the rise and fall of the international. I6s 
In Italy, too, the reform is half accomplished ; for the State, the 
Provinces, and the Commune levy, by way of taxes, thirty, forty, 
and even fifty per cent, of the land revenue. It is, therefore, 
the same as if they had got possession of half the property 
, Is the tiller of the soil in these countries any the happier ? 
No ; the poverty of the rural districts is extreme. To give the 
ownership of land to the State would simply be to impose a 
single tax, as was formerly advocated by the Physiocrats and 
recently by MM. de Girardin and Menier. The general 
character of our societies would not be in the least modified, 
ent, consumed to-day by landowners, would then be swal- 
officials. This is precisely what the 
Proudhonian Anarchists, the desperate opponents of the 
State-Divinity,” fought against. They, accordingly, proposed 
to entrust the land to rural associations. But here also 
experience, that supreme authority which the Sociologists 
always quote, gives serious warnings on the subject of “ the 
natural laws of social evolution.” 
The system of which the International Anarchists dream 
is not a Utopia. It was formerly general in France, and it 
still exists to-day with the Slavs of the Danube and of the 
Balkans. There the land is worked and owned by autonomous 
associations, which are very justly termed by Austrian writers 
Hauscommuniomn, “House or Family Communities.” When I 
visited the zadrugas of Servia and Croatia, I too, like M I e Plav 
and like the great apostle of Danubian Slavism, Monseigneur 
Strossmayer, was beguiled by the charms of this rural life so 
group, men and women, working in common in the fields or 
preparing the hemp and the wool for their clothes, in the ¡ate 
evening, the nausic of tl^¿7»iA, acconqxmymgthe song of the 
Servian romancero, one might fancy one's self transported among 
the nymphs and swains of the Golden Age* “Natural 
Evolution,” however, is undermining these fraternal insti-