Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/88

38 that the active and intelligent collaboration of the producers themselves will be necessary. Moreover, this collaboration is beginning to seem possible since communistic habits have got a foothold in the peasant labour.

I could cite many characteristics, slight indeed but which outline the future forms which life will take. I spoke of the vineyards around Gaillac. There, for several years, since the simple agricultural wage earners have regained the hope of acquiring some small share of the reconstituted vineyards, they have little by little established a curious custom. The working day, which commences it is true at a very early hour, almost at daybreak, ends at four o'clock in the afternoon. The reason is that it is necessary for many of these proletarians, of these wage earners who possess a small vineyard and who wish to work in it after their day's labour at the bourgeois proprietor's, to be free at four o'clock. Thus, these men are accustomed to two kinds of work, to the collective work which they perform on a great estate in company with numerous wage earners, and to the individual labour that they perform on their own minute property. I hardly need say that the work they do for themselves is, even after the fatigue of the paid labour, a pleasure and a joy. But I am convinced that this duality of soul will continue in them after the great social transformation. I suppose that the great vineyards will become the property of the commune.