British Agricultural Union and the Collectivist Movement in the Countryside

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London, June 14

I realised that my last article was incomplete, and therefore feel it to be my due to write the present one. I spoke there about the Agricultural Union, founded 6 years ago by citizen Arch, who is now famous throughout Britain for this initiative and for the quality of his public speaking: he is a real tribune, somewhat unrefined, but powerful in his lack of refinement.

The Union began its propaganda over the wages question. The farm workers earned no more than the equivalent of 16 lire (Italian) a week. Arch, with the help of some able friends, increased the membership of the Agricultural Union by over 50 thousand in 3 or 4 years and was able to organise a strike of 30 thousand men. The strike was successful, and wages rose by two and a half lire a week in the Eastern counties. At the same time provisions were adopted to let farm workers emigrate to America and Australia or move from one English county to another. These transfers obtained the desired effect of raising wages where manpower decreased. This struggle was conducted to good effect until 1874. But after this date things changed. There was an attempt to tackle the question of an expropriation of the land in favour of the State, as the famous economist Stuart Mill had already proposed. * The questions of universal suffrage and popular education were also raised. Note, however, a very significant circumstance, namely that the movement in favour of collective property was almost exclusively the work of those who broke away from citizen Arch, whose constant predilection was for those issues which did not touch the holy altar of the individual ownership of land. Indeed, in the presence of the collectivist movement, he felt disposed to preach a sort of conciliation between agricultural labourers and their exploiters; in the presence, in other words, of the revolutionary idea of collectivism he felt himself to be a conservative: he reserved all his hostility for the upper aristocracy. He thought it useful to woo the tenant farmers a little, to avoid having them as avowed enemies in the parliamentary elections. It is therefore not unlikely that we shall see citizen Arch in the House of Commons: there is already a certain amount of agitation in this direction and Arch is willing to stand as a candidate for membership. All this does not stop the collectivist movement from making headway: indeed even at the recent MEETING of the Agricultural Union something was said about it. After recognising the need for great improvements in agriculture, the desire was expressed for a law which would place all cultivable land in the hands of a representative body and indemnify the owners. This expropriation would be intended to benefit the working people— those people, in other words, in whose hands the future prosperity of agriculture lies.

I have been concerned to set this out for you because I want the Italian socialists to have a clear idea of the spirit of our Agricultural Union and the movement agitating round it.