THE ROUMANIAN " JACQUERIE."
THIS Roumanian faze/Aerie is for many reasons a most serious affair. In the first place, it is an explosion based upon grievances which are felt, not only by the six million peasants of Roumania, but by the twelve million or so peasants of Eastern Austria, and the eighty million peasants who, in a rough way, cultivate and maintain the Russian Empire. That the movement has commenced first of all in Roumania is due to a change in estate management ; but the substance of the peasants' grievance exists, though not in so acute a form, through- out Eastern Europe. The Boyars, or great landlords, of Moldavia and Wallachia, the two great Turkish provinces from which the little kingdom was formed, constitute a class by themselves. Their moral has been destroyed by their long subjection to Turkish tyranny, and now that they are free they are the most luxurious, most dissolute, and most extravagant of all European nobles. They are all in debt. They are compelled to wring the last farthing out of their tenants, and they have recently discovered a new and most successful method of exaction. Being, like most men of their kind in Southern Europe, very lazy, they dwell in the towns, and farm their estates to bailiffs for a fixed quit-rent, leaving them to obtain from the peasantry the utmost they can squeeze. The majority of these bailiffs are clever Jews, who, armed with the whole powers of the landlords, and backed by the officials whom they "conciliate," demand double, and in some cases triple, the accustomed rents, which were already heavy; and this takes from the people—who, it must be remembered, have no alternative mode of living—the whole produce of their toil beyond the barest and roughest means of subsistence, means so attenuated that they are compelled to live in rotten huts and to starve not only themselves but their wives and children. It is probable that the bailiffs, belonging as they do for the most part to an oppressed and detested class, use their new position without mercy, and, like the intendants of the great French estates before the Revolution, insult and worry the peasants with a certain sense of gratification. The new system has been borne through a few fertile years, but the land has been overcropped, and now that a lean year or two have arrived the peasants—who, it must not be forgotten, have all passed through the military mill— have risen in insurrection. They know nothing of passive resistance, they are boiling with a hate which has risen to bloodthirstiness, and, like all peoples who have been trodden into savagery, they have in them, like the French before the Revolution, an element of Eastern cruelty. They plunder and burn out the bailiffs, and slaughter the landlords, sometimes with circumstances of abhorrent cruelty. There are stories, for instance, which are believed, at least in isolated cases, to be true, of their plunging their victims into boiling petroleum. The Government, of course, does its best to maintain order,; but the Army with the colours, though excellently disciplined, is not large, and its Generale find it difficult at once to defend the small towns and protect the scattered estates, and are compelled, therefore, to call out the Reserves. The Reservists are almost all peasants, they sympathise with the sufferings of the insur- gents, like them they hate the Jews, who monopolise every kind of productive industry except agriculture, and before restoring order they murder the Jews and pillage the estates. The insurrection creeps on from district to district, till throughout Moldavia and Wallachia there is a roaring jacquerie such as, except in Galicia in 1818, has not been seen in any section of Europe for a hundred years. The King, who is a really able man, is prostrated with sickness. The Government, which is Conservative— that is, nominated by the great landlords—has thrown up the sponge ; and its. successor, which is taken from the Liberal Opposition, must, if it is to avoid interference from its great neighbours, Austria and Russia. restore order swiftly, and can only do it, after it has tried palliatives, by proposals which, however their meaning may be hidden in legal phrases, must involve large measures of confiscation. One of them, it is reported, will authorise the State, whenever a quarrel between the land- lord and his tenantry becomes visible, to take the control of the property into its own hands. The owners of the soil, in fact, are to be treated en masse as it was proposed
in Ireland to treat Lord Clanricarde. External order will of course be restored, but it needs no economist to prove that the very basis of society will be upset through- out Roumania, which has for years been considered in Western Europe the best governed of the Balkan States. The loss will not fall upon the landlords exclusively, but upon all who have lent them money, upon the banks which have cashed their creditors' bills, and upon the little towns which have been plundered or have found their petty commerce brought to a standstill by the disorders.
A jacquerie likethis, whatever its termination, has a lesson in it for all Europe. It has been assumed by all statesmen and almost all observers that in the great collision between Labour and Capital which is now shaking European society the steadying influence is the stolidity of the peasants, who have -always been ready to furnish soldiers, and who are supposed to have an instinctive regard for the security of property. That idea is substantially sound so long as the peasants own their little farms ; but as we have seen for generations in Ireland, and as all Asiatic statesmen have recognised for ages, when the cultivators rent the soil in patches, and are liable to increasing or indefinite demands, the doctrine ceases to be true. The peasants then suffer like artisans, and being armed with the instruments of agriculture, or, in Europe, having passed through the military mill, they insurrect with more readiness and much greater effect than their rivals, the workmen .of the towns. They are, too, much fiercer, more ignorant, and from their position as scattered com- munities are able to make a better fight of it with the soldiers, who, again, are for the most part drawn from their own ranks. This is the grand danger throughout Eastern Europe, and it is very doubtful indeed whether it can be removed without a transfer of property so great and so violent that it would make all property insecure, and would incidentally extirpate or cripple the only class which, having the leisure and inclination to cultivate itself, has begun at all events to be civilised. That class is not numerous enough to defend itself with its own hands, it cannot depend permanently on the soldiers, and it has, therefore, before it only two alternatives. One is to fly as the French nobles did—and it is this which is being generally adopted—and the other is to submit to low permanent quit-rents imposed from above, and accepted by the losers with the sense of insufferable in- justice. If King Charles, who is thoroughly aware of the dangers of the situation, and who bitterly reproaches the statesmen who have just resigned for their want of pre- vision and energy, can suggest a compromise other than this, he will show himself the first statesman, as he has long since been accepted as the first soldier, in Eastern Europe. In Russia, in Austria, in parts of Italy, and in most of the Balkan States the Roumanian jacquerie, Whether successful or defeated, will immensely increase the excitability of the peasantry and the perplexities of statesmen, already overloaded by problems which as yet no man of genius has arisen with sufficient mental power and sufficient daring to attempt to solve.
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