Page:Man or the State.djvu/51

33 everywhere, after a hundred years of State domination.

Misery everywhere! All unanimously recognize it and point it out. Wherever serfdom had been abolished it was reconstituted in a hundred different forms; wherever it had not yet been destroyed it was shaped, under State protection, into a ferocious institution bearing all the characteristics of antique slavery, or even worse.

And could anything else evolve out of this State-produced misery, the State's chief anxiety being to annihilate the village community after the town, to destroy all bonds existing between peasants, to give over their lands to be pillaged by the rich, and to subject them, each individually, to the functionary, the priest and the lord?

VIII

To annihilate the independence of cities; to plunder merchants' and artisans' rich guilds; to centralise the foreign trade of cities into its hands and ruin it; to seize the internal administration of guilds, and subject home trade, as well as all manufactures, even in the slightest detail, to a swarm of functionaries, and by these means kill both industry and arts; to seize upon local militias and all municipal administration; to crush the weak by taxation for the benefit of the strong; and to ruin countries by war,—such was the nascent State's behavior towards urban agglomerations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The same tactics were evidently employed towards villages and peasants. As soon as the State felt itself strong enough, it destroyed the village commune, ruined the peasants committed to its mercy, and plundered the common lands.

Historians and economists paid by the State have taught us that the village commune, having become an obsolete form of land-ownership obstructing agricultural progress, was bound to disappear by the action of natural economic forces. Politicians and bourgeois economists do not tire of repeating this even nowadays, and there are revolutionists and