Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/121

 country. The town money owners, instead of exploiting their peasant debtors any further, go to work to drive them from their possessions, to unite into great plantations, and to introduce slave work for the peasant, without any change being required in the tools and instruments of agriculture.

Finally, we see a fourth type of peasant development in inaccessible mountain regions. The soil there is poor and difficult to cultivate. By the side of agriculture, the breeding of stock retains the preponderance. Nevertheless, both are not sufficient to sustain a great increase of population. At the foot of the mountains, fruitful, well-tilled lands tempt them. The mountain peasants will make the attempt to conquer and exploit them, or, where they meet with resistance, to hire out their superfluous population as paid soldiers. Their experience in war, in combination with the poverty and inaccessibility of their land, serves to guard it against foreign invaders, to whom in any case its poverty offers no great temptation. There the old peasant democracy still exists, when all around the peasantry have long become dependent on feudal lords, priests, merchants and usurers. Occasionally a primitive democracy of that kind tyrannises and exploits a neighbouring country which they have conquered, in marked contradiction to their own highly-valued liberty. Thus the old cantons of the fatherland of William Tell exercised through their bailiffs in Tessin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a rule, whose crushing weight could compare with that of the tyrannical Geisler.

It will be seen that very different methods of production are compatible with the peasant economy. How are these differences to be explained? The opponents of the materialist conception of history trace them back to force, or again to the difference of the ideas which form themselves at various periods in the various peoples.

Now it is certain that in the erection of all these methods of production force played a great part, and Marx called it the midwife of every new society. But