Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

She had no need to embellish the workers and the peasants with imaginary virtues in order to love them and to work for them.

Two generations, perhaps, will succumb in the task, and yet it must be done.’ None of the women of our circle would have given way before the certainty of death on the scaffold.

Altogether it may be said that the région lyonnaise is characterised as a separate centre of French civilisation and art, and that a remarkable spirit of research, discovery and invention has developed there in all directions--scientific…

On the contrary, the delicacy of the work and the extreme variety of patterns were a distinctive feature of the Tarare muslins and a cause of their success.

What most deserves admiration is--not so much the development of the great industries, which, after all, here as elsewhere, are to a great extent international in their origins--as the creative and inventive powers and capacities of…

At every step, in the field, in the garden, in the orchard, in the dairy, in the industrial arts, in the hundreds of small inventions in these arts, one sees the creative genius of the folk.

It also appears very probable that if we find a highly developed working population in Vienna and Warsaw, this depends again to a very great extent upon the very considerable development of similar small industries, which stimulate…

One can appreciate in it both the variety of the small industries which are carried on in French towns and the skill and inventing powers of the workers.

The small industry of Paris fights hard for its maintenance, and it shows its vitality by the numberless machine-tools which are continually invented by the workers for improving and cheapening the produce.

But where the spirit of initiative has been awakened in one way or another, we see the petty industries taking a new development in Germany, as we have just seen that being done in France.

The reality is, however, that when we compare the miserable conditions of the workers in the petty trades with the conditions of the wage workers in the factories, in the same regions and in the same trades, we see that the very same…

They live upon wages of from nine to eleven shillings a week, in town slums instead of the country.

They work eleven hours a day, and they also are subject to the extra misery thrown upon them during the frequently recurring crises.

It is only after they have undergone all sorts of sufferings in their struggles against their employers that some factory workers succeed, more or less, here and there, to wrest from their employers a “living wage”--and this again only in…

To welcome all these sufferings, seeing in them the action of a “natural law” and a necessary step towards the necessary concentration of industry, would be simply absurd.

Moreover, everyone knows to what extent the labour of children and girls is resorted to, even in the most prosperous factories--even in this country which stands foremost in industrial development.

To idealise the modern factory, in order to depreciate the so-called “mediæval” forms of the small industries, is consequently--to say the least--as unreasonable as to idealise the latter and try to bring mankind back to isolated…

Knowing that in most cases the advent of the factory would mean no work at all for most men, and the taking of the children and girls to the factory, they do the utmost to prevent it from appearing at all in the village.

As to combinations in the villages, co-operation and the like, one must never forget how jealously the German, the French, the Russian and the Austrian Governments have hitherto prevented the workers, and especially the village workers…

The great concern would thus find its advantages not in such factors as are imposed by the technical necessities of the trade at the time being, but in such factors as could be eliminated by co-operative organisation.

Altogether, it may be taken as one of the fundamental facts of the economical life of Europe that the defeat of a number of small trades, artisan work and domestic industries, came through their being incapable of organising the sale of…

When the markets for such commodities came to be Asia on the one side, and the New World on the other side, such was fatally the case; since commerce had ceased to be communal, and had become individual, the cities became a prey for the…

Every step that may be taken, either for awakening intellectual life in the villages, or for assuring the peasants’ or the country’s rights upon the land, will necessarily further the growth of industries in the villages.

A separate book of the greatest interest and value could be written on this subject, especially on the impulse given to a number of petty trades, old and new, by means of a cheap supply of motive power.

Such a book would also offer a great interest in that it would show to what an extent that mingling together of agriculture with industry, which I described in the first edition of this book as “the factory amidst the fields,” has…