39.  On the Mennonite village community see A. Klaus, Our Colonies (Nashi Kolonii), St. Petersburg, 1869.

40.  Such communal cultures are known to exist in 159 villages out of 195 in the Ostrogozhsk district; in 150 out of 187 in Slavyanoserbsk; in 107 village communities in Alexandrovsk, 93 in Nikolayevsk, 35 in Elisabethgrad.  In a German colony the communal culture is made for repaying a communal debt.  All join in the work, although the debt was contracted by 94 householders out of 155.

41.  Lists of such works which came under the notice of the zemstvo statisticians will be found in V.V.’s Peasant Community, pp. 459-600.

42.  In the government of Moscow the experiment was usually made on the field which was reserved for the above-mentioned communal culture.

43.  Several instances of such and similar improvements were given in the Official Messenger, 1894, Nos. 256-258.  Associations between “horseless” peasants begin to appear also in South Russia.  Another extremely interesting fact is the sudden development in Southern West Siberia of very numerous co-operative creameries for making butter.  Hundreds of them spread in Tobolsk and Tomsk, without any one knowing wherefrom the initiative of the movement came.  It came from the Danish co-operators, who used to export their own butter of higher quality, and to buy butter of a lower quality for their own use in Siberia.  After a several years’ intercourse, they introduced creameries there.  Now, a great export trade, carried on by a Union of the Creameries, has grown out of their endeavours and more than a thousand co-operative shops have been opened in the villages.

CHAPTER VIII

Mutual aid amongst ourselves (continued)

Labour-unions grown after the destruction of the guilds by the State.  Their struggles.  Mutual Aid in strikes.  Co-operation.  Free associations for various purposes.  Self-sacrifice.  Countless societies for combined action under all possible aspects.  Mutual Aid in slum-life.  Personal aid.

When we examine the every-day life of the rural populations of Europe, we find that, notwithstanding all that has been done in modern States for the destruction of the village community, the life of the peasants remains honeycombed with habits and customs of mutual aid and support; that important vestiges of the communal possession of the soil are still retained; and that, as soon as the legal obstacles to rural association were lately removed, a network of free unions for all sorts of economical purposes rapidly spread among the peasants—­the tendency of this young movement being to reconstitute some sort of union similar to the village community of old.  Such being the conclusions arrived at in the preceding chapter, we have now to consider, what institutions for mutual support can be found at the present time amongst the industrial populations.