stricted. First of all he is restricted in the rotation of crops, and type of tillage. The third field is the fallow field on which the cattle of all the villagers pasture. The cattle are also pastured on the stubble as soon as the harvest is removed. Hence it becomes necessary for all the members of the community not only to sow the same crop on the same field, but to sow at the same time and to harvest at the same time.

Besides the cultivated fields the village as a rule has some waste that serves as a permanent pasture, woods, and a meadow. None of this is subdivided or fenced. It is used in common, with restrictions varying in different localities. As a rule with a definite acreage in the cultivated fields goes a proportionate and quite definite acreage in the meadows. Let us say that a certain farmer owns two acres of meadow land. It is left, however, to a yearly drawing of lots to determine where his two acres are to be located. He will get neither more nor less than the two acres to which he has a title, but the location of these two acres may vary from year to year. As soon as the meadow hay is mowed, the entire meadow is thrown open for common pasturage of all members of the village community. Sometimes all varieties of cattle are allowed there; oftener sheep will be restricted to the waste and fallow fields or to a special part of the meadow.

This is the organization of the village community as we find it still in numberless localities of northern, western, and southeastern Europe, an institution that has given rise to so prodigious a literature.

It is not an idle problem, either. Agriculture was

until recently the sole basis of state and society. It is, and will remain, of paramount significance. Anything so fundamentally characteristic as is the village community of European farming is of fundamental economic and historical importance. The problem of the village community is not a new one. The enclosure of the commons shook the very foundations of sixteenth-century England. Yet curiously enough it became a scientific and bookish problem only in the nineteenth century. This bookish spirit is nowhere so well expressed as in Wagner's rejoinder to Faust:

I often had myself fantastic notions,

But never have I felt the like emotions.

'Tis tiresome on green woods and fields to look,
The bird's wing crave I not in slightest measure.
How otherwise bears us the mental pleasure
From page to page, from book to book!
Then grow the winter nights so lovely fair,

A warm and blissful life all limbs pervading,

And oh! unroll'st thou e'en an ancient parchment rare,

All Heaven descends to thee that knows no fading.

Tiresome as it may be to look at green woods and fields, let us do so for a change. If we should take with us a plain American farmer and show him a European village community he could not possibly believe his eyes. First of all he would observe the homestead with the farm buildings all clustered together, far away from the farming land. This would naturally look to him just as if an American farming community should live in a city, keeping there the horses, fodder, etc., but going out every morning to farm somewhere in the country. The American farmer would hardly

know what to think about such a situation. True, he knows of wealthy farmers who live in the town in the winter, or even go visiting or traveling in the winter, but they can do so because during the season they are on their jobs without wasting a minute of their own or of their horses' time. What are we to tell this plain American farmer? We consult all the books and find that they are unanimous on this point. In fact it is the only point on which the various writers are unanimous. The European peasant lives in villages for protection. Protection of what? The farm land, the crops, the cattle on the pastures? Of course not. They live in villages for their own protection, for the protection of themselves. Shall we give this answer to the sturdy son of an American pioneer? His comment could easily be guessed, as well as his praise and thanksgiving for having come from a different stock. But that is where our farmer is quite mistaken. His stock, whether English or Irish, German or Scandinavian, Magyar or Slav, have all lived in precisely such villages in the old country.

But, curiously, if we consult documentary evidence we shall find that early agricultural pioneers and settlers in newly colonized European territory, where they needed "protection" the most, lived as a matter of fact not in villages but on single farms. Their "villages" consisted of single homesteads, but as the population grew even these communities often developed the same uniform type as the European village, with all the homesteads huddled together. Instead, however, of consulting thousands of documents let us try

another method. Let us give our poor ancestors the benefit of the doubt and assume that they had some common sense. If they so universally persisted in holding to an arrangement so obviously and seriously inconvenient there must have been some good reason for it. When we proceed on this assumption, we almost invariably find that a "good reason" is a plain, technical, and economic necessity. So it is in the case of the European village. Where would you locate the farmhouses, if not together in a special area? Would you put the house and garden on the farm land? If so, to which of the farmer's numerous and widely scattered strips and ribbons of land would you attach his homestead? And if his house were securely attached to one of his strips, would he not be just as far away from all his other strips as when he lives in the village? Furthermore, if his homestead and garden should be located on one of his strips in one of the three farming fields, he would find himself every third year on a fallow field, where the cattle of all his neighbors are grazing, and perhaps miles away from the strips he is cultivating in the two other fields; besides his buildings and his garden would interfere every year with pasturing on the stubble.

Thus the village community and the possession of isolated, intermixed strips of land necessitate living together outside the area given over to tillage, and thus there is formed a village street.

Now let us turn to the farming land.

The reader, of course, knows that in no occupation is the time element of so decisive importance as in