is love
of secure possession and peaceful earnings. But, in fact, the peasant
contemplated "partition" by the light of an historical reminiscence
rather than of novel theory. The golden age, in the imagination of the
peasant, was the time when every member of the commune had a right to as
much wood from the forest as would enable him to sell some, after using
what he wanted in firing--in which the communal possessions were so
profitable that, instead of his having to pay rates at the end of the
year, each member of the commune was something in pocket. Hence the
peasants in general understood by "partition," that the State lands,
especially the forests, would be divided among the communes, and that, by
some political legerdemain or other, everybody would have free fire-wood,
free grazing for his cattle, and over and above that, a piece of gold
without working for it. That he should give up a single clod of his own
to further the general "partition" had never entered the mind of the
peasant communist; and the perception that this was an essential
preliminary to "partition" was often a sufficient cure for his Communism.

In villages lying in the neighborhood of large towns, however, where the
circumstances of the peasantry are very different, quite another
interpretation of Communism is prevalent. Here the peasant is generally
sunk to the position of the proletaire living from hand to mouth: he has
nothing to lose, but everything to gain by "partition." The coarse
nature of the peasant has here been corrupted into bestiality by the
disturbance of his instincts, while he is as yet incapable of principles;
and in this type of the degenerate peasant is seen the worst example of
ignorance intoxicated by theory.

A significant hint as to the interpretation the peasants put on
revolutionary theories may be drawn from the way they employed the few
weeks in which their movements were unchecked. They felled the forest
trees and shot the game; they withheld taxes; they shook off the
imaginary or real burdens imposed on them by their mediatized princes, by
presenting their "demands" in a very rough way before the ducal or
princely "Schloss;" they set their faces against the bureaucratic
management of the communes, deposed the government functionaries who had
been placed over them as burgomasters and magistrates, and abolished the
whole bureaucratic system of procedure, simply by taking no notice of its
regulations, and recurr