Page:The State Its Historic Role.djvu/35

 five or six documents. No doubt scientists will tell you that at that barbarous period State control was only fictitious.

And if it were only this. Alter all it would be but twenty thousand functionaries too many, and a thousand million francs more added to the budget. A detail for the lovers of "order" and levelling!

But there is worse at the bottom of all this. The principle kills everything.

The peasants of a village have a thousand interests in common: interests of economy, neighbourhood and constant intercourse. They are perforce compelled to unite for a thousand divers things. But the State cannot allow them to unite! It gives them school and priest, police and judge; that must suffice them, and should other interests arise, they must apply in the regular way to Church and State.

Thus till 1883 it was severely forbidden to the villagers of France to unite, were it only to buy chemical manure or to irrigate their fields. It was only in 1883-1886 that the Republic granted this right to peasants when it voted the law on unions, hampered by many a precaution and obstacle.

And we with our faculties blunted by State education rejoice at the sudden progress accomplished by agricultural syndicates, without blushing at the idea that this right of union of which peasants were deprived for centuries belonged to them without contention in the Middle Ages. Belonged to every man—free or serf. Slaves that we are, we believe it to be a "conquest of democracy."

This is the pitch of stupidity we have reached by our own warped and vitiated State education, and by our own State prejudices.

—"If you have any common interests in the city or the village, ask the Church and the State to look after them. But you are forbidden to combine in a direct way to settle matters for yourselves!" Such is the formula re-echoing throughout Europe since the sixteenth century. Already in an edict of Edward III, issued at the end of the fourteenth century, we read that "all unions, combinations, meetings, organised societies, statutes and oaths already established or to be established by carpenters and masons, will henceforth be null and void." But when the defeat of the towns and of the popular insurrection of which we have spoken was completed, the State boldly laid hands on all the institutions (guilds, fraternities, etc.) which used to bound artisans and peasants together, and annihilated them.

This is plainly seen in England where a number of documents exists