are of importance to us as showing some significant analogies with our own times. It is otherwise with the peasant risings of later times such as the French Jacquerie