Fifty years ago a grayheaded prisoner, neglected, gaunt, unbefriended,
died in the dungeons of Schlüsselburg, and today a thousand Russian
cities are ringing with the name of Mikal Bakunin, the apostle of
Populism, one of the many reformers who were stoned by a contemporary
public and sainted by its descendants.
Russia spurned the impassioned orator; Germany exiled him, after a few
months of toleration, and now his projects are discussed by millions who
seem determined to give them a fair trial.
“A pack of knout-serving flunkeys,” Bakunin called the German officials
who enforced the frontier-laws in the interest of the Czar, and soon
after a messenger in uniform served him with a copy of the Prussian
press-laws, and a hint at the expedience of making himself invisible.
His virulent tongue hurt him a good deal, and his popularity was somewhat
modified by his social radicalism; but the long neglect of his revenue
plan is one of the strangest facts in the literature of political
economy. One might as well reject Kepler’s solar hypothesis, because the
great astronomer got a little cloudy on the question of witchcraft.
And, after all, Bakunin only whispered his matrimonial theories, but
shouted his tax-protests before multitudes who ought to have known better
than to class them with his chimeras.
Briefly stated, his main reform plan is this: That governments ought to
earn their own revenues as they cast their own cannon and build their
own battleships.
“Look at your great Government stud-farm of Trakehnen,” said he, in a
speech on the old Breslau market-square. “Model stables, model granaries,
fine pastures, all more than self-supporting, monthly auctions of forage
and surplus horses. Oats are barreled in airy magazines, and, for greater
security, the granary warden breeds cats, and hires two boys to take care
of them.
“All lovely, so far. But now suppose those boys were to break in a
private cottage and snatch away a poor youngster’s kitten, on the
pretext that the Government might have need of it? At sight of a club,
the little lad would have to let his pet go, but could you blame him
for growling?—Why don’t you get oats of your own? And let my little
kitten alone?—And that is exactly what I am growling about when I see
tax-collectors confiscate a poor man’s last milch-cow or nanny-goat.”
The orator then described the estate of Prince Gorkas, a semi-independent
land-magnate near Tiflis, in the southern Caucasus. The Prince’s tenants
pay a moderate rent; freeholders keep his good will by buying his cattle
and coal. Free schools, fairly good, and no tax-collectors—a pattern of
what an empire ought to be on a large scale. Foreseeing the eventual
need of money for the purchase of a neighboring estate, the Prince had
a mountain-side planted with plum trees, to sell the dried fruit. His
engineers opened a mine of cannel-coal, and soon had a large market.
Their master hoarded and was thought capable of driving a sharp bargain,
but gossips would have risked the lunatic-asylum if they had spread a
report that Prince Gorkas had broken into the little crossroad store and
helped himself to a share of the old storekeeper’s savings.
Fruit plantations are also managed by the Shah of Persia, and mines of
vast values by the Russian Government. Prussia and Austria own extensive
timber forests and realize a handsome profit after paying reasonable
wages to thousands of wardens, rangers and woodcutters.
Saxony operates national mines and large national glass-works.
Do kings need ordnance? Let them hire foundries to cast it for them. Do
they need gunpowder? Hire chemists to mix it for them.
Do they need money? Why, let them hire business-men to earn it for them.
Not the faintest ghost of a doubt but it can be done.
A little more difficult than raising royal race-horses? Perhaps so. But
does that give His Majesty the right to race down a peddler and take his
money away from him? Now reflect, and do not let your verdict be biased
by the idea that might makes right, or that a long-established absurdity
becomes reasonable.
Why collect revenues by Government highway robbery, by Government hold-up
methods, by harpies in Government uniform, when the test of practical
experience proves that revenues can be raised by Government industries?
Would you bring the State in unfair competition with individuals?
“Don’t for one moment,” says Bakunin, “believe that lie of lazybones.
Secretaries of Finance find it easier to hire marauders than to hire
skilled mechanics, that’s all.”
Who is hurt by the great stockfarm at Trakehnen? It could be enlarged
twenty times, and still give private enterprise a chance to raise
prize-horses at a considerable profit. Who complains about Government
forestry? It gives bread to hundreds of thousands; it protects the
fountains of fertilizing streams; it prevents droughts, but does not
prevent individuals from conducting timber-plantations at a profit
exceeding that of grain farms.
The Belgian Government owns coal-mines, but private mine-owners will
continue to prosper till they exhaust the supply of the mineral. No
glass-worker has ever objected to the Government glass-works of Saxony.
They invite co-operation; the demand for artistic glass products exceeds
the supply.
If Government mines and factories, why not Government commerce, and,
above all, Government real estate transactions—Government landlordism
to an extent that will hurt no other landlord, and benefit millions of
tenants?
Found new communities on the plan of reserving a certain percentage of
building lots for state purposes, and lease those reservations for five
to ten years to the highest bidder. If the Government erects buildings,
let them be models of their kind—fire-proof storehouses, sanitary
tenements.
Government plantations ought to be drained till gnat-plagues are no more;
equipped with improved machinery, with airy cottages; a blessing to all
concerned, and yet an undoubted source of revenue, since experience
proves that wholesale farming operations are the most profitable.
One tobacco plantation of the French Government yields a yearly net
revenue of 2,000,000 francs, and the only objection is the nature of
the crop; national agriculture could raise profitable harvests without
catering to a stimulant habit. Government commission houses should import
Jamaica bananas, rather than Jamaica rum.
On the Bakunin plan, national revenue industries should, as a rule,
select their ground where the strain of competition is the least likely
to be felt. After that, objectors should be referred to a chronicle of
such alternatives as trust despotism.
“No governments,” he asks, “decline to dirty their hands delving for
boodle? Oh, ye prayerful pirates! Lineal descendants of the bushwhacker
princes who preferred clubs to spades! Below their dignity to cut wood,
but did cut purses and throats. Too highborn to clean out a pig-sty, but
did clean out peddlers and often whole caravans.
“And now the descendants of those beautiful buccaneers, too proud to
mine or farm, but not ashamed to fall upon a poor farmer’s homestead
and confiscate his last horse! Not too dignified to hold up a crippled
huckster and collar two-thirds of his hard earned pennies. Too sensitive
to work the windlass of a silvermine, but rough-handed enough to wring
silver from a consumptive shopkeeper. Our grandiose rulers, I should say,
are in small business when they break in to snatch a widow’s kettle and
cot-bed.
“Yet that’s done every day in the year. Statistics claim that somewhere
on earth a child is born every second. And at least every minute sees the
birth of a child that will have to die of hunger, because its mother’s
bread has been filched by tax-collectors.
“Have Governments a right to supply their needs at the expense of widows
and orphans, while thousands of able-bodied young men stand ready to earn
revenue for them?”
High tariff bullies, says the Russian reformer, are marine highway
robbers. At first sight, the burden of spoliation seems shifted to the
shoulders of foreigners, but, look closer, and you find natives obliged
to buy imports at extortion rates.
Passengers, waiting to be examined by custom-house officers, says
Bakunin, always remind him of travelers, lined up to be searched by
footpads.
“How commerce revives,” he says, “wherever those shackles are partly
removed! How would it flourish if they were altogether abolished?
Traffic that now obliges skippers to starve their sailors could be made
abundantly profitable.”
A hundred years before the birth of Henry George, a revenue system,
closely resembling the “Single Tax” plan, was recommended by the father
of Gabriel Mirabeau, and by the Roget School of French Communists.
“It _would_ relieve some classes of our wage-earners,” says Bakunin, “but
would burden others, and why harass them, if we can undoubtedly find ways
to get along without direct taxation?”
Why make land the scapegoat of a sin that might be avoided?
In 1849 the Russian Government got its clutches on the bold reformer,
and silenced him by the usual argument of despots. The voice that had
entranced mass-meetings in a hundred cities of southern and western
Europe was stifled in the catacombs of Schlüsselburg.
But Time, the All-Avenger, has made the martyr’s name a rallying cry of
East-European reformers, and America should honor the memory of Mikal
Bakunin as that of a hero and pioneer of reform—a man whose marvelous
gift of intuition had recognized all the ideals of Populism, all its
principles and promises, but who succumbed to the superhuman task of
effecting its progress under the handicap of a monarchical government.
_Naturally_
KNICKER—There goes a man who would rather fight than eat.
BOCKER—Soldier?
KNICKER—No, dyspeptic.
[Illustration: LUCIANNA’S KEEP