Jutting out from one corner of the room is the great clay oven, which projects into the next apartment too, and has sleeping accommodation on the top. A shining table and benches, with a long bench around the wall, are the only furniture. Everything is marvellously clean: we might eat our dinner off the floor.
Music floats in at the open door; seven girls have come to entertain us, sitting on the ledge outside and singing hymns while we eat. For this is a village of Doukhobors.
We have all heard of the little gang of fanatical extremists bearing that name, who now and then make trouble for the police. The members of the Doukhobor community, as a whole, are distressed by such proceedings, for which they are often blamed. The saddler, when we go for the mended girth, expounds their views in quite good English. “When a criminal lunatic calls himself a Presbyterian or Catholic,” he protests, “you don’t hold up your hands and cry ‘Oh, those dreadful Presbyterians and Catholics!’ I know we have peculiar ideas, and we have suffered for them; but we are not criminals and we are not mad.”
They are like our Quakers in their opposition to fighting, and in the simplicity of their religious observances as well as their daily life. Each family has its little personal belongings; but the land, live stock and implements are owned by the community. “The co-operation that we preach they practise,” an observer says, who knows them well, “and we should be honestly thankful to them for trying to live up to high ideals in a too materialistic age. Though they cultivate an almost primitive simplicity of life, in the cultivation of the ground they are by no means primitive, but keen to adopt the most scientific methods, which their strong co-operative organization enables them to practise with admirable success. They are industrious workers. Their cleanliness and good health are remarkable. The value of all this to our country is so great that it should not be impossible, with sufficient good-will and elasticity of law on our part, to allow them to work out their system side by side with our own—especially as their number is not large, for many leave their community rather than submit to its rules and restrictions.”