STRIKES AND FARM LABOUR IN ITALY AND HUNGARY
There is one English word which seems to be more widely known and
used in Europe than almost any other. It is the word "strike." Labour
strikes, I have understood, had their origin with the factory system in
England. But the people on the Continent have improved on the original
English device, and have found ways of using it of which we in America,
I suspect, have rarely if ever heard.
It seems to me that during my short journey in Europe I heard of
more kinds of strikes, and learned more about the different ways in
which this form of warfare can be used, than I ever learned before
in all my life. In Europe one hears, for example, of "political"
strikes, of "general" strikes, and of "agricultural" strikes--harvest
strikes--which are a peculiar and interesting variety of the ordinary
labour strikes. There are rent strikes, "hunger riots," strikes of
students, even of legislatures, and when I was in Budapest some one
called my attention to an account in one of the papers of what was
called a "house strike."
This was a case in which the tenants of one of the large tenement
buildings or apartment houses of the city had gone on strike to
compel the landlord to reduce the rent. They had hung the landlord in
effigy in the big central court around which the building is erected;
decorated the walls and balconies with scurrilous placards, and then
created such a disturbance by their jeers and outcries, supplemented
with fish horns, that the whole neighbourhood was roused. The house
strikers took this way to advertise their grievances, gain public
sympathy, and secure reduction of the rent.
I had an opportunity, during my stay in Europe, to get some first-hand
information in regard to these continental strikes. I was in Berlin
just before and after the three days' battle between the striking
coalyard men of Moabit and the police, in the course of which several
of the officers and hundreds of the people were wounded. For several
days one section of Berlin was practically in a state of siege. The
police charged the crowd with their horses, trampled the people
under foot, and cut them down with their swords. The soldiers hunted
the strikers into the neighbouring houses, where they attempted to
barricade themselves and replied to the attacks of the police by
hurling missiles from the windows of the houses into the streets below.
At night the streets were in darkness, because the strikers had cut the
electric wires, thus shutting off the lights, so that the police were
compelled to carry torches in order to distinguish friends from foes.
At another time, while I was in Fiume, Hungary, I had an opportunity
to see for myself the manner and spirit in which these strikes are
conducted, or, rather, the way in which they are put down by the police.
I had gone out one day to visit the emigrant station, which is situated
on the outskirts of the city, and noticed, on my way thither, a number
of policemen on the car. Then, apparently at a signal from a man in
charge, they seemed to melt away. Half an hour later, while I was
at the emigrant station, I was startled by loud cries outside the
building. Every one rushed to the windows. The street was crowded with
men, women, and children, all running helter-skelter in the direction
of the city. Some of the hands in a nearby factory had gone on strike.
I could not at first understand why every one seemed in such a state of
terror. Very soon I learned, however, that they were running from the
police, and a moment later the police themselves moved into view.
They were formed in a broad double line across the avenue, and,
marching rapidly, simply swept everything before them. At their head,
bearing a heavy cane, was a man in plain clothes. I do not know whether
he was an officer or the proprietor of the factory, but I was struck
with the haughty and contemptuous air with which he surveyed the rabble
as it melted away from in front of him. In a few minutes the street was
empty and, so far as I could see, the strike was over.
It was a small affair in any case. There was no bloodshed and almost
no resistance on the part of the strikers, so far as I could see. It
was sufficient, however, to give me a very vivid notion of the ruthless
way in which the governments of these stern military powers deal with
rebellious labourers. European governments seem to have the habit of
interfering, in a way of which we have no conception in this country,
in all the small intimate affairs of life. So it is not to be expected
that they would be able, like the police in this country, to act as a
neutral party or referee, so to speak, in the struggles of labour and
capital. That is the reason, I suspect, why in Europe strikes almost
always turn out to be a battle with the police or an insurrection
against the Government.
Almost anything may be made the occasion of a strike in Europe, it
seems. Sometimes in Austria and Hungary, as I learned, members of
the local diets or provincial legislatures go on a strike and refuse
to make any laws until certain demands have been complied with by the
central government at Vienna. Sometimes the students in one or more of
the national universities go on a strike because a favourite professor
has been removed by the Government, or because they are opposed to
some particular measure of the Government. Not infrequently, in France
or Italy, labour disturbances are fomented for political or party
purposes, particularly among the employees of the state railways.
Strikes are a favourite weapon of the Socialists when they are seeking
to force some political measure through parliament. Until a few years
ago it seemed that the "general strike," in which all the labourers
of a city or several cities, by suddenly laying down their tools and
refusing to return to their work, sought to force some concession by
the Government, was the means by which the Socialists proposed to
overturn all the existing governments in Europe. Since the failure of
the revolution in Russia and of similar movements on a smaller scale
in Italy and elsewhere, this form of strike seems to have fallen into
disrepute.
The most novel and interesting form of labour insurrection which
I found while I was in Europe was the "strike of the agricultural
labourers." In both Hungary and Italy the agricultural labourers have
for some years past been organized into more or less secret societies,
and the outbreaks which have been fomented by these secret societies
have been, I understand, the most bloody and the most far-reaching in
influence of any labour strikes in Europe.
The possibility that farm hands might be organized into labour
unions, and make use of this form of organization in order to compel
landowners to raise wages, had never occurred to me, and I took some
pains to learn the conditions in Hungary and Italy under which these
organizations have grown up.
I found that while the situation of the farm hands in Hungary differs
from that of the farm hands in Italy in many ways, there are two
important respects in which the situation of each is the same: First,
a large part of the land of both countries is held in large estates;
second, farm labourers, as a rule, particularly in Hungary, do not
live, as is the case in America, on the land. On the contrary, they
dwell apart in villages, so that they are hardly any more attached
to the soil they cultivate than the factory hand is attached to the
factory in which he is employed. In Hungary, for example, it is the
custom for a group of labourers to enter, during the spring and summer,
into a contract with a landowner to harvest his crop in the fall. A
contractor, who either represents or employs the farm hands, will look
over the field and bargain with the owner to do the work for a certain
per cent. of the crop. At the harvest time the contractor will arrive
with his labourers just as he would come with a gang of men to build a
house or dig a ditch. While the work is going on the labourers, men and
women together, practically camp in the fields, sleeping sometimes in
the open or in such scant shelter as they are able to find.
It happened that I was in Hungary at the harvest time, and in the
course of my journey through the country I have several times seen
these gangs of men and women going to their work at daybreak. In this
part of the country the strangest costumes are worn by the peasant
people, and the women especially, with their bright kerchiefs over
their heads, their short skirts and high boots, when they were not
barefoot, were quite as picturesque as anything I had read had led me
to expect. The labourers go to work at early dawn, because during the
harvest season the field hands work sometimes as much as fourteen to
sixteen hours a day, and then throw themselves down to rest for the
night on a truss of straw or under a single blanket. After the harvest
is over they return again to their villages.
Working in this way in troups of wandering labourers, there was no room
for any permanent human relationships between themselves and their
employers; such relationships, for example, as exist, in spite of the
differences of race and colour, between every white planter in the
South and his Negro tenants. On the other hand, the labourers, working
and living together in the way I have described, come to have a strong
sense of their common interest, all the stronger, perhaps, because they
are looked down upon by the rest of the population, and particularly by
the small landowners with whom they were associated up to the time of
their emancipation, in 1848.
About 1890 a series of bad harvests--coming on the heels of other
changes which, for a number of years, had made their lives steadily
harder--helped to increase the discontent of the farm hands. Thus it
was that when, about this time, the Socialists turned their attention
to the agricultural population of Hungary, they found the people
prepared to listen to their doctrines.
What made Socialism the more popular among the lowest farming classes
was the fact that it not only promised to teach the farm labourers how
they might increase their wages, but declared that the state was going
to take the land out of the hands of the large landowners and divide it
among the people who cultivated it.
What made the situation the more difficult was the fact that the
agricultural labourers, as soon as they were thoroughly organized, had
the landowners, during the harvest time, at a peculiar disadvantage,
because when work in the fields stopped, the standing grain ripened and
spoiled and the landowner was ruined.
In the emergency created by these strikes the Government came to the
rescue of the landowner by establishing recruiting stations for farm
labourers in different parts of the country. Collecting labourers in
those parts of the country where labour was abundant, they shipped it
to other parts of the country where, because of strikes, labourers were
scarce and crops were in danger. Thus, the Government had at one time
a reserve force of not less than 10,000 strike-breakers with which it
was at any moment able to come to the rescue of a landowner who was
threatened.
In many cases the Government undertook to regulate wages between
landowners and their hands. In some cases they even sent troops into
the fields, and in the course of the struggle there were frequent
bloody collisions between the labourers and the troops.
One effect of these disturbances was to greatly increase the amount of
immigration to America. In 1904, when the struggle was at its height,
no less than 100,000 persons, mostly from the country districts,
emigrated from Hungary. Thousands of others left the country and moved
into the cities.
Hungary is about half the size of Texas, and it has nearly five times
its population. Those who remember the "Negro exodus" of thirty years
ago, and the apprehension that was created when some 40,000 Negroes
left the plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana, will be able to
understand the effect if for a number of years the South should lose
annually by emigration to the cities or to other parts of the country
100,000 of its labourers in the cotton fields.
The exodus of the farm labourer from Hungary threatened, in spite of
the rapid increase of the population, to permanently check the rising
prosperity of the country. It was soon found that the great landowners
could not rely upon repressive measures alone to solve their labour
problems. Something must be done to redress the grievances and to
improve the condition of the agricultural population. As a matter
of fact, a very great deal was done by the state for agriculture,
and something was done for the agricultural labourers. For example,
relief funds were organized in sixty-four counties and boroughs to aid
temporarily disabled workmen. Public prizes and diplomas were offered
to labourers who were faithful to their masters.
Something was done to brighten the monotony of the agricultural
labourer's life and to strengthen the ties between the labourers and
their employers. At the suggestion of the Minister of Agriculture, an
attempt was made to revive the harvest feasts, which brought the farmer
and his labourers together. Workingmen's clubs, libraries, friendly
and coöperative societies were encouraged by the Government. A popular
weekly paper, printed in seven different languages, was started for
the benefit of agricultural labourers and as a means of agricultural
education. A bill for insurance against accidents and old age for the
benefit of agricultural labourers provided that if a labourer loses
more than a week's time he shall receive, in addition to the expenses
of doctor and medicine, a sum amounting to about 25 cents a day for
sixty days. In case of death of an agricultural labourer, his family
receives a sum amounting to something between $40 and $50.
In Italy, the Socialistic movement among the agricultural classes took
a somewhat different course. For one thing, it was not confined merely
to the poorest class--namely, those labourers who live in the villages
and go out at certain seasons to assist in the work on the farms--but
extended to the small proprietors also, and those who rented land. In
many cases the large estates in Italy are not managed as in Hungary,
by the proprietor, but by middlemen and overseers, who pay a certain
amount of rent to the proprietor and then sublet to tenants. Sometimes,
particularly in southern Italy, lands are sublet a second and third
time.
In many cases the terms upon which the land was held and worked by the
small farmer were terribly oppressive, even in northern Italy, where
conditions are incomparably better than in the south.
Although the peasants in northern Italy were nominally given their
freedom in 1793, their condition, until a few years ago, has been
described by one who was himself a large land proprietor as "little
better than if they were slaves." In addition to the high rents, the
tenant farmer was compelled to furnish the overseer with a certain
number of chickens and eggs, and a certain amount of peaches, nuts,
figs, hemp and flax, in proportion to the amount of land he rented.
The overseer claimed, also, just as the overlord did in the days of
feudalism, the rights to the labour of the peasant and his ox-cart for
a certain part of every year. His children were expected to work as
servants in his household at a nominal price. The overseer sold the
crop of the tenant farmer, and, after deducting all that was coming
to him for rent and for other charges, returned the remainder to the
tenant farmer as his share of the year's work.
In one case where, as a result of the revolt of his tenants the
middleman was driven out, the tenant farmer, under the direction of
the Socialist leaders, undertook to rent the land directly from the
landowners, it was found that the middleman had been appropriating
not less than 48 per cent. of the profits, which, under the new
arrangement, went directly into the hands of the man who tilled the
soil.
For a number of years there had existed among the small farmers
numerous societies for mutual aid of various kinds. After the
Socialists began to turn their attention to the agricultural population
they succeeded in gaining leadership in these societies and used them
as a means of encouraging agricultural strikes. It was from these same
societies also that they recruited the members of those organizations
of farm labourers and tenants which have attempted to form large
estates on a coöperative basis. By this means the small farmer has
been able to do away with the middleman and still retain the advantages
which result, particularly in harvesting and marketing the crops, from
conducting the operations on a large scale.
In recent years coöperative organizations of all kinds have multiplied
among the small farmers of northern Italy. There are societies for
purchasing supplies as well as for disposing of the products of the
small farmers; the most important of these societies have been,
perhaps, the coöperative credit organizations, by means of which small
landowners have been able to escape the burden of the heavy interest
charges they were formerly compelled to pay.
I was interested to learn that both the Government and the Socialists
were at different times opposed to these coöperative societies,
although for different reasons. The Socialists were opposed to
coöperation because by removing the causes of discontent it sapped the
revolutionary spirit of the farming classes. The Government, on the
other hand, was opposed to the coöperative societies because their
leaders were so frequently revolutionists who were using the society
to stimulate discontent and organize the movement to overthrow the
Government.
The great general strike of September, 1904, which resulted in
practically putting an end, for five days, to all kinds of business
industries in the city of Milan, was provoked by the state police
firing upon some peasants who were holding a meeting to pay their
shares and take their lots in an agricultural coöperative society.
I have attempted to describe at some length the character of the
Socialistic movement as I found it in Hungary and Italy, because it
represents on the whole the movement of the masses at the bottom of
life in Europe. Through this party, for the first time, millions of
human beings who have had no voice in and no definite ideas in respect
to the Government under which they lived are learning to think and to
give expression to their wants.
Few people, I venture to say, have any definite notion to what
extent the most remote parts of Europe, from which the majority of
our immigrants now come, have been penetrated by the ideas and the
sentiments of the Socialistic party. There are, for example, some
five or six different branches of the party in Bohemia. Socialism, I
learn, has made its way even into such countries as Roumania, Servia,
Bulgaria, and Dalmatia, where perhaps three fourths of the population
are engaged in agriculture.
There are, however, as I discovered, various kinds and types of
Socialism. I think I saw during my journey across Europe as many
different kinds of Socialists as I did kinds of Jews, which is saying
a good deal. In Denmark and Italy, for example, I met men of the very
highest type who were members of the Socialist party. In Copenhagen
I was entertained by the editors of the Socialistic paper, _The
Politiken_, which is perhaps the most ably edited and influential paper
in Denmark. In Italy many of the most patriotic as well as the most
brilliant men in the country, writers, students, and teachers, are
members of the Socialist party.
In Poland, on the other hand, I met other Socialists who had taken an
active part in the revolution in Russia and who, for aught I know, were
members of that group of desperate men who are said even now to be
plotting from Cracow, Austria, a new revolutionary movement among the
agricultural classes in Russia.
In short, I found that where the masses of the people are oppressed,
where the people at the bottom are being crushed by those who are
above them, there Socialism means revolution. On the other hand, where
governments have shown a liberal spirit, and especially where the
Socialists have had an opportunity to participate in the Government, or
have been able, by means of the coöperative societies I have described,
to do constructive work for the benefit of the masses, they have
ceased to be revolutionists, have no longer sought to overturn the
Government, but have patriotically striven to strengthen the existing
order by freeing it from those defects that were dangerous to its
existence.
In saying this, I do not mean to imply that I in any way favour the
Socialistic programme of reform. I live in the Southern States, a
part of the country which, more than any other part of the civilized
world, still believes that the best government is the government that
governs least; the government that you can wear like an old coat,
without feeling it. More than that, I believe that the best and only
fundamental way of bringing about reform is not by revolution, not
through political machinery that tries to control and direct the
individual from the outside, but by education, which gets at the
individual from within; in short, fits him for life but leaves him free.
There is much in the history of the agricultural labourers of Hungary
and Italy that is interesting to any one who has studied the condition
of the Negro farm labourer in the South. In many respects their history
has been the same. There is, however, this difference: When the serfs
were freed in Hungary, as in most other parts of Europe, provision was
made to give them land, though to a very large extent they were denied
the political privileges enjoyed by the upper classes.
In Italy also it was intended, in giving the serfs freedom, to give
them likewise land. Again, when the vast estates of the Church were
taken over by the State, an attempt was made to increase the class
of small owners and to give the land to the people who tilled it. In
both cases, however, it was but a few years before the greater portion
of the peasant owners were wiped out and their lands absorbed into
the large estates. At the present time the small landowners, under
the influence of education and agricultural organization, are gaining
ground, and both countries, in the interest of agriculture, are seeking
to encourage this movement.
The case of the Negro was just the opposite. When the masses of the
Negro people were turned loose from slavery they carried in their hands
the ballot that they did not know how to use, but they took no property
with them. At the present time, I believe, by a conservative estimate,
that the Negroes in the South own not less than twenty million acres
of land, an area equal to the five New England States of Vermont, New
Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
On the other hand, the Negroes have largely lost, at least temporarily,
many of the political privileges which were given them at emancipation.
The experience of the peasants of Europe, just as the experience of
the Negro in America, has served to confirm an opinion I have long
held--namely, that it is very hard for a man to keep anything that he
has not earned or does not know how to use. And in most cases, the best
way and, in fact, the only way to insure any people in the possession
either of property or political privileges is to fit them by education
to use these gifts for their own good and for the highest good of the
community in which they live.
The peasants were given land without effort on their part and soon lost
it. The masses of the Negroes were given the ballot without effort
on their part and they soon lost it. The peasants are now gradually
gaining the land through their own effort and are keeping it. The
masses of Negroes are gradually gaining the ballot through their own
effort, and are likely to keep it when so gained.