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.
Knicker—There goes a man who would rather fight than eat.
Bocker—Soldier?
Knicker—No, dyspeptic.