in which
social policy clashes with a purely economical policy.

Political vicissitudes have added their influence to that of economical
changes in disturbing that dim instinct, that reverence for traditional
custom, which is the peasant's principle of action. He is in the midst
of novelties for which he knows no reason--changes in political
geography, changes of the government to which he owes fealty, changes in
bureaucratic management and police regulations. He finds himself in a
new element before an apparatus for breathing in it is developed in him.
His only knowledge of modern history is in some of its results--for
instance, that he has to pay heavier taxes from year to year. His chief
idea of a government is of a power that raises his taxes, opposes his
harmless customs, and torments him with new formalities. The source of
all this is the false system of "enlightening" the peasant which has been
adopted by the bureaucratic governments. A system which disregards the
traditions and hereditary attachments of the peasant, and appeals only to
a logical understanding which is not yet developed in him, is simply
disintegrating and ruinous to the peasant character. The interference
with the communal regulations has been of this fatal character. Instead
of endeavoring to promote to the utmost the healthy life of the Commune,
as an organism the conditions of which are bound up with the historical
characteristics of the peasant, the bureaucratic plan of government is
bent on improvement by its patent machinery of state-appointed
functionaries and off-hand regulations in accordance with modern
enlightenment. The spirit of communal exclusiveness--the resistance to
the indiscriminate establishment of strangers, is an intense traditional
feeling in the peasant. "This gallows is for us and our children," is
the typical motto of this spirit. But such exclusiveness is highly
irrational and repugnant to modern liberalism; therefore a bureaucratic
government at once opposes it, and encourages to the utmost the
introduction of new inhabitants in the provincial communes. Instead of
allowing the peasants to manage their own affairs, and, if they happen to
believe that five and four make eleven, to unlearn the prejudice by their
own experience in calculation, so that they may gradually understand
processes, and not merely see results, bureaucracy comes with its "Ready
Reckoner" and works all the peasant's sums for him--the sur