THE RISE OF THE COMMON PEOPLE 141values were obstinately preserved in spite of the dispositions of well-intentioned
reformers. In the sixty or seventy years when Emancipation was in the air, the
philanthropic master who cared to ask his peasants' opinion invariably received
the same reply, in Poland as in Russia. 'My wasp, the peasants said, 'a ziemia
nasza' (We are yours, but the land is ours). In other words, the peasants were
not specially concerned about their personal freedom. As at any period in his-
tory, they had few objections to serfdom so long as it improved their security of
tenure. In the nineteenth century, they only settled for Emancipation when they
realized that it was the best way of reversing the encroachments of the demesne
and hence of diminishing the lord's control of 'their' land. For the peasant who
was happy enough to be tied to the soil and had no desire whatsoever to leave
his village, Emancipation by itself was meaningless. Contemporary reformers,
and modern social theorists, have ignored these factors at their peril. In later
times, political innovators who advocate collectivization of the land have cast
the communist state in the role of the feudal landlord, and have inevitably
earned the peasants' undying hatred.^7
None the less, in the long term, the effects of Emancipation were very impor-
tant. Henceforth the peasants were free to move where they wished, to seek new
employment, to make contracts, to buy and sell, to send their children to school,
to organize themselves politically. Almost all the outstanding social develop-
ments of the last hundred years, from industrialization and scientific agriculture
to mass education and mass politics, could not possibly have happened if a class,
which in 1900 still included 82 per cent of the total population of the Polish
lands, had not first been freed from the chains of serfdom. Emancipation spelled
the end of the estate-based society and gave a major boost to social mobility.
Seen in a wider perspective, it was the fundamental precondition for the full
exploitation of new economic conditions and for the formation of new social
classes.
The politicization of the peasantry began soon after Emancipation. Its char-
acteristic manifestations appeared in the 1860s in the co-operative movement,
principally in Prussia: and in the 18.90s in the formation of peasant parties,
principally in Austria.
The co-operative movement was originally concerned with popular Credit
Banks, making short-term loans to the peasants for farm improvements or the
purchase of machinery; but it soon spread into the realm of agricultural pro-
duction and marketing. The peasant rolniki or 'farmers' circles' helped their
members to make bulk purchases of fuel, grain-feed, and fertilizers, and to sell
their meat, grain, or dairy products on favourable terms. They played a vital
role in rural education and in improving farming methods. In the struggle with
the Prussian Colonization Commission they entered the real estate business,
buying land in competition with the government and selling it to Polish peas-
ants. In that same era, especially in Silesia, they spread into food marketing.
Under the influence of clerical pioneers such as the Revds A. Szamarzewski and
P. Wawrzyniak, Polish workers were encouraged to form co-operative societies