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36
population", by whom, the Ests are indicated, not the Balts although
they have been in the land for seven hundred years. Any small plot
of land of the size of a peasant-holding, if possessed by a Balt, is
expropriated for the sole reason that the owner is not a Lett. Likewise
Baltic owners of gardens, houses, mills or any agricultural establishment
have their property expropriated for the positively stated reason that
the owner is not a Lett or Est. In the parliament and in the press of
Latvia and Eesti, no secret is made of the fact that the Land laws are
for the purpose of crushing the non - Lettish and non - Estonian
elements of the State and are therefore pointedly directed against
the minorities. According to a recent statement of Mr. Samuel,
the Latvian Minister of Agriculture, the aim of the Agrarian reform is
„the complete annihilation of the large Baltic landed properties, and
the suppression of alien influence in the country4’. It is therefore
nothing more than a device against the right of property, the lawful
proprietor being evicted in order that he may be supplanted by Letts
and Ests, but the de-possessed proprietors and their families, who used
to live on the land, having now lost all their means of subsistence, are
faced with the prospect of dying of hunger and want. Such is the
catastrophic position of those land owners in the Balticum who are neither
Ests nor Letts. And at the same time, the Letts know perfectly well
that they cannot do without large landed properties.
The actual purport of the Agrarian Reform is often intentionally
obscured, thus a correspondent from Riga writes to the „Temps" on
the 4th May 1921, „Les grands proprietaires fonciers en Lettonie desirent
maintenir l’integrite de leurs domaines et de leurs privileges surannees".
But, there is no question of any privileges"! The large land owners
are only daring to raise an objection to robbery, and have the audacity
to claim the right to their property.
But, even the ruthless and lawless Agrarian Reform was not deemed
by the Letts as sufficient to economically annihilate the non-Lettish
population. Small settlers of Russian and German racial origin who
had come from the interior of Russia and settled in Courland before the
Latvian Republic existed, and had acquired in the country their legal
domicile and their homesteads of the size of a peasant’s holding, were
evicted by force, and their estate seized from them without
compensation. —- Morever a Bill has been introduced stipulating that petty
traders in articles of foot and those for daily use will be admitted only in
the same proportion as their race bears towards the Lettish population.
Of course the chief sufferers will be the Jews whose number of traders
is far in excess to their numerical proportion to other races.
If it be necessary to give further proof that the chief aim of the
authorities in Latvia and Eesti, lies in their appropriation of the
possessions of the minorities, examples can be quoted of the confiscation and
requisition of their real and personal property in the towns. If in Riga
alone, requisitioned furniture and houses were to be returned to their
lawful owners, half a legion of State employees and State Institutions
would have to give up their quarters! Confiscation is also the
keynote of the enforced liquidation of the Agrarian banks, by which all
the assets of these private institutions have been expropriated without
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