What Socialism meant to most of them was a chance to work and eat till their stomachs were full, to work and sleep in peace, without having to be afraid of the morrow. In the league premises at Fossa, next to the bearded portrait of Karl Marx, there was a picture of Christ in a red shirt. On Saturday nights the peasants came to the league to sing “Up, brothers! Brothers, arise!” and on Sunday morning they went to Mass to say “Amen.” The permanent occupation of a Socialist leader was writing recommendations. The American representatives of this class seem much the same. Garland’s _A Spoil of Office_ follows the abortive political careers of the Grange and the Farmer’s Alliance. Bradley Talcott sees this latter movement as “the most pathetic, tragic, and desperate revolt against oppression and wrong ever made by the American farmer.” His guiding star Ida puts it even more simply: “While our great politicians split hairs on the tariff, people starve. The time has come for rebellion.” Conditions in Iowa have changed eighty years later, but in the deep South they are almost as bad. William Russell’s _A Wind Is Rising_ (1950) focuses on Negro tenant farmers charged 500 per cent interest by the landowners and cheated of part of the cotton crop they succeed in raising. Whether he is Prince Torlonia or a Russian noble, the large landholder is most often seen in the novel as the embodiment of the forces which keep the peasant class in subjection. Men like Nikolai Kirsanov in _Fathers and Sons_ may attempt to improve conditions, but the predominant pattern is one of exploitation which eventually produces violence. At the end of _A Handful of Blackberries_ the peasants kill a bailiff when they invade the Tarocchi pasture lands they believe to be rightfully theirs. Debased and deprived, lacking political awareness, and incited by members of other classes, the peasant group turns to violence. In some areas of the world, particularly the United States and England, a steady economic evolution has tended to eliminate large segments of this group. The Russian peasant appears still to be a peasant, even though he may be a Stakhanovite worker in a large _kolkhoz_. But where the class still exists in a society in which violent protest is still possible, the pattern appears unchanged. =Labor=