PEASANT MOVEMENT. The World War gave a strong impetus to the political consciousness of a class which had seemed obliterated since the Industrial Revolution. During the past century the peasants, even in western Europe, have been dom inated by commerce and industry. In eastern Europe they have had no share in public life, except in sporadic risings. Yet in eastern Europe they form the bulk of the populations, and it is naturally in that region that the new peasant movement is asserting itself.
The political division between town and country was later widened into a gulf by scientific Socialism. The angle of Socialist economics was essentially the same as that of Liberalism, except that what the latter regarded as economically well established Socialism looked upon as merely transitory ; so that its own heaven was even more remote from the peasant world. The peasant holding and tilling land on a small scale was doomed. M. Vandervelde said (in 1898) that to wish to realise the ideal of the Biblical homestead was as futile as to try "to replace the Code Napoleon by the tables of Moses." And not only futile but also pernicious ; Marx praised capitalism for having at least rescued "a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life." Hence he and his disciples placed the nationalisa tion of land and farming on a large scale for public account in the forefront of their programme. From that time date the many Conservative agrarian organisations in central and western Europe which found in the peasants credulous recruits; a circumstance whose electoral effects gradually led to a watering down of Socialist agrarian programmes.
Politically that region was still in the autocratic stage; and its economic structure rested on a primitive agriculture and on artisan manufacture—capitalist industry being altogether absent. But the third, social incentive stirred up reformers in the east if anything more deeply than in the west. In Russia the Slavophil revival had raised the peasant on a pedestal, and that only made his serf's chains more obnoxious in the eyes of the intelligentsia. The younger intellectuals, imbued with 18th century humanitar ian philosophy, centred all their ideals on freeing the peasants. But whereas to western Liberals that had been an end in itself, for the Russian reformers it was merely the stepping-stone to an independent and prosperous village life. They prided themselves in being Socialists, but, like Proudhon's, theirs was a Socialism for the peasants. Marxism was essentially an industrial policy for the transformation of industrial societies. The eastern re formers were forced to form alternative conceptions and pro grammes suited to the problems of their peasant populations. "Populism" (narodnichestvo, from narod—people) became the expression of that current of opinion. (See RUSSIA, HISTORY.) The kernel of the Populist position was the rejection of the Marxian economic determinism. Marxism considered a phase of capitalist concentration of production as the inevitable prelude to a Socialist society; the Russian Populists, basing themselves on the existence of the mir, contended that the capitalist-prole tarian phase was not necessary in Russia, nor even possible in such backward agrarian countries. For capitalism would ruin the peasants, i.e., the only available customers for industrial products. Likewise the Populists held that revolutionary leaders were able to shape and guide events, provided that they acted in line with the needs and wishes of the masses. Above all they be lieved that a rural democracy offered the masses a better promise of happiness than they could expect from an industrial organisa tion. All they needed was more "Land and Liberty"; and the backbone of the Populist programme was a plea for equal dis tribution of land among the peasants.