The land should belong to those who need it

The land should belong to those who need it is a moral claim that challenges the idea that payment or registered ownership alone settles who ought to possess and use land. Rocho gives the claim its clearest formulation in a confrontation over land at Podlesie, but its force grows from the wider hardships of Lipce: disputed pasture, contested forest rights, scarce work, and poor families approaching hunger. It turns practical need into an argument about justice—and makes that argument a basis for collective action.

The claim against ownership by payment alone

At Podlesie, German settlers of Podlesie object that Lipce’s people would prevent them from buying land. Asked on what right they are being challenged, one of the Germans states, “The land belongs to the one who pays for it!” Rocho answers that this may be how it appears to them, but that the villagers see the matter differently: “It should belong to the one who needs it.” The exchange sets two principles against one another. One treats the land as a commodity whose rightful owner is determined by purchase; the other measures a claim by need and by the capacity to live and work on the land.

Rocho’s argument does not present need as a demand for land without effort. When the German scoffs that this would mean getting it for free, Rocho replies, “With these ten fingers, price enough!” His answer grounds the claim in labor: the people who need land are prepared to work for it, and their work is itself a meaningful contribution. The disagreement is therefore not simply between ownership and no ownership, but between competing accounts of what makes possession legitimate.

Land, livelihood, and unequal risk

The argument resonates with the villagers’ earlier disputes over access to pasture. A complaint that a cow died after being chased from grazing land insists that the pasturage belongs to the complainants and is recorded as theirs, while also describing repeated expulsions and injury to a boy. The reference to a register shows that villagers can appeal to formal documentation, but the conflict is lived through animals, access, and the immediate costs of exclusion. The moral claim about need does not erase questions of title; it exposes how title and customary use can collide in practice.

Boryna’s own attention to land reveals another dimension of the same conflict. As he passes through the forest, he calculates his four morgen and the one morgen associated with Jagusia, measuring the trees against the land claims at stake. His private reckoning contrasts with Rocho’s appeal to communal need: land is at once a personally counted possession and the material basis on which households depend. The forest dispute makes those meanings impossible to separate, because the manor’s felling threatens a resource villagers regard as theirs and a source of work they urgently need.

That urgency is explicit when a speaker tells Boryna that at least twenty hired laborers in Lipce desperately need employment. Winter has already damaged some families’ potatoes; money is scarce, some people eat a hot meal only once a day, and the coming preharvest period promises still greater deprivation. Villagers had expected the work of felling at Wolf’s Hollow to provide jobs, only to hear that the squire would employ no one from Lipce. The dispute over forest control is therefore also a dispute over who bears the cost of poverty and whether the powerful have any obligation to those whose livelihood depends on their decisions.

Jagustynka’s account gives that hardship a domestic scale. She describes a freezing cottage with straw-stuffed windows, a family crowded together, no potatoes, and a quilt already sold. A mother has no milk for her newborn, while the fields stand fallow because the men who might work them are imprisoned. Jagustynka condemns the better-off farmers for attending to food, lending, and their own comfort while leaving the poor to divine care. Her account makes need more than an abstract test of ownership: it is the condition of families without food, credit, labor, or a reliable means of relief.

From moral argument to collective resistance

The claim also informs the villagers’ response to the manor’s logging. In a public speech, the speaker gathers separate grievances—forest felling, refusal of employment, harassment, confiscations, and failed complaints to courts—into a single charge of injustice. The crowd answers with calls to drive the woodcutters away and stop the work. When the villagers arrive at the clearing, they confront the workers with a shared declaration: “It’s ours!” The shift from individual grievance to collective assertion gives the land claim political force, even as the confrontation becomes a violent struggle.

A related strategy appears in the proposal concerning Podlesie. Rather than approach the German buyers separately, Rocho urges the villagers to go together and peacefully warn them not to buy. The proposed warning is backed by a threat that the community will prevent sowing and building if the purchase goes ahead. The sequence shows how the principle of need becomes an organizing argument: the villagers seek first to present a united case, then to make clear that ownership acquired through payment will not automatically secure acceptance or use.

Meaning and limits

The expression supplies a moral counterweight to the formal power of money, contracts, and the manor. It does not settle every question of who has a valid title, nor does the novel show that collective need always produces a just or peaceful outcome. Instead, it exposes the pressure beneath competing claims: land sustains livelihood, work, and household survival, while exclusion can deepen hunger and dependency. By placing Rocho’s words beside the villagers’ labor, poverty, and resistance, the novel makes need a standard by which ownership and authority are judged—and shows how that standard can unite a community against those who control access to land.