United States or Bhutan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Without attempting to expound those mysterious principles, to which I have repeatedly referred in previous chapters, I may mention briefly that the traditional patriarchal institutions on which the theorists found their hopes of a happy social future for their country are the rural Commune, the native home-industries, and the peculiar co-operative institutions called Artels.
Fishing is always made by artels in the Ural, the Volga, and all the lakes of Northern Russia. Besides these permanent organizations, there are the simply countless temporary artels, constituted for each special purpose. When ten or twenty peasants come from some locality to a big town, to work as weavers, carpenters, masons, boat-builders, and so on, they always constitute an artel.
In some of the larger towns there are artels of a much more complex kind permanent associations, possessing large capital, and pecuniarily responsible for the acts of the individual members." The word "artel," despite its apparent similarity, has, Mr Aylmer Maude assures me, no connection with "ars" or "arte."
The oldest guild-statute known is that of Verona, dating from 1303, but evidently copied from some much older statute. The chief works on the artels are named in the article "Russia" of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition, p. 84. M. Clode's The Early History of the Guild of the Merchant Taylors, London, 1888, i. 45; and so on.
Big factories were increasing in size and numbers, while cottage industries were disappearing or falling under the power of middlemen, and the Artels had not advanced a step in their expected development. The factory workers, though all of peasant origin, were losing their connection with their native villages and abandoning their allotments of the Communal land.
The only association which exists in this case is for the purchase and preparation of provisions, and even these duties are very often left to the contractor. In some of the larger towns there are artels of a much more complex kind permanent associations, possessing a large capital, and pecuniarily responsible for the acts of the individual members.
Until now, many of the fishing-grounds on the tributaries of the Caspian Sea are held by immense artels, the Ural river belonging to the whole of the Ural Cossacks, who allot and re-allot the fishing-grounds perhaps the richest in the world among the villages, without any interference of the authorities.
In the building trades, artels of from 10 to 200 members are formed; and the serious builders and railway contractors always prefer to deal with an artel than with separately-hired workers. As to the Balkan peninsula, the Turkish Empire and Caucasia, the old guilds are maintained there in full.
The history of "the making of Russia," and of the colonization of Siberia, is a history of the hunting and trading artels or guilds, followed by village communities, and at the present time we find the artel everywhere; among each group of ten to fifty peasants who come from the same village to work at a factory, in all the building trades, among fishermen and hunters, among convicts on their way to and in Siberia, among railway porters, Exchange messengers, Customs House labourers, everywhere in the village industries, which give occupation to 7,000,000 men from top to bottom of the working world, permanent and temporary, for production and consumption under all possible aspects.
For Russia we have positive evidence showing that the very "making of Russia" was as much the work of its hunters', fishermen's, and traders' artels as of the budding village communities, and up to the present day the country is covered with artels.
Word Of The Day