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 swalofficials.
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-
