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Tom Monto

Anarchist Kropotkin's visit to Edmonton and Calgary 1897, at James Mavor's invitation

Updated: May 25

One of the world's leading anarchist thinkers, Peter Kropotkin visited Edmonton in 1897, saw much evidence of "mutual aid," and went away with the idea of getting Doukhobors to come to settle in western Canada. His visit to Edmonton and other points in North America is described in A.G. Ivanov's book, Kropotkin and Canada (translated by Malcolm Archibald), published by Black Cat Press, 2020.


Russian Prince Kropotkin was the leading figure in the international anarchist movement following Bakunin's death in 1876. And in 1897, Toronto professor James Mavor invited him to come to the British Scientific Conference, held in that city.


James Mavor was an important figure in both Canada and Great Britain, now largely forgotten. Mavor was author of

North West of Canada. Report to the Board of Trade on the North West of Canada with special reference to wheat production for export, 1904 [has passing mention of Kropotkin] (full text available in Peel's PP)] and Government Telephones, the Experience of Manitoba, 1916 (full text available in Peel's PP)


The second volume of Mavor's memoirs has much information on Kropotkin. It is available here:


Kropotkin toured the U.S. and Canada in 1897. His trip included visits to Edmonton and Calgary. He later wrote of what he had seen. He did not plant anarchism cells here but later helped encourage Doukhobor emigration to the old North-West.


Calgary and Edmonton reports of his visit to Canada Prince Kropotkin, an exile from Russia due to “his advanced liberal ideas,” visited Calgary area to learn about agricultural situation there. (Calgary Herald, Sept. 23, 1897. The Herald did not refer to his visit again in 1897, according to a search in Peel's PP website.) In calling for the expropriation of land, Kropotkin was indebted to Henry George's Progress and Poverty, the publication of which, Kropotkin claimed, had provoked "an outburst of of socialist feeling in England".


In Conquest of Bread and Factories, Fields and Workshops Kropotkin paid tribute to U.S. economic progress and extolled U.S. federalism. He praised the U.S. War of Independence and Declaration of Independence as landmarks in the struggle of human freedom.


However he also abhorred U.S. politics, which he described as a "plutocracy". He noted with displeasure abuses of power occurring there. He protested the trials of the Haymarket anarchists in 1886 and 1887. Kropotkin read in the news that, at Hazelton, Pennsylvania, 19 Hungarian miners had been killed and 41 wounded, by a volley of shots from a posse of sheriff's deputies and spoke out against the injustice. (Edmonton Bulletin, Sept. 16, 1897) But he saw signs of an emerging working class consciousness in the U.S. in the late 1800s. He viewed the 1877 railway strike as a sign of rising revolutionary consciousness among workers. (Avrich, Kropotkin in America (anarchist website)) The Sept. 23, 1897 Calgary Herald, blandly reported that Prince Kropotkin, who had been exiled from Russia due to “his advanced liberal ideas,” had visited the Calgary area to learn about the agricultural situation there. Kropotkin had by then moved on to Edmonton. The Sept. 16, 1897 Edmonton Bulletin reported Prince Kropotkin, "a well-known socialistic writer, had arrived on the Monday train "to view the Edmonton district and visit some of the settlers of Russian race and language". (Edmonton Bulletin, Sept. 16, 1897. His name was spelled "Prince Krapotkine.") During his stay, he stayed at the Alberta Hotel. On Edmonton, Kropotkin recorded in a later article published in the Nineteenth Century magazine, "farmers [there] rely chiefly upon mixed farming - dairy produce, poultry, stock-raising, honey and so on - everything in short that can be grown or produced on the farm. Co-operative dairying [has developed to a noticeable degree] with rapid extension of co-operative cheese factories." The Canadian government had taken the initiative of introducing co-operative cheese factories to the North-West under a plan by which the government initiates a factory, operates it for a few years by a Government agent, then withdraws as soon as the farmers have been initiated in the factory's management.


Kropotkin visited one of these factories operating at Innisfail and said its production had already found a good market in BC. ("Some of the Resources of Canada", Nineteenth Century magazine) "On the banks of the Saskatchewan begins a belt of very fertile soil covered with small aspen and birch woods which have grown within the last 15 years after the virgin forest had been burned. Edmonton is in the heart of that region, on the picturesque banks of the gold-bearing Saskatchewan. I found it a lively little town of 1300 inhabitants, which has grown entirely within the last 14 years. It was formerly a Hudson Bay Company fort, and is still is an emporium for trade in raw furs, but it has taken the aspect of a town provided with hotels, "stores" and schools. "Seeing what a family of as few as two working adults can make in five years out of a virgin spot, one realizes what man is capable to achieve when no rent or tax collector is upon him to take the best fruit of his labour. After having worked all their life to no account [in the Old Country], they are happy to name their [Canadian] homestead and its little cabin their own, and to know that after each good crop their livestock is increasing and some new machinery is bought (they do it mostly in small groups of four or five farmers)." He said the incredible resources of the Canada West raised this thought in his mind - "How rich mankind could be if social obstacles did not stand everywhere in the way of utilizing the gifts of nature." Kropotkin described the hard work and sacrifices made by the settlers of the Edmonton area.


"Fertile as the soil is, it must be cleared from some forest growth before it is tilled. The first winter must often be passed in a sod hut the house. The shed, the barn have to be built out of wood that has been cut with their own hands, because lumber, even though it is cheap enough, would have to be bought. The threshing engine has to be carried along a primitive road or across some swampy brook. And every sack of wheat must be carted fifteen, twenty and thirty miles to Edmonton because in the neighbourhood of the town [of Edmonton] land is already in the hands of land speculators....

Happily the climate is really very healthy and the settlers being scattered there is not much danger from contagious disease." Kropotkin noted that he had seen that the land survey system created 16 groups of farms in every township (a western Canadian township being a measure of land 6 miles by 6 miles). Each family was separated (at least at first) by a mile of idle land from its nearest neighbours. Kropotkin kept a diary in this period of his life. It was used as important source of information for A.G. Ivanov's book, Kropotkin and Canada (translated by Malcolm Archibald), published by Black Cat Press, 2020. "Prince Kropotkin left for England on Friday's train. During his stay he visited the Rabbit Hill, Stony Plain and St. Albert settlements, driven by M. McCauley MLA. Questioning some of the Stony Plain settlers as to whether they desired to return to Europe or not, he was informed they were more than satisfied with their present conditions and prospects." (Edmonton Bulletin, Sept. 20, 1897) Matt McCauley was a prominent Edmonton pioneer and community leader. He was serving as member of the North-West Territorial Council at the time of Kropotkin's visit, not MLA as reported. He had been the first mayor of the Town of Edmonton. The neighbourhood of McCauley is named after him.

Mutual Aid About the time of his visit to Canada, Kropotkin wrote Factories, Fields and Workshops and Conquest of Bread. Just prior to his Alberta tour, he had recorded his ideas on the history and practice of mutual aid, which became the book Mutual Aid, published in 1902. Interestingly, one of the examples his book gives of mutual aid, neighbours donating household items to a family that had lost all in a fire, is what happened commonly in Territorial times in Alberta.


Another noteworthy example is that of one of the first Ukrainians in Alberta. Ivan Pilipewsky suffered loss of all in a fire at his home near Josephburg and he came to Edmonton to get donated replacements to start over. The Edmonton Bulletin advertized his plight.

(Kropotkin, Mutual Aid - A Factor of Evolution (1902), "Chapter 7 Mutual Aid Amongst Ourselves"; Pilipewsky: Edmonton Bulletin, May 24, 1894; Rice Sheppard, 25 Years in the North-West. This same farmer, Rice Sheppard, later an Edmonton city councillor, also joined with neighbouring farmers to jointly buy a horse-powered thresher, in 1899, another form of mutual aid. (Edmonton Bulletin, Oct. 5, 1899)) Mutual Aid, by Prince Kropotkin In medieval times, a federation of village communities, covered by a network of guilds and fraternities, came into existence in medieval cities. But in the 16th Century, growing military states over-ran the peasants' lands, and over the next three or four hundred years slaughtered peasants who defended their traditional lifestyle (more than 100,000 in Germany alone) and ground out, almost to extinction, the mutual-aid, land commune and co-operative organizations that had been the hallmark of a civil society. In the 19th Century, there was a re-birth of village community life as farmers and workers pushed to join together again in joint associations.


But royalty, nobles, bourgeois and richer peasants fought to slow this progress. All sorts of organizations were prosecuted as syndicates as prohibited. Kropotkin noted that it was not until 1884 that associations of more than 19 persons were permitted in France, and syndicates quickly sprouted across he country, engaging in buying of farm supplies and commodities, on which formerly sellers had engaged in cheap practices. Kropotkin wrote that 172 French communes had established free medical services. Communal fields, forests, breeding stock, mills, all are operated by farmers' associations.

Trade unions were more or less accepted after 1841 in Britain and within a few decades more than one-quarter of workers were unionized.But Kropotkin warned, from the point of view of social economics, all these efforts of the peasants certainly are of little importance. They cannot substantially, and still less permanently, alleviate the misery to which the tillers of the soil are doomed all over Europe.But...they prove that even under the system of reckless individualism that now prevails the agricultural masses piously maintain their mutual-support inheritance and as soon as the States relax the iron laws by means of which they have broken all bonds between men, these bonds are reconstituted - notwithstanding the difficulties, political, economical and social, which are many, - in such forms as best answer to the modern requirements of production." He outlined how hundreds, or even thousands, of villages in Russia, have turned from private ownership of land to village community, land held co-operatively as commons.


Kropotkin noted that "this movement in favour of communal possession runs against the current economic theories according to which intensive culture is incompatible with the village community. But the most charitable thing to say is that these current economic theories have never been submitted to the test of experiment, they belong to the domain of political metaphysics...


On the contrary where conditions necessary to spawn these co-operative operations, that is, where "Russian peasants, owing to concurrence of favourable circumstances, are less miserable than they are on the average and where they find men of knowledge and initiative among their neighbours, the village community is created and "becomes the means for introducing various improvements in agriculture and village life together." "That all sorts of work that is part of village life (repair of roads, bridges dams and drainage, supply of water for irrigation, cutting of wood, planting of trees) are made by whole communes and land is rented and meadows are mown by whole communes - old and young, men and women- is only what one may expect from people living under the village-community system." [In our civilized world], the natural and social calamities pass away. Whole populations are periodically reduced to misery and starvation; the very springs of life are crushed out of millions of men, reduced to city pauperism, the understanding and the feelings of the millions are vitiated by teachings worked out in the interests of the few. All this is certainly a part of our existence. But the nucleus of mutual-support institutions, habits, and customs remain alive with the millions, it keeps them together, and they prefer to cling to their customs, beliefs and traditions rather than to accept the teachings of a war of each against all, which are offered to them under the title of science but are not science at all." Kropotkin Mutual Aid

Chapter 8. Mutual Aid Amongst Ourselves

Kropotkin outlined how during strikes, altruistic acts of mutual support are common*, and in the political associations, created and nurtured through incredible sacrifices of activists.

*The 1928 book The Strike, A Study in Collective Action by E.T. Hiller gives many examples of strikers' wives sacrificing even their wedding rings to carry on a strike. Kropotkin wrote that "every experienced politician knows that all great political movements were fought upon large and often distant issues, and that those of them were strongest and provoked the most support from people to whom they had the least personal impact. For our own generation, Socialism is our example."


Mutual aid, he wrote, includes the "friendly societies, the unities of oddfellows, the village and town clubs organized for meeting the doctor's bills, the dress and burial clubs, the small clubs very common among factory girls to which they contribute a few pence every week, the pot drawn by lot, which can at least be used for some substantial purchase." He also wrote of "countless societies clubs and alliances for the enjoyment of life, for study and research for education and so on"; "cricket, football, tennis, bowling, pigeon, musical and singing clubs"; cycling and Alpine clubs; "thousands of scientific, literary, artistic and educational societies."


"In the crowded lanes of the poorer parts of the large towns, people know each other perfectly and are continually brought into mutual contact. There are petty quarrels but groupings in accordance with personal affinities grow up, and within their circle, mutual aid is practised to an extent of which the richer classes have no idea." "In short, neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teaching of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle that came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution." (Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, Chapter 8) Speaking of mutual aid, Kropotkin later wrote that he had observed in his tour of Alberta that the ability of western Canadian settlers to aid each other was inhibited by the way the Dominion government surveyed and distributed the land. With the railway, school lands and HBC taking at least every odd section, settlement in each township was practically arranged in 16 groups of four families each, each cluster not large enough for a hamlet or village and each cluster separated from the others by a full mile of what was for many years empty land.


Kropotkin said this inhibited mutual aid by making it inconvenient to build and operate co-operative elevators, cold storage or creameries and engage in common ownership of male breeding stock and agricultural implements... Also, he said, "this system doubles the distance to mill and market, children have to walk full four or five miles to school, and the settlers naturally grumble as they see the sale price of the CPR and HBC land grow in proportion as they work to render the country habitable." ("Some of the Resources of Canada," The Nineteenth Century, March 1898 (online)) Kropotkin, when he visited Alberta in 1897, said he saw that the system creates 16 groups of farms in every township, each one separated (at least at first) by a mile of idle land from its neighbours .--------------------------- Calgary Herald quoted from Kropotkin's published views and gave rebuttal After Kropotkin published what he had learned during his Canadian tour, the Calgary Herald quoted from Kropotkin's published views and gave rebuttal where it thought necessary.


First, it spoke of his politics, saying “there is of course no question as to bias of his mind in relation to certain social and political problems. This however detracts but little from the value of his carefully weighed and essentially impartial estimate of Canada's resources and needs."


"The independence of his mind allowed him to make the factual statement that despite the great expanse of cropland of Manitoba, the small farms of Ontario still produced more wheat than Manitoba, not to mention the immense root crop harvest that Ontario produced. But Kropotkin allowed that Manitoba's wheat production was just getting started and that the wheat itself was said to be the best in the world. The Prince, the Herald stated, was “a keen critic of the homestead system of settlement, and evidently sides with those who hold that despite the advantages undeniably secured by the methods in force, the village or hamlet system would have been more conducive to the welfare and progress of the country.”


The Herald's write-up included a query by Kropotkin, reflecting his concern for the future. Kropotkin mentioned the “onerous labour required of the pioneer in the first few years of his settlement” and asked what would have been the result if a fraction of this expense had been applied back in Scotland before emigration. He ended his report by expressing his fear that Canada is developing "the same land monopolies conditions that now drive the European peasants out of Europe."


The Herald responded to his points, saying “the fact that spurs on the settler to the strenuous exertions that alone can ensure his success in his new home is the knowledge that both the political and economic conditions assure him in the long run a fairer and fuller reward for his toil that he can secure in the Old Country.


Free, independent and his own landlord, a vista is opened before him that he can never hope to see while tied to the soil under the system that rules in the motherland. Kropotkin himself tells us that it is the social conditions that have driven the Swede to Saskatchewan and the Scotchman to Ontario.


Thus you have the best safeguard that can be hoped for against the creation of the same conditions in the Dominion itself, a prospect that Kropotkin naturally views with apprehension. But...Canadians may well be trusted to guard against evils that must be fatal to future growth. In this respect, they are masters of their own destiny.” (Calgary Herald, March 24, 1898, p. 2) On the issue of whether or not there is too much university education in Canada, Kropotkin said "too many lawyers, I gladly admit, but surely not too many doctors [and a need for] education of teachers, especially in natural sciences and hygiene." Kropotkin pointed out (in "Some Resources of Canada...") that the truly poor and desperate could not afford to come to Canada.


"The East European peasant who are accustomed to long winters are too poor, as a rule to to pay the expenses of a long journey and to save something to start with. It seems therefore that unless some system of aid to immigrants be organized, the current of emigration from Europe will continue to flow towards more congenial latitudes." The results of his Canadian tour, and there were some, did not include any noticeable anarchist movement, it seems. According to one historian, it was a visit by Kropotkin to Glasgow in 1886 that spawned the ideological anarchist movement in that city as opposed to the anti-parliamentarian/slum criminal non-conformist movement previously leading the anti-capitalist opposition there.

(The anarchist movement in Glasgow pre-dated both the British Labour Party and state communism.) (Mairtin O'Caithain, With a Bent Elbow and a Clenched Fist, reviewed in libcom.org. The ‘Anarchist Prince’, as the media liked to portray him, spoke in Glasgow in 1886 on ‘Socialism: Its Growing Force and Final Aim.’) However, it seems, there was no anarchist movement of any significant amount spawned by his visit to Edmonton and Calgary.


It is not even known if McCauley mentioned Kropotkin's visit when he took his seat in the NWT Council at Regina.


Doukhobor immigration A result of Kropotkin's tour was a wave of Doukhobor immigration starting just a couple years after his visit. Kropotkin wrote a positive description of the Mennonite settlements of Manitoba, to whom he said Tolstoy was still a revered figure. This drew attention of a member of the Tolstoyan Committee who suggested to Kropotkin that Doukhobors might also settle in Canada happily. Kropotkin approved the idea, and within months, he contacted Mavor at Toronto and suggested to him that the Canadian government invite Doukhobor immigration. In part due to this discussion, thousands of Doukhobors left Russia and Cyprus and came to Canada. (Kropotkin in America, p. 6) (The Edmonton Bulletin reported in 1899 that a thousand Doukhobors residing in Cyprus would be soon arriving in Canada (Edmonton Bulletin, Feb. 20, 1899) Russia should copy Canada, Kropotkin urged Kropotkin noted the degree of freedom enjoyed by Canadian citizens, especially as compared with those living under the Czar, and concluded "the only possible solution for Russia would be to adopt the Federalist principle, a system of several autonomous parliaments as we see it in Canada, instead of trying to imitate the centralized system of Britain, France and Germany." After his tour of Canada, he toured some of the eastern U.S. states.

When asked by a reporter for a statement, he said, "I am an anarchist and am trying to work out the ideal society, which, I believe, will be communistic in economics but will leave full and free scope for the development of the individual. As to its organization, I believe in the formation of federated groups for production and consumption." He went on to distinguish the anarchist position from that of the Social Democrats, who, he said, "are endeavouring to attain the same end, but the difference is that they start from the centre - the State - and work outwards, while we endeavour to work out the ideal society from the simple elements to the complex." (Avrich, Kropotkin in America, p. 9) Kropotkin returned to North America in 1901 but toured only the U.S. He lectured of a new ideal society, but he defended anarchists who took up arms against coercive authority, describing the "countless cruelties and brutalities of kings, rulers and all governments, practised upon the poor, oppressed, starving, defenceless people."


When asked about the wave of riot, protests and assassinations then happening in Russia, he said "the despotic bureaucrats could be overcome only by being blown off the face of the earth." Two years later an anarchist assassinated the U.S. president and Kropotkin never could return to the U.S., the government passing a law prohibiting the admittance of anarchists. (Avrich, Kropotkin in America, p. 21, 28) Bellamy's book Looking Backward was an important and radical piece of literature. When a Vancouver publisher reprinted it in 1934 (more than 40 years after it was written) the leader of the Socialist Party of Canada wrote a foreword for it. (Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, Totem Press, Vancouver, 1934. 236 pp. Foreword by Socialist Party of Canada leader W.A. Pritchard.) Kropotkin said that Bellamy's later book Equality better addressed "all the vices of capitalist society." (Rosemount, Edward Bellamy, 1850-1898, p. 82) 1915 Prohibition Kropotkin was also referred to in 1915 in an Alberta newspaper. Didsbury prohibitionist F.W. Patterson was reported as speaking on the need to restrict unfettered liberties of the individual for social good. He referred to Kropotkin [but possibly misquoted him]. Patterson said Kropotkin favoured perfectly unfettered self-government of the individual, which he said in the economic field, is also known as laissez-faire and "hands-off".


Patterson said anti-Prohibitionists say that to interfere with the saloon is to infringe on the legitimate liberties of the individual.


Patterson said this type of statement is not new: "It was heard when slavery was abolished, when laws prohibiting child-labour, when factory acts were passed. It will continue to be heard whenever laws for social betterment press hard on the un-social desires of the individual...

But the direct and almost the necessary result of such a policy was the cruelty and injustice that made imperative the social legislation of modern times. Child labour, unprotected machinery, fire-trap factories, unreasonable hours of labour, inadequate wages were all the result of this conception of personal liberty. It is not difficult to show that all the social injustice and social abuse grow out of the fact that those guilty of them interpret liberty as the right to do as they desire without regard for the rights of others. ("Personal Liberty," Didsbury Pioneer, May 19, 1915)


(The freedom to pursue anti-social behaviour is also stressed in one of the first major films made in the U.S.. "Intolerance" shows Prohibitionists stamping out freedoms in their quest for a sober society. The film-maker portrayed how crime, moral puritanism, and conflicts between ruthless capitalists and striking workers ruined the lives of a specific couple of marginalized workers. (But, I say, surely do-good-ers must do some good!)

The film-maker had formerly been boycotted for producing a pro-KKK film the same year that Patterson in Didsbury criticized statements of pro-business freedoms that echoed the sentiment of the film.

And now during COVID pandemic, we see it again in protests of health regulations meant to protect public health.)


(For more information on Kropotkin's visit, see Avrich, "Kropotkin in America" (anarchist website))

====================================================


the following was in a separate blog. it may be actual copy of above but has been put here just for comprehensiveness...


James Mavor, a Toronto professor, invited Kropotkin to come to British Scientific Conference, held in Toronto, in 1897. He toured the U.S. and Canada and later wrote of what he had seen. He did not plant anarchism cells here but later helped encourage Russian Doukhobor emigration to the old North-West.


Mavor was author of North West of Canada. Report to the Board of Trade on the North West of Canada with special reference to wheat production for export, 1904 [has passing mention of Kropotkin] (full text available in Peel's PP)]

and

Government Telephones, the Experience of Manitoba, 1916 (full text available in Peel's PP)


Kropotkin was the leading figure in the international anarchist movement following Bakunin's death in 1876." (Avrich, Kropotkin in America)


Calgary and Edmonton reports of his visit


Prince Kropotkin, an exile from Russia due to “his advanced liberal ideas,” visited Calgary area to learn about the agricultural situation there. (Calgary Herald, Sept. 23, 1897. The Herald did not refer to his visit again in 1897, according to a search in Peel's PP website.)


Kropotkin called for the expropriation of privately-hoarded land. For this belief, he was indebted to Henry George's Progress and Poverty, the publication of which, Kropotkin claimed, had provoked "an outburst of of socialist feeling in England".


In his books Conquest of Bread and Factories, Fields and Workshops Kropotkin paid tribute to U.S. economic progress and extolled U.S. federalism. He praised the U.S. War of Independence and Declaration of Independence as landmarks in struggle of human freedom. However he also abhorred U.S. politics, which he described as a "plutocracy". He noted with displeasure abuses of power occurring there. He protested the trials of the Haymarket anarchists in 1886 and 1887.


While in Canada, Kropotkin read in the news that, at Hazelton, Pennsylvania, 19 Hungarian miners had been killed and 41 wounded, by a volley of shots from a posse of sheriff's deputies and spoke out against the injustice. (Edmonton Bulletin, Sept. 16, 1897)


But he saw signs of an emerging working class consciousness in the U.S. in the late 1800s. He viewed the 1877 railway strike as a sign of rising revolutionary consciousness among workers. (Avrich, Kropotkin in America (anarchist website))


The Sept. 23, 1897 Calgary Herald, blandly reported that Prince Kropotkin, who had been exiled from Russia due to “his advanced liberal ideas,” had visited the Calgary area to learn about the agricultural situation there.


Kropotkin had by then moved on to Edmonton.


The Sept. 16, 1897 Edmonton Bulletin reported Prince Kropotkin, "a well-known socialistic writer, had arrived on the Monday train to view the Edmonton district and visit some of the settlers of Russian race and language". (Edmonton Bulletin, Sept. 16, 1897 [his name spelled Prince Krapotkine])


During his stay, he stayed at the Alberta Hotel.


On Edmonton, Kropotkin later noted in an article in the Nineteenth Century magazine, "farmers [there] rely chiefly upon mixed farming - dairy produce, poultry, stock-raising, honey and so on - everything in short that can be grown or produced on the farm. Co-operative dairying [has developed to a noticeable degree] with rapid extension of co-operative cheese factories." ("Some of the Resources of Canada", Nineteenth Century magazine)


The Canadian government had taken the initiative of introducing them to North-West under a plan by which the government initiates a factory, operates it for a few years by a Government agent, then withdraws as soon as the farmers have been initiated in the factory's management. Kropotkin visited one of these factories operating at Innisfail and said its production has already found a good market in BC.


"On the banks of the Saskatchewan begins a belt of very fertile soil covered with small aspen and birch woods which have grown within the last 15 years after the virgin forest had been burned. Edmonton is in the heart of that region, on the picturesque banks of the gold-bearing Saskatchewan. I found it a lively little town of 1300 inhabitants which has grown entirely within the last 14 years. It was formerly a Hudson Bay Company fort, and is still is an emporium for trade in raw furs but it has taken the aspect of a town provided with hotels, "stores" and schools.


"Seeing what a family of as few as two working adults can make in five years out of a virgin spot, one realizes what man is capable to achieve when no rent or tax collector is upon him to take the best fruit of his labour. After having worked all their life to no account [in the Old Country], they are happy to name their [Canadian] homestead and its little cabin their own, and to know that after each good crop their livestock is increasing and some new machinery is bought (they buy machinery mostly in small groups of four or five farmers)."


He said the incredible resources of the Canada West raised this thought in his mind - "How rich mankind could be if social obstacles did not stand everywhere in the way of utilizing the gifts of nature."


Kropotkin described the hard work and sacrifices made by the settlers of the Edmonton area.


"Fertile as the soil is, it must be cleared from some forest growth before it is tilled. The first winter must often be passed in a sod hut the house. The shed, the barn have to be built out of wood that has been cut with their own hands, because lumber, even though it is cheap enough, would have to be bought. The threshing engine has to be carried along a primitive road or across some swampy brook. And every sack of wheat must be carted fifteen, twenty and thirty miles to Edmonton because in the neighbourhood of the town [of Edmonton] land is already in the hands of land speculators.... Happily the climate is really very healthy and the settlers being scattered there is not much danger from contagious disease."


Kropotkin noted that he had seen that the land survey system created 16 groups of farms in every township (a western Canadian township being a measure of land 6 miles by 6 miles). Each family was separated (at least at first) by a mile of idle land from its nearest neighbours.


Kropotkin kept a diary in this period of his life, said to be preserved in an archives in Moscow. (Paul Avrich, "Kropotkin in America" (anarchist website). The diary is a source of information for the A.G. Ivanov`s book, Kropotkin and Canada (Black Cat Press, 2020).


"Prince Kropotkin left for England on Friday's train. During his stay he visited the Rabbit Hill, Stony Plain and St. Albert settlements, driven by M. McCauley MLA. Questioning some of the Stony Plain settlers as to whether they desired to return to Europe or not, he was informed they were more than satisfied with their present conditions and prospects." (Edmonton Bulletin, Sept. 20, 1897)


Matt McCauley was a prominent Edmonton pioneer and community leader. He had been the Town of Edmonton's first mayor. The neighbourhood of McCauley is named after him. He is not generally regarded as a leftist but was involved in an early organized farmers movement, the Patrons of Industry.


Mutual Aid

About the time of his visit to Canada, Kropotkin wrote Factories, Fields and Workshops and Conquest of Bread. Just prior to his Alberta tour, he had recorded his ideas on the history and practice of mutual aid, which became the book Mutual Aid, published in 1902. Interestingly, one of the examples his book gives of mutual aid, neighbours donating household items to a family that had lost all in a fire, is what happened commonly in Territorial times in Alberta.


 A noteworthy example of mutual aid is that of one of the first Ukrainians in Alberta. Ivan Pilipewsky suffered loss of all in a fire at his home near Josephburg and he came to Edmonton to get donated replacements to start over, the Edmonton Bulletin advertizing his plight.

(Kropotkin, Mutual Aid - A Factor of Evolution (1902), "Chapter 7 Mutual Aid Amongst Ourselves"; Pilipewsky: Edmonton Bulletin, May 24, 1894;


Rice Sheppard also noted mutual aid when an Edmonton farm family lost all in a house fire. The family head later emotionally told his friend Rice that people had been so generous that his family might actually have more than they had before the fire - although of course still lacking a house.


Rice Sheppard was a well-educated British immigrant with a yearning for collective action. He joined with neighbouring farmers to jointly buy a horse-powered thresher, in 1899, another form of mutual aid. He helped found the United Farmers of Alberta, a farmer lobbying group and later a political party. He was a long-serving Labour Party city councillor. ((Sheppard, 25 Years in the North-West ; Edmonton Bulletin, Oct. 5, 1899))


Mutual Aid, by Prince Kropotkin

In medieval times, a federation of village communities, covered by a network of guilds and fraternities, came into existence in medieval cities. But in the 16th Century, growing military states over-ran the peasants' lands, and over the next three or four hundred years slaughtered peasants who defended their traditional lifestyle (more than 100,000 in Germany alone) and ground out, almost to extinction, the mutual-aid, land commune and co-operative organizations that had been the hallmark of a civil society. In the 19th Century, there was a re-birth of village community life as farmers and workers pushed to join together again in joint associations.


But royalty, nobles, bourgeois and richer peasants fought to slow this progress. All sorts of organizations were prosecuted as syndicates as prohibited. Kropotkin noted that it was not until 1884 that associations of more than 19 persons were permitted in France, and syndicates quickly sprouted across he country, engaging in buying of farm supplies and commodities, on which formerly sellers had engaged in cheap practices. Kropotkin wrote that 172 French communes had established free medical services. Communal fields, forests, breeding stock, mills, all are operated by farmers' associations.


Trade unions were more or less accepted after 1841 in Britain and within a few decades more than one-quarter of workers were unionized.


But Kropotkin warned, from the point of view of social economics, all these efforts of the peasants certainly are of little importance. They cannot substantially, and still less permanently, alleviate the misery to which the tillers of the soil are doomed all over Europe.


But...they prove that even under the system of reckless individualism that now prevails the agricultural masses piously maintain their mutual-support inheritance and as soon as the States relax the iron laws by means of which they have broken all bonds between men, these bonds are reconstituted - notwithstanding the difficulties, political, economical and social, which are many, - in such forms as best answer to the modern requirements of production."


He outlined how hundreds, or even thousands, of villages in Russia, have turned from private ownership of land to village community, land held co-operatively as commons.Kropotkin noted that "this movement in favour of communal possession runs against the current economic theories according to which intensive culture is incompatible with the village community. But the most charitable thing to say is that these current economic theories have never been submitted to the test of experiment, they belong to the domain of political metaphysics... On the contrary where conditions necessary to spawn these co-operative operations, that is, where "Russian peasants, owing to concurrence of favourable circumstances, are less miserable than they are on the average and where they find men of knowledge and initiative among their neighbours, the village community is created and "becomes the means for introducing various improvements in agriculture and village life together."


"That all sorts of work that is part of village life (repair of roads, bridges dams and drainage, supply of water for irrigation, cutting of wood, planting of trees) are made by whole communes and land is rented and meadows are mown by whole communes - old and young, men and women- is only what one may expect from people living under the village-community system."


[In our civilized world], the natural and social calamities pass away. Whole populations are periodically reduced to misery and starvation; the very springs of life are crushed out of millions of men, reduced to city pauperism, the understanding and the feelings of the millions are vitiated by teachings worked out in the interests of the few. All this is certainly a part of our existence. But the nucleus of mutual-support institutions, habits, and customs remain alive with the millions, it keeps them together, and they prefer to cling to their customs, beliefs and traditions rather than to accept the teachings of a war of each against all, which are offered to them under the title of science but are not science at all."


Kropotkin Mutual Aid

"Chapter 8. Mutual Aid Amongst Ourselves"

Kropotkin outlined how during strikes, altruistic acts of mutual support are common*, and in the political associations, created and nurtured through incredible sacrifices of activists.


*Hiller's book Strike gives many examples of strikers' wives sacrificing even their wedding rings to carry on a strike.


Kropotkin wrote that "every experienced politician knows that all great political movements were fought upon large and often distant issues, and that those of them were strongest and provoked the most support from people to whom they had the least personal impact.


For our own generation, Socialism is our example.


Mutual aid, he wrote, includes the "friendly societies, the unities of oddfellows, the village and town clubs organized for meeting the doctor's bills, the dress and burial clubs, the small clubs very common among factory girls to which they contribute a few pence every week, the pot drawn by lot, which can at least be used for some substantial purchase."


He also wrote of "countless societies clubs and alliances for the enjoyment of life, for study and research for education and so on"; "cricket, football, tennis, bowling, pigeon, musical and singing clubs"; cycling and Alpine clubs; "thousands of scientific, literary, artistic and educational societies."


In the crowded lanes of the poorer parts of the large towns, people know each other perfectly and are continually brought into mutual contact. There are petty quarrels but groupings in accordance with personal affinities grow up, and within their circle, mutual aid is practised to an extent of which the richer classes have no idea."


"In short, neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teaching of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle that came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution." (Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, Chapter 8)


Speaking of mutual aid, Kropotkin later wrote that he had observed in his tour of Alberta that the ability of western Canadian settlers to aid each other was inhibited by the way the Dominion government surveyed and distributed the land. With the railway, school lands and HBC taking at least every odd section, settlement in each township was practically arranged in 16 groups of four families each, each cluster not large enough for a hamlet or village and each cluster separated from the others by a full mile of what was for many years empty land. Kropotkin said this inhibited mutual aid by making it inconvenient to build and operate co-operative elevators, cold storage or creameries and engage in common ownership of male breeding stock and agricultural implements...


Also, he said, "this system doubles the distance to mill and market, children have to walk full four or five miles to school, and the settlers naturally grumble as they see the sale price of the CPR and HBC land grow in proportion as they work to render the country habitable." ("Some of the Resources of Canada," The Nineteenth Century, March 1898 (online))


Kropotkin, when he visited Alberta in 1897, said he saw that the system creates 16 groups of farms in every township, each one separated (at least at first) by a mile of idle land from its neighbours

.---------------------------


Calgary Herald quoted from Kropotkin's published views and gave rebuttal

After Kropotkin published what he had learned during his Canadian tour, the Calgary Herald quoted from Kropotkin's published views and gave rebuttal where it thought necessary.


First, it spoke of his politics, saying “there is of course no question as to bias of his mind in relation to certain social and political problems. This however detracts but little from the value of his carefully weighed and essentially impartial estimate of Canada's resources and needs."


"The independence of his mind allowed him to make the factual statement that despite the great expanse of cropland of Manitoba, the small farms of Ontario still produced more wheat than Manitoba, not to mention the immense root crop harvest that Ontario produced.


But Kropotkin allowed that Manitoba's wheat production was just getting started and that the wheat itself was said to be the best in the world. The Prince, the Herald stated, was “a keen critic of the homestead system of settlement, and evidently sides with those who hold that despite the advantages undeniably secured by the methods in force, the village or hamlet system would have been more conducive to the welfare and progress of the country.”


The Herald's write-up included a query by Kropotkin, reflecting his concern for the future. Kropotkin mentioned the “onerous labour required of the pioneer in the first few years of his settlement” and asked what would have been the result if a fraction of this expense had been applied back in Scotland before emigration.


He ended his report by expressing his fear that Canada is developing "the same land monopolies conditions that now drive the European peasants out of Europe."


The Herald responded to his points, saying “the fact that spurs on the settler to the strenuous exertions that alone can ensure his success in his new home is the knowledge that both the political and economic conditions assure him in the long run a fairer and fuller reward for his toil that he can secure in the Old Country. Free, independent and his own landlord, a vista is opened before him that he can never hope to see while tied to the soil under the system that rules in the motherland. Kropotkin himself tells us that it is the social conditions that have driven the Swede to Saskatchewan and the Scotchman to Ontario. Thus you have the best safeguard that can be hoped for against the creation of the same conditions in the Dominion itself, a prospect that Kropotkin naturally views with apprehension. But...Canadians may well be trusted to guard against evils that must be fatal to future growth. In this respect, they are masters of their own destiny.” (Calgary Herald, March 24, 1898, p. 2)


On the issue of whether or not there is too much university education in Canada, Kropotkin said "too many lawyers, I gladly admit, but surely not too many doctors [and a need for] education of teachers, especially in natural sciences and hygiene."


Kropotkin pointed out (in "Some Resources of Canada...") that the truly poor and desperate could not afford to come to Canada.


"The East European peasant who are accustomed to long winters are too poor, as a rule to to pay the expenses of a long journey and to save something to start with. It seems therefore that unless some system of aid to immigrants be organized, the current of emigration from Europe will continue to flow towards more congenial latitudes."


The results of his Canadian tour, and there were some, did not include any noticeable anarchist movement, it seems, although such had been the case elsewhere. According to one historian, it was a visit by Kropotkin to Glasgow in 1886 that spawned the ideological anarchist movement in that city as opposed to the anti-parliamentarian/slum criminal non-conformist movement previously leading the anti-capitalist opposition there. (The anarchist movement in Glasgow pre-dated both the British Labour Party and state communism.) (Mairtin O'Caithain, With a Bent Elbow and a Clenched fist, reviewed in libcom.org. The "Anarchist Prince", as the media liked to portray him, spoke in Glasgow in 1886 on "Socialism: Its Growing Force and Final Aim".)


However, it seems, there was no anarchist movement of any significant amount spawned by his visit to Edmonton and Calgary. Matt McCauley with whom he spent much time, did not exhibit any anarchist tendencies afterwards as far as is known.


I wonder if McCauley shared with Kropotkin his experience in 1892, when he had led an insurrection against a federal government official attempting to move Edmonton's land titles office to South Edmonton, across the river. Armed Edmonton citizens had stopped the official in his work, dismantled his wagon and then confronted a force of Mounties at Rat Creek (at today's Commonwealth stadium). McCauley as mayor had led the act of "direct action." The Mounties, led by Greisbach, were not impressed by the mayor's action and refused to enforce the law again in Edmonton. And that is how the Edmonton police force got started.


I wonder what Kropotkin would have thought of it....


Doukhobor immigration

A result of his tour was a wave of Doukhobor immigration starting just a couple years after his visit.


Kropotkin wrote a positive description of the Mennonite settlements of Manitoba, to whom he said Tolstoy was still a revered figure. This drew attention of a member of the Tolstoyan Committee who suggested to Kropotkin that Doukhobors might also settle in Canada happily. Kropotkin approved the idea, and within months, he contacted Mavor at Toronto and suggested to him that the Canadian government invite Doukhobor immigration. In part due to this discussion, thousands of Doukhobors left Russia and Cyprus and came to Canada. (Kropotkin in America, p. 6)


(The Edmonton Bulletin reported in 1899 that a thousand Doukhobors residing in Cyprus would be soon arriving in Canada (Edmonton Bulletin, Feb. 20, 1899))


Russia should copy Canada, Kropotkin urged

Kropotkin noted the degree of freedom enjoyed by Canadian citizens, especially as compared with those living under the Czar, and concluded "the only possible solution for Russia would be to adopt the Federalist principle, a system of several autonomous parliaments as we see it in Canada, instead of trying to imitate the centralized system of Britain, France and Germany."


After his tour of Canada, he toured some of the eastern U.S. states.


When asked by a reporter for a statement, he said, "I am an anarchist and am trying to work out the ideal society, which, I believe, will be communistic in economics but will leave full and free scope for the development of the individual. As to its organization, I believe in the formation of federated groups for production and consumption."


He went on to distinguish the anarchist position from that of the Social Democrats, who, he said, "are endeavouring to attain the same end, but the difference is that they start from the centre - the State - and work outwards, while we endeavour to work out the ideal society from the simple elements to the complex." (Avrich, Kropotkin in America, p. 9)


Kropotkin returned to North America in 1901 but toured only the U.S.


He lectured of a new ideal society, but he defended anarchists who took up arms against coercive authority, describing the "countless cruelties and brutalities of kings, rulers and all governments, practised upon the poor, oppressed, starving, defenceless people."When asked about the wave of riot, protests and assassinations then happening in Russia, he said "the despotic bureaucrats could be overcome only by being blown off the face of the earth."


Two years later an anarchist assassinated the U.S. president and Kropotkin never could return to the U.S., the government passing a law prohibiting the admittance of anarchists. (Avrich, Kropotkin in America, p. 21, 28)


Bellamy's book Looking Backward was an important and radical piece of literature. When a Vancouver publisher reprinted it in 1934 (more than 40 years after it was written) the leader of the Socialist Party of Canada wrote a foreword for it. (Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, Totem Press, Vancouver, 1934. 236 pp. Foreword by Socialist Party of Canada leader W.A. Pritchard.)


Kropotkin said that Bellamy's later book Equality better addressed "all the vices of capitalist society." (Rosemount, Edward Bellamy, 1850-1898, p. 82)


1915 Prohibition

Kropotkin was also referred to in 1915 in an Alberta newspaper.


Didsbury prohibitionist F.W. Patterson was reported as speaking on the need to restrict unfettered liberties of the individual for social good. He referred to Kropotkin [but possibly misquoted him]. Patterson said Kropotkin favoured perfectly unfettered self-government of the individual, which he said in the economic field, is also known as laissez-faire and "hands-off".


Patterson said anti-Prohibitionists say that to interfere with the saloon is to infringe on the legitimate liberties of the individual.


Patterson said this type of statement is not new:

"It was heard when slavery was abolished, when laws prohibiting child-labour, when factory acts were passed. It will continue to be heard whenever laws for social betterment press hard on the un-social desires of the individual...


But the direct and almost the necessary result of such a policy was the cruelty and injustice that made imperative the social legislation of modern times. Child labour, unprotected machinery, fire-trap factories, unreasonable hours of labour, inadequate wages were all the result of this conception of personal liberty. It is not difficult to show that all the social injustice and social abuse grow out of the fact that those guilty of them interpret liberty as the right to do as they desire without regard for the rights of others.

("Personal Liberty," Didsbury Pioneer, May 19, 1915)


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