KROPOTKIN Convention (known under the name of Code Napoleon) does not recognize customary law; it recognizes only Roman law, or rather Byzantine law. That is why in France when the wind blows down a tree on the National highway, or a peasant prefers giving a Stonebreaker two or three francs to the unpleasant task of repairing the communal road himself, it is necessary for twelve or fifteen employees of the Home Office and Treasury to be put in motion, and for more than fifty documents to be exchanged between these austere functionaries, before the tree can be sold, or the peasant receives permission to deposit two or three francs into the communal treasury. Should you have any doubts about it you will find these fifty documents recapitulated and duly numbered by M. Tricoche in the Journal des Economistes. This is under the third Republic, for I do not speak of the barbarous methods of the ancient regime that limited itself to five or six documents. No doubt scientists will tell you that at that barbarous period State control was only fictitious. If it were only this, it would be but twenty thousand functionaries too many, and a thousand million francs more added to the budget, a detail for the lovers of "order" and levelling! But there is worse beneath all this, for the principle kills everything.· The peasants of a village have a thousand interests in common: interests of economy, neighbourhood and constant intercourse. They must unite for a thousand divers things. But the State cannot allow them to unite! It gives them school and priest, police and judge; these must suffice, and should other interests arise, they must apply in the regular way to Church and State. Thus till 1883 it was severely forbidden to the villagers of France to unite, even to buy chemical manure or to irrigate their fields. It was only in 1883-1886 that the Republic granted this right when it voted the law of unions, hampered by many a precaution and obstacle. And we, with our faculties blunted by State education, rejoice at the sudden progress accomplished by agricultural syndicates, without blushing at the idea that this right of union of which peasants were deprived for centuries belonged to them without contention in the Middle Ages. Belonged to every man-free or serf. Slaves that we are, we believe it to be a "conquest of democracy"! This is the pitch of stupidity we have reached by our warped and vitiated State education, and our State prejudices. "If you have any common interests in the city or the village, ask the Church and the State to look after them. But you are forbidden to combine in a direct way to settle matters for yourselves!" Such is the formula throughout Europe since the sixteenth century. Already in an edict of Edward III, issued at the end of the fourteenth century, 36 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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