92 THE RISE OF ITALIAN FASCISM
the landowners, who had always put up an obstinate
resistance, were less and less inclined to yield.
On the workers' side the system was only possible with
strict discipline, even with the control over the employment
of labour. This combination of rules as meticulous and
as closely enforced as those of a medieval gild with a
highly advanced technique was not the least oddity of this
huge region. Anyone who did not join the peasants5 league,
who accepted lower wages and worked all the year round,
depleted the share of the others and was consequently
pitilessly harassed by them. The blackleg was boycotted,
refused bread by the baker, treated as an outcast with his
wife and children, until he gave in or left the district.
Penalties and fines were imposed on landowners who
employed him and broke the labour contract.
Such a system could only function if it was universal,
for any breach of its terms brought other workers to starva-
tion. At the same time small farms were disapproved of
and their development hindered : not from any theoretical
objection, but because they were partly exempt from the
imponibile della mono ffopera^- for the wealthy peasant or
small farmer and his families did not keep to the legal day
and made scarcely any use of the working shifts of the
wage-earners. Conditions on the plain favoured economic
development by large-scale enterprise where the labour
contract really functioned and could be more easily enforced.
After the war the peasants, who had heard much talk about
their c right to the land ', and particularly the sons of small
owners and farmers, many of whom had risen from the
ranks, wanted to be independent and make their own way,
and this brought them up against the collective regulations.
The Federation of Agricultural Labourers engaged in long
strikes in which they forced the farmers and mezzadri to take
part. The latter were allowed to harvest half their crops,
the half which was their due, but the landlord's share they
had to leave in the fields. However necessary or justifiable
such tactics might be, the sight of such wealth abandoned
1 The imponibile della mano d*opera means the obligation on the landowner
to employ a minimum of labourers per hectare, a minimum which varied
with the type of farm and the nature of the ground. The minimum was
fixed in the collective labour contract.