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+Project Gutenberg's Mutual Aid, by kniaz' Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+Title: Mutual Aid
+       A Factor of Evolution
+
+Author: kniaz' Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin
+
+Posting Date: June 14, 2011 [EBook #4341]
+Release Date: August, 2003
+[This file was first posted on January 11, 2002]
+[Last updated: November 15, 2014]
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MUTUAL AID ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo Aldarondo@yahoo.com
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MUTUAL AID
+
+A FACTOR OF EVOLUTION
+
+BY P. KROPOTKIN
+
+1902
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I
+made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them
+was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most
+species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the
+enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural
+agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory
+which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those
+few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to
+find--although I was eagerly looking for it--that bitter struggle for
+the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species,
+which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin
+himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the
+main factor of evolution.
+
+The terrible snow-storms which sweep over the northern portion of
+Eurasia in the later part of the winter, and the glazed frost that often
+follows them; the frosts and the snow-storms which return every year in
+the second half of May, when the trees are already in full blossom and
+insect life swarms everywhere; the early frosts and, occasionally, the
+heavy snowfalls in July and August, which suddenly destroy myriads of
+insects, as well as the second broods of the birds in the prairies; the
+torrential rains, due to the monsoons, which fall in more temperate
+regions in August and September--resulting in inundations on a scale
+which is only known in America and in Eastern Asia, and swamping, on the
+plateaus, areas as wide as European States; and finally, the heavy
+snowfalls, early in October, which eventually render a territory as
+large as France and Germany, absolutely impracticable for ruminants, and
+destroy them by the thousand--these were the conditions under which I
+saw animal life struggling in Northern Asia. They made me realize at an
+early date the overwhelming importance in Nature of what Darwin
+described as "the natural checks to over-multiplication," in comparison
+to the struggle between individuals of the same species for the means of
+subsistence, which may go on here and there, to some limited extent, but
+never attains the importance of the former. Paucity of life,
+under-population--not over-population--being the distinctive feature of
+that immense part of the globe which we name Northern Asia, I conceived
+since then serious doubts--which subsequent study has only confirmed--as
+to the reality of that fearful competition for food and life within each
+species, which was an article of faith with most Darwinists, and,
+consequently, as to the dominant part which this sort of competition was
+supposed to play in the evolution of new species.
+
+On the other hand, wherever I saw animal life in abundance, as, for
+instance, on the lakes where scores of species and millions of
+individuals came together to rear their progeny; in the colonies of
+rodents; in the migrations of birds which took place at that time on a
+truly American scale along the Usuri; and especially in a migration of
+fallow-deer which I witnessed on the Amur, and during which scores of
+thousands of these intelligent animals came together from an immense
+territory, flying before the coming deep snow, in order to cross the
+Amur where it is narrowest--in all these scenes of animal life which
+passed before my eyes, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to
+an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest
+importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each
+species, and its further evolution.
+
+And finally, I saw among the semi-wild cattle and horses in
+Transbaikalia, among the wild ruminants everywhere, the squirrels, and
+so on, that when animals have to struggle against scarcity of food, in
+consequence of one of the above-mentioned causes, the whole of that
+portion of the species which is affected by the calamity, comes out of
+the ordeal so much impoverished in vigour and health, that no
+progressive evolution of the species can be based upon such periods of
+keen competition.
+
+Consequently, when my attention was drawn, later on, to the relations
+between Darwinism and Sociology, I could agree with none of the works
+and pamphlets that had been written upon this important subject. They
+all endeavoured to prove that Man, owing to his higher intelligence and
+knowledge, may mitigate the harshness of the struggle for life between
+men; but they all recognized at the same time that the struggle for the
+means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners, and of
+every man against all other men, was "a law of Nature." This view,
+however, I could not accept, because I was persuaded that to admit a
+pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war
+a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only had not
+yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation.
+
+On the contrary, a lecture "On the Law of Mutual Aid," which was
+delivered at a Russian Congress of Naturalists, in January 1880, by the
+well-known zoologist, Professor Kessler, the then Dean of the St.
+Petersburg University, struck me as throwing a new light on the whole
+subject. Kessler's idea was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle
+there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the
+struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the
+species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest. This
+suggestion--which was, in reality, nothing but a further development of
+the ideas expressed by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man--seemed to
+me so correct and of so great an importance, that since I became
+acquainted with it (in 1883) I began to collect materials for further
+developing the idea, which Kessler had only cursorily sketched in his
+lecture, but had not lived to develop. He died in 1881.
+
+In one point only I could not entirely endorse Kessler's views. Kessler
+alluded to "parental feeling" and care for progeny (see below, Chapter
+I) as to the source of mutual inclinations in animals. However, to
+determine how far these two feelings have really been at work in the
+evolution of sociable instincts, and how far other instincts have been
+at work in the same direction, seems to me a quite distinct and a very
+wide question, which we hardly can discuss yet. It will be only after we
+have well established the facts of mutual aid in different classes of
+animals, and their importance for evolution, that we shall be able to
+study what belongs in the evolution of sociable feelings, to parental
+feelings, and what to sociability proper--the latter having evidently
+its origin at the earliest stages of the evolution of the animal world,
+perhaps even at the "colony-stages." I consequently directed my chief
+attention to establishing first of all, the importance of the Mutual Aid
+factor of evolution, leaving to ulterior research the task of
+discovering the origin of the Mutual Aid instinct in Nature.
+
+The importance of the Mutual Aid factor--"if its generality could only
+be demonstrated"--did not escape the naturalist's genius so manifest in
+Goethe. When Eckermann told once to Goethe--it was in 1827--that two
+little wren-fledglings, which had run away from him, were found by him
+next day in the nest of robin redbreasts (Rothkehlchen), which fed the
+little ones, together with their own youngsters, Goethe grew quite
+excited about this fact. He saw in it a confirmation of his pantheistic
+views, and said:--"If it be true that this feeding of a stranger goes
+through all Nature as something having the character of a general
+law--then many an enigma would be solved." He returned to this matter on
+the next day, and most earnestly entreated Eckermann (who was, as is
+known, a zoologist) to make a special study of the subject, adding that
+he would surely come "to quite invaluable treasuries of results"
+(Gespräche, edition of 1848, vol. iii. pp. 219, 221). Unfortunately,
+this study was never made, although it is very possible that Brehm, who
+has accumulated in his works such rich materials relative to mutual aid
+among animals, might have been inspired by Goethe's remark.
+
+Several works of importance were published in the years 1872-1886,
+dealing with the intelligence and the mental life of animals (they are
+mentioned in a footnote in Chapter I of this book), and three of them
+dealt more especially with the subject under consideration; namely, Les
+Societes animales, by Espinas (Paris, 1877); La Lutte pour l'existence
+et l'association pout la lutte, a lecture by J.L. Lanessan (April 1881);
+and Louis Buchner's book, Liebe und Liebes-Leben in der Thierwelt, of
+which the first edition appeared in 1882 or 1883, and a second, much
+enlarged, in 1885. But excellent though each of these works is, they
+leave ample room for a work in which Mutual Aid would be considered, not
+only as an argument in favour of a pre-human origin of moral instincts,
+but also as a law of Nature and a factor of evolution. Espinas devoted
+his main attention to such animal societies (ants, bees) as are
+established upon a physiological division of labour, and though his work
+is full of admirable hints in all possible directions, it was written at
+a time when the evolution of human societies could not yet be treated
+with the knowledge we now possess. Lanessan's lecture has more the
+character of a brilliantly laid-out general plan of a work, in which
+mutual support would be dealt with, beginning with rocks in the sea, and
+then passing in review the world of plants, of animals and men. As to
+Buchner's work, suggestive though it is and rich in facts, I could not
+agree with its leading idea. The book begins with a hymn to Love, and
+nearly all its illustrations are intended to prove the existence of love
+and sympathy among animals. However, to reduce animal sociability to
+love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance,
+just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have
+contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole.
+It is not love to my neighbour--whom I often do not know at all--which
+induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I
+see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or
+instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is
+also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in
+its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form
+a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces
+wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or
+lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days
+together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy
+which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as
+large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching
+towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling
+infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy--an instinct that has
+been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an
+extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the
+force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and
+the joys they can find in social life.
+
+The importance of this distinction will be easily appreciated by the
+student of animal psychology, and the more so by the student of human
+ethics. Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part
+in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love
+and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the
+conscience--be it only at the stage of an instinct--of human solidarity.
+It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each
+man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every
+one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice,
+or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every
+other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary
+foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed. But this
+subject lies outside the scope of the present work, and I shall only
+indicate here a lecture, "Justice and Morality" which I delivered in
+reply to Huxley's Ethics, and in which the subject has been treated at
+some length.
+
+Consequently I thought that a book, written on Mutual Aid as a Law of
+Nature and a factor of evolution, might fill an important gap. When
+Huxley issued, in 1888, his "Struggle-for-life" manifesto (Struggle for
+Existence and its Bearing upon Man), which to my appreciation was a very
+incorrect representation of the facts of Nature, as one sees them in the
+bush and in the forest, I communicated with the editor of the Nineteenth
+Century, asking him whether he would give the hospitality of his review
+to an elaborate reply to the views of one of the most prominent
+Darwinists; and Mr. James Knowles received the proposal with fullest
+sympathy. I also spoke of it to W. Bates. "Yes, certainly; that is true
+Darwinism," was his reply. "It is horrible what 'they' have made of
+Darwin. Write these articles, and when they are printed, I will write to
+you a letter which you may publish." Unfortunately, it took me nearly
+seven years to write these articles, and when the last was published,
+Bates was no longer living.
+
+After having discussed the importance of mutual aid in various classes
+of animals, I was evidently bound to discuss the importance of the same
+factor in the evolution of Man. This was the more necessary as there are
+a number of evolutionists who may not refuse to admit the importance of
+mutual aid among animals, but who, like Herbert Spencer, will refuse to
+admit it for Man. For primitive Man--they maintain--war of each against
+all was the law of life. In how far this assertion, which has been too
+willingly repeated, without sufficient criticism, since the times of
+Hobbes, is supported by what we know about the early phases of human
+development, is discussed in the chapters given to the Savages and the
+Barbarians.
+
+The number and importance of mutual-aid institutions which were
+developed by the creative genius of the savage and half-savage masses,
+during the earliest clan-period of mankind and still more during the
+next village-community period, and the immense influence which these
+early institutions have exercised upon the subsequent development of
+mankind, down to the present times, induced me to extend my researches
+to the later, historical periods as well; especially, to study that most
+interesting period--the free medieval city republics, of which the
+universality and influence upon our modern civilization have not yet
+been duly appreciated. And finally, I have tried to indicate in brief
+the immense importance which the mutual-support instincts, inherited by
+mankind from its extremely long evolution, play even now in our modern
+society, which is supposed to rest upon the principle: "every one for
+himself, and the State for all," but which it never has succeeded, nor
+will succeed in realizing.
+
+It may be objected to this book that both animals and men are
+represented in it under too favourable an aspect; that their sociable
+qualities are insisted upon, while their anti-social and self-asserting
+instincts are hardly touched upon. This was, however, unavoidable. We
+have heard so much lately of the "harsh, pitiless struggle for life,"
+which was said to be carried on by every animal against all other
+animals, every "savage" against all other "savages," and every civilized
+man against all his co-citizens--and these assertions have so much
+become an article of faith--that it was necessary, first of all, to
+oppose to them a wide series of facts showing animal and human life
+under a quite different aspect. It was necessary to indicate the
+overwhelming importance which sociable habits play in Nature and in the
+progressive evolution of both the animal species and human beings: to
+prove that they secure to animals a better protection from their
+enemies, very often facilities for getting food and (winter provisions,
+migrations, etc.), longevity, therefore a greater facility for the
+development of intellectual faculties; and that they have given to men,
+in addition to the same advantages, the possibility of working out those
+institutions which have enabled mankind to survive in its hard struggle
+against Nature, and to progress, notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of
+its history. It is a book on the law of Mutual Aid, viewed at as one of
+the chief factors of evolution--not on all factors of evolution and
+their respective values; and this first book had to be written, before
+the latter could become possible.
+
+I should certainly be the last to underrate the part which the
+self-assertion of the individual has played in the evolution of mankind.
+However, this subject requires, I believe, a much deeper treatment than
+the one it has hitherto received. In the history of mankind, individual
+self-assertion has often been, and continually is, something quite
+different from, and far larger and deeper than, the petty, unintelligent
+narrow-mindedness, which, with a large class of writers, goes for
+"individualism" and "self-assertion." Nor have history-making
+individuals been limited to those whom historians have represented as
+heroes. My intention, consequently, is, if circumstances permit it, to
+discuss separately the part taken by the self-assertion of the
+individual in the progressive evolution of mankind. I can only make in
+this place the following general remark:--When the Mutual Aid
+institutions--the tribe, the village community, the guilds, the medieval
+city--began, in the course of history, to lose their primitive
+character, to be invaded by parasitic growths, and thus to become
+hindrances to progress, the revolt of individuals against these
+institutions took always two different aspects. Part of those who rose
+up strove to purify the old institutions, or to work out a higher form
+of commonwealth, based upon the same Mutual Aid principles; they tried,
+for instance, to introduce the principle of "compensation," instead of
+the lex talionis, and later on, the pardon of offences, or a still
+higher ideal of equality before the human conscience, in lieu of
+"compensation," according to class-value. But at the very same time,
+another portion of the same individual rebels endeavoured to break down
+the protective institutions of mutual support, with no other intention
+but to increase their own wealth and their own powers. In this
+three-cornered contest, between the two classes of revolted individuals
+and the supporters of what existed, lies the real tragedy of history.
+But to delineate that contest, and honestly to study the part played in
+the evolution of mankind by each one of these three forces, would
+require at least as many years as it took me to write this book.
+
+Of works dealing with nearly the same subject, which have been published
+since the publication of my articles on Mutual Aid among Animals, I must
+mention The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man, by Henry Drummond
+(London, 1894), and The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, by A.
+Sutherland (London, 1898). Both are constructed chiefly on the lines
+taken in Buchner's Love, and in the second work the parental and
+familial feeling as the sole influence at work in the development of the
+moral feelings has been dealt with at some length. A third work dealing
+with man and written on similar lines is The Principles of Sociology, by
+Prof. F.A. Giddings, the first edition of which was published in 1896 at
+New York and London, and the leading ideas of which were sketched by the
+author in a pamphlet in 1894. I must leave, however, to literary critics
+the task of discussing the points of contact, resemblance, or divergence
+between these works and mine.
+
+The different chapters of this book were published first in the
+Nineteenth Century ("Mutual Aid among Animals," in September and
+November 1890; "Mutual Aid among Savages," in April 1891; "Mutual Aid
+among the Barbarians," in January 1892; "Mutual Aid in the Medieval
+City," in August and September 1894; and "Mutual Aid amongst Modern
+Men," in January and June 1896). In bringing them out in a book form my
+first intention was to embody in an Appendix the mass of materials, as
+well as the discussion of several secondary points, which had to be
+omitted in the review articles. It appeared, however, that the Appendix
+would double the size of the book, and I was compelled to abandon, or,
+at least, to postpone its publication. The present Appendix includes the
+discussion of only a few points which have been the matter of scientific
+controversy during the last few years; and into the text I have
+introduced only such matter as could be introduced without altering the
+structure of the work.
+
+I am glad of this opportunity for expressing to the editor of the
+Nineteenth Century, Mr. James Knowles, my very best thanks, both for the
+kind hospitality which he offered to these papers in his review, as soon
+as he knew their general idea, and the permission he kindly gave me to
+reprint them.
+
+Bromley, Kent, 1902.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+MUTUAL AID AMONG ANIMALS
+
+Struggle for existence. Mutual Aid a law of Nature and chief factor of
+progressive evolution. Invertebrates. Ants and Bees. Birds, hunting and
+fishing associations. Sociability. Mutual protection among small birds.
+Cranes, parrots.
+
+
+The conception of struggle for existence as a factor of evolution,
+introduced into science by Darwin and Wallace, has permitted us to
+embrace an immensely wide range of phenomena in one single
+generalization, which soon became the very basis of our philosophical,
+biological, and sociological speculations. An immense variety of
+facts:--adaptations of function and structure of organic beings to their
+surroundings; physiological and anatomical evolution; intellectual
+progress, and moral development itself, which we formerly used to
+explain by so many different causes, were embodied by Darwin in one
+general conception. We understood them as continued endeavours--as a
+struggle against adverse circumstances--for such a development of
+individuals, races, species and societies, as would result in the
+greatest possible fulness, variety, and intensity of life. It may be
+that at the outset Darwin himself was not fully aware of the generality
+of the factor which he first invoked for explaining one series only of
+facts relative to the accumulation of individual variations in incipient
+species. But he foresaw that the term which he was introducing into
+science would lose its philosophical and its only true meaning if it
+were to be used in its narrow sense only--that of a struggle between
+separate individuals for the sheer means of existence. And at the very
+beginning of his memorable work he insisted upon the term being taken in
+its "large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on
+another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of
+the individual, but success in leaving progeny."(1)
+
+While he himself was chiefly using the term in its narrow sense for his
+own special purpose, he warned his followers against committing the
+error (which he seems once to have committed himself) of overrating its
+narrow meaning. In The Descent of Man he gave some powerful pages to
+illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless
+animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the
+means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation,
+and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and
+moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for
+survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the
+physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine
+so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the
+welfare of the community. "Those communities," he wrote, "which included
+the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best,
+and rear the greatest number of offspring" (2nd edit., p. 163). The
+term, which originated from the narrow Malthusian conception of
+competition between each and all, thus lost its narrowness in the mind
+of one who knew Nature.
+
+Unhappily, these remarks, which might have become the basis of most
+fruitful researches, were overshadowed by the masses of facts gathered
+for the purpose of illustrating the consequences of a real competition
+for life. Besides, Darwin never attempted to submit to a closer
+investigation the relative importance of the two aspects under which the
+struggle for existence appears in the animal world, and he never wrote
+the work he proposed to write upon the natural checks to
+over-multiplication, although that work would have been the crucial test
+for appreciating the real purport of individual struggle. Nay, on the
+very pages just mentioned, amidst data disproving the narrow Malthusian
+conception of struggle, the old Malthusian leaven reappeared--namely, in
+Darwin's remarks as to the alleged inconveniences of maintaining the
+"weak in mind and body" in our civilized societies (ch. v). As if
+thousands of weak-bodied and infirm poets, scientists, inventors, and
+reformers, together with other thousands of so-called "fools" and
+"weak-minded enthusiasts," were not the most precious weapons used by
+humanity in its struggle for existence by intellectual and moral arms,
+which Darwin himself emphasized in those same chapters of Descent of
+Man.
+
+It happened with Darwin's theory as it always happens with theories
+having any bearing upon human relations. Instead of widening it
+according to his own hints, his followers narrowed it still more. And
+while Herbert Spencer, starting on independent but closely allied lines,
+attempted to widen the inquiry into that great question, "Who are the
+fittest?" especially in the appendix to the third edition of the Data of
+Ethics, the numberless followers of Darwin reduced the notion of
+struggle for existence to its narrowest limits. They came to conceive
+the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved
+individuals, thirsting for one another's blood. They made modern
+literature resound with the war-cry of woe to the vanquished, as if it
+were the last word of modern biology. They raised the "pitiless"
+struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle
+which man must submit to as well, under the menace of otherwise
+succumbing in a world based upon mutual extermination. Leaving aside the
+economists who know of natural science but a few words borrowed from
+second-hand vulgarizers, we must recognize that even the most authorized
+exponents of Darwin's views did their best to maintain those false
+ideas. In fact, if we take Huxley, who certainly is considered as one of
+the ablest exponents of the theory of evolution, were we not taught by
+him, in a paper on the 'Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon
+Man,' that,
+
+     "from the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on
+     about the same level as a gladiators' show. The creatures are
+     fairly well treated, and set to, fight hereby the strongest, the
+     swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The
+     spectator has no need to turn his thumb down, as no quarter is
+     given."
+
+Or, further down in the same article, did he not tell us that, as among
+animals, so among primitive men,
+
+     "the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and
+     shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their
+     circumstances, but not the best in another way, survived. Life was
+     a continuous free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary
+     relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was
+     the normal state of existence."(2)
+
+In how far this view of nature is supported by fact, will be seen from
+the evidence which will be here submitted to the reader as regards the
+animal world, and as regards primitive man. But it may be remarked at
+once that Huxley's view of nature had as little claim to be taken as a
+scientific deduction as the opposite view of Rousseau, who saw in nature
+but love, peace, and harmony destroyed by the accession of man. In fact,
+the first walk in the forest, the first observation upon any animal
+society, or even the perusal of any serious work dealing with animal
+life (D'Orbigny's, Audubon's, Le Vaillant's, no matter which), cannot
+but set the naturalist thinking about the part taken by social life in
+the life of animals, and prevent him from seeing in Nature nothing but a
+field of slaughter, just as this would prevent him from seeing in Nature
+nothing but harmony and peace. Rousseau had committed the error of
+excluding the beak-and-claw fight from his thoughts; and Huxley
+committed the opposite error; but neither Rousseau's optimism nor
+Huxley's pessimism can be accepted as an impartial interpretation of
+nature.
+
+As soon as we study animals--not in laboratories and museums only, but
+in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains--we at
+once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and
+extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst
+various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or
+perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence
+amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same
+society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of
+course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the
+relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we
+resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those
+who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one
+another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of
+mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to
+survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest
+development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless
+facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into
+account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal
+life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most
+probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the
+development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and
+further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of
+welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste
+of energy.
+
+Of the scientific followers of Darwin, the first, as far as I know, who
+understood the full purport of Mutual Aid as a law of Nature and the
+chief factor of evolution, was a well-known Russian zoologist, the late
+Dean of the St. Petersburg University, Professor Kessler. He developed
+his ideas in an address which he delivered in January 1880, a few months
+before his death, at a Congress of Russian naturalists; but, like so
+many good things published in the Russian tongue only, that remarkable
+address remains almost entirely unknown.(3)
+
+"As a zoologist of old standing," he felt bound to protest against the
+abuse of a term--the struggle for existence--borrowed from zoology, or,
+at least, against overrating its importance. Zoology, he said, and those
+sciences which deal with man, continually insist upon what they call the
+pitiless law of struggle for existence. But they forget the existence of
+another law which may be described as the law of mutual aid, which law,
+at least for the animals, is far more essential than the former. He
+pointed out how the need of leaving progeny necessarily brings animals
+together, and, "the more the individuals keep together, the more they
+mutually support each other, and the more are the chances of the species
+for surviving, as well as for making further progress in its
+intellectual development." "All classes of animals," he continued, "and
+especially the higher ones, practise mutual aid," and he illustrated his
+idea by examples borrowed from the life of the burying beetles and the
+social life of birds and some mammalia. The examples were few, as might
+have been expected in a short opening address, but the chief points were
+clearly stated; and, after mentioning that in the evolution of mankind
+mutual aid played a still more prominent part, Professor Kessler
+concluded as follows:--
+
+"I obviously do not deny the struggle for existence, but I maintain that
+the progressive development of the animal kingdom, and especially of
+mankind, is favoured much more by mutual support than by mutual
+struggle.... All organic beings have two essential needs: that of
+nutrition, and that of propagating the species. The former brings them
+to a struggle and to mutual extermination, while the needs of
+maintaining the species bring them to approach one another and to
+support one another. But I am inclined to think that in the evolution of
+the organic world--in the progressive modification of organic
+beings--mutual support among individuals plays a much more important
+part than their mutual struggle."(4)
+
+The correctness of the above views struck most of the Russian zoologists
+present, and Syevertsoff, whose work is well known to ornithologists and
+geographers, supported them and illustrated them by a few more examples.
+He mentioned sone of the species of falcons which have "an almost ideal
+organization for robbery," and nevertheless are in decay, while other
+species of falcons, which practise mutual help, do thrive. "Take, on the
+other side, a sociable bird, the duck," he said; "it is poorly organized
+on the whole, but it practises mutual support, and it almost invades the
+earth, as may be judged from its numberless varieties and species."
+
+The readiness of the Russian zoologists to accept Kessler's views seems
+quite natural, because nearly all of them have had opportunities of
+studying the animal world in the wide uninhabited regions of Northern
+Asia and East Russia; and it is impossible to study like regions without
+being brought to the same ideas. I recollect myself the impression
+produced upon me by the animal world of Siberia when I explored the
+Vitim regions in the company of so accomplished a zoologist as my friend
+Polyakoff was. We both were under the fresh impression of the Origin of
+Species, but we vainly looked for the keen competition between animals
+of the same species which the reading of Darwin's work had prepared us
+to expect, even after taking into account the remarks of the third
+chapter (p. 54). We saw plenty of adaptations for struggling, very often
+in common, against the adverse circumstances of climate, or against
+various enemies, and Polyakoff wrote many a good page upon the mutual
+dependency of carnivores, ruminants, and rodents in their geographical
+distribution; we witnessed numbers of facts of mutual support,
+especially during the migrations of birds and ruminants; but even in the
+Amur and Usuri regions, where animal life swarms in abundance, facts of
+real competition and struggle between higher animals of the same species
+came very seldom under my notice, though I eagerly searched for them.
+The same impression appears in the works of most Russian zoologists, and
+it probably explains why Kessler's ideas were so welcomed by the Russian
+Darwinists, whilst like ideas are not in vogue amidst the followers of
+Darwin in Western Europe.
+
+The first thing which strikes us as soon as we begin studying the
+struggle for existence under both its aspects--direct and
+metaphorical--is the abundance of facts of mutual aid, not only for
+rearing progeny, as recognized by most evolutionists, but also for the
+safety of the individual, and for providing it with the necessary food.
+With many large divisions of the animal kingdom mutual aid is the rule.
+Mutual aid is met with even amidst the lowest animals, and we must be
+prepared to learn some day, from the students of microscopical
+pond-life, facts of unconscious mutual support, even from the life of
+micro-organisms. Of course, our knowledge of the life of the
+invertebrates, save the termites, the ants, and the bees, is extremely
+limited; and yet, even as regards the lower animals, we may glean a few
+facts of well-ascertained cooperation. The numberless associations of
+locusts, vanessae, cicindelae, cicadae, and so on, are practically quite
+unexplored; but the very fact of their existence indicates that they
+must be composed on about the same principles as the temporary
+associations of ants or bees for purposes of migration. As to the
+beetles, we have quite well-observed facts of mutual help amidst the
+burying beetles (Necrophorus). They must have some decaying organic
+matter to lay their eggs in, and thus to provide their larvae with food;
+but that matter must not decay very rapidly. So they are wont to bury in
+the ground the corpses of all kinds of small animals which they
+occasionally find in their rambles. As a rule, they live an isolated
+life, but when one of them has discovered the corpse of a mouse or of a
+bird, which it hardly could manage to bury itself, it calls four, six,
+or ten other beetles to perform the operation with united efforts; if
+necessary, they transport the corpse to a suitable soft ground; and they
+bury it in a very considerate way, without quarrelling as to which of
+them will enjoy the privilege of laying its eggs in the buried corpse.
+And when Gleditsch attached a dead bird to a cross made out of two
+sticks, or suspended a toad to a stick planted in the soil, the little
+beetles would in the same friendly way combine their intelligences to
+overcome the artifice of Man. The same combination of efforts has been
+noticed among the dung-beetles.
+
+Even among animals standing at a somewhat lower stage of organization we
+may find like examples. Some land-crabs of the West Indies and North
+America combine in large swarms in order to travel to the sea and to
+deposit therein their spawn; and each such migration implies concert,
+co-operation, and mutual support. As to the big Molucca crab (Limulus),
+I was struck (in 1882, at the Brighton Aquarium) with the extent of
+mutual assistance which these clumsy animals are capable of bestowing
+upon a comrade in case of need. One of them had fallen upon its back in
+a corner of the tank, and its heavy saucepan-like carapace prevented it
+from returning to its natural position, the more so as there was in the
+corner an iron bar which rendered the task still more difficult. Its
+comrades came to the rescue, and for one hour's time I watched how they
+endeavoured to help their fellow-prisoner. They came two at once, pushed
+their friend from beneath, and after strenuous efforts succeeded in
+lifting it upright; but then the iron bar would prevent them from
+achieving the work of rescue, and the crab would again heavily fall upon
+its back. After many attempts, one of the helpers would go in the depth
+of the tank and bring two other crabs, which would begin with fresh
+forces the same pushing and lifting of their helpless comrade. We stayed
+in the Aquarium for more than two hours, and, when leaving, we again
+came to cast a glance upon the tank: the work of rescue still continued!
+Since I saw that, I cannot refuse credit to the observation quoted by
+Dr. Erasmus Darwin--namely, that "the common crab during the moulting
+season stations as sentinel an unmoulted or hard-shelled individual to
+prevent marine enemies from injuring moulted individuals in their
+unprotected state."(5)
+
+Facts illustrating mutual aid amidst the termites, the ants, and the
+bees are so well known to the general reader, especially through the
+works of Romanes, L. Buchner, and Sir John Lubbock, that I may limit my
+remarks to a very few hints.(6) If we take an ants' nest, we not only
+see that every description of work-rearing of progeny, foraging,
+building, rearing of aphides, and so on--is performed according to the
+principles of voluntary mutual aid; we must also recognize, with Forel,
+that the chief, the fundamental feature of the life of many species of
+ants is the fact and the obligation for every ant of sharing its food,
+already swallowed and partly digested, with every member of the
+community which may apply for it. Two ants belonging to two different
+species or to two hostile nests, when they occasionally meet together,
+will avoid each other. But two ants belonging to the same nest or to the
+same colony of nests will approach each other, exchange a few movements
+with the antennae, and "if one of them is hungry or thirsty, and
+especially if the other has its crop full ... it immediately asks for
+food." The individual thus requested never refuses; it sets apart its
+mandibles, takes a proper position, and regurgitates a drop of
+transparent fluid which is licked up by the hungry ant. Regurgitating
+food for other ants is so prominent a feature in the life of ants (at
+liberty), and it so constantly recurs both for feeding hungry comrades
+and for feeding larvae, that Forel considers the digestive tube of the
+ants as consisting of two different parts, one of which, the posterior,
+is for the special use of the individual, and the other, the anterior
+part, is chiefly for the use of the community. If an ant which has its
+crop full has been selfish enough to refuse feeding a comrade, it will
+be treated as an enemy, or even worse. If the refusal has been made
+while its kinsfolk were fighting with some other species, they will fall
+back upon the greedy individual with greater vehemence than even upon
+the enemies themselves. And if an ant has not refused to feed another
+ant belonging to an enemy species, it will be treated by the kinsfolk of
+the latter as a friend. All this is confirmed by most accurate
+observation and decisive experiments.(7)
+
+In that immense division of the animal kingdom which embodies more than
+one thousand species, and is so numerous that the Brazilians pretend
+that Brazil belongs to the ants, not to men, competition amidst the
+members of the same nest, or the colony of nests, does not exist.
+However terrible the wars between different species, and whatever the
+atrocities committed at war-time, mutual aid within the community,
+self-devotion grown into a habit, and very often self-sacrifice for the
+common welfare, are the rule. The ants and termites have renounced the
+"Hobbesian war," and they are the better for it. Their wonderful nests,
+their buildings, superior in relative size to those of man; their paved
+roads and overground vaulted galleries; their spacious halls and
+granaries; their corn-fields, harvesting and "malting" of grain;(8)
+their, rational methods of nursing their eggs and larvae, and of
+building special nests for rearing the aphides whom Linnaeus so
+picturesquely described as "the cows of the ants"; and, finally, their
+courage, pluck, and, superior intelligence--all these are the natural
+outcome of the mutual aid which they practise at every stage of their
+busy and laborious lives. That mode of life also necessarily resulted in
+the development of another essential feature of the life of ants: the
+immense development of individual initiative which, in its turn,
+evidently led to the development of that high and varied intelligence
+which cannot but strike the human observer.(9)
+
+If we knew no other facts from animal life than what we know about the
+ants and the termites, we already might safely conclude that mutual aid
+(which leads to mutual confidence, the first condition for courage) and
+individual initiative (the first condition for intellectual progress)
+are two factors infinitely more important than mutual struggle in the
+evolution of the animal kingdom. In fact, the ant thrives without having
+any of the "protective" features which cannot be dispensed with by
+animals living an isolated life. Its colour renders it conspicuous to
+its enemies, and the lofty nests of many species are conspicuous in the
+meadows and forests. It is not protected by a hard carapace, and its
+stinging apparatus, however dangerous when hundreds of stings are
+plunged into the flesh of an animal, is not of a great value for
+individual defence; while the eggs and larvae of the ants are a dainty
+for a great number of the inhabitants of the forests. And yet the ants,
+in their thousands, are not much destroyed by the birds, not even by the
+ant-eaters, and they are dreaded by most stronger insects. When Forel
+emptied a bagful of ants in a meadow, he saw that "the crickets ran
+away, abandoning their holes to be sacked by the ants; the grasshoppers
+and the crickets fled in all directions; the spiders and the beetles
+abandoned their prey in order not to become prey themselves;" even the
+nests of the wasps were taken by the ants, after a battle during which
+many ants perished for the safety of the commonwealth. Even the swiftest
+insects cannot escape, and Forel often saw butterflies, gnats, flies,
+and so on, surprised and killed by the ants. Their force is in mutual
+support and mutual confidence. And if the ant--apart from the still
+higher developed termites--stands at the very top of the whole class of
+insects for its intellectual capacities; if its courage is only equalled
+by the most courageous vertebrates; and if its brain--to use Darwin's
+words--"is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world,
+perhaps more so than the brain of man," is it not due to the fact that
+mutual aid has entirely taken the place of mutual struggle in the
+communities of ants?
+
+The same is true as regards the bees. These small insects, which so
+easily might become the prey of so many birds, and whose honey has so
+many admirers in all classes of animals from the beetle to the bear,
+also have none of the protective features derived from mimicry or
+otherwise, without which an isolatedly living insect hardly could escape
+wholesale destruction; and yet, owing to the mutual aid they practise,
+they obtain the wide extension which we know and the intelligence we
+admire, By working in common they multiply their individual forces; by
+resorting to a temporary division of labour combined with the capacity
+of each bee to perform every kind of work when required, they attain
+such a degree of well-being and safety as no isolated animal can ever
+expect to achieve however strong or well armed it may be. In their
+combinations they are often more successful than man, when he neglects
+to take advantage of a well-planned mutual assistance. Thus, when a new
+swarm of bees is going to leave the hive in search of a new abode, a
+number of bees will make a preliminary exploration of the neighbourhood,
+and if they discover a convenient dwelling-place--say, an old basket, or
+anything of the kind--they will take possession of it, clean it, and
+guard it, sometimes for a whole week, till the swarm comes to settle
+therein. But how many human settlers will perish in new countries simply
+for not having understood the necessity of combining their efforts! By
+combining their individual intelligences they succeed in coping with
+adverse circumstances, even quite unforeseen and unusual, like those
+bees of the Paris Exhibition which fastened with their resinous propolis
+the shutter to a glass-plate fitted in the wall of their hive. Besides,
+they display none of the sanguinary proclivities and love of useless
+fighting with which many writers so readily endow animals. The sentries
+which guard the entrance to the hive pitilessly put to death the robbing
+bees which attempt entering the hive; but those stranger bees which come
+to the hive by mistake are left unmolested, especially if they come
+laden with pollen, or are young individuals which can easily go astray.
+There is no more warfare than is strictly required.
+
+The sociability of the bees is the more instructive as predatory
+instincts and laziness continue to exist among the bees as well, and
+reappear each time that their growth is favoured by some circumstances.
+It is well known that there always are a number of bees which prefer a
+life of robbery to the laborious life of a worker; and that both periods
+of scarcity and periods of an unusually rich supply of food lead to an
+increase of the robbing class. When our crops are in and there remains
+but little to gather in our meadows and fields, robbing bees become of
+more frequent occurrence; while, on the other side, about the sugar
+plantations of the West Indies and the sugar refineries of Europe,
+robbery, laziness, and very often drunkenness become quite usual with
+the bees. We thus see that anti-social instincts continue to exist
+amidst the bees as well; but natural selection continually must
+eliminate them, because in the long run the practice of solidarity
+proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of
+individuals endowed with predatory inclinations. The cunningest and the
+shrewdest are eliminated in favour of those who understand the
+advantages of sociable life and mutual support.
+
+Certainly, neither the ants, nor the bees, nor even the termites, have
+risen to the conception of a higher solidarity embodying the whole of
+the species. In that respect they evidently have not attained a degree
+of development which we do not find even among our political,
+scientific, and religious leaders. Their social instincts hardly extend
+beyond the limits of the hive or the nest. However, colonies of no less
+than two hundred nests, belonging to two different species (Formica
+exsecta and F. pressilabris) have been described by Forel on Mount
+Tendre and Mount Saleve; and Forel maintains that each member of these
+colonies recognizes every other member of the colony, and that they all
+take part in common defence; while in Pennsylvania Mr. MacCook saw a
+whole nation of from 1,600 to 1,700 nests of the mound-making ant, all
+living in perfect intelligence; and Mr. Bates has described the hillocks
+of the termites covering large surfaces in the "campos"--some of the
+nests being the refuge of two or three different species, and most of
+them being connected by vaulted galleries or arcades.(10) Some steps
+towards the amalgamation of larger divisions of the species for purposes
+of mutual protection are thus met with even among the invertebrate
+animals.
+
+Going now over to higher animals, we find far more instances of
+undoubtedly conscious mutual help for all possible purposes, though we
+must recognize at once that our knowledge even of the life of higher
+animals still remains very imperfect. A large number of facts have been
+accumulated by first-rate observers, but there are whole divisions of
+the animal kingdom of which we know almost nothing. Trustworthy
+information as regards fishes is extremely scarce, partly owing to the
+difficulties of observation, and partly because no proper attention has
+yet been paid to the subject. As to the mammalia, Kessler already
+remarked how little we know about their manners of life. Many of them
+are nocturnal in their habits; others conceal themselves underground;
+and those ruminants whose social life and migrations offer the greatest
+interest do not let man approach their herds. It is chiefly upon birds
+that we have the widest range of information, and yet the social life of
+very many species remains but imperfectly known. Still, we need not
+complain about the lack of well-ascertained facts, as will be seen from
+the following.
+
+I need not dwell upon the associations of male and female for rearing
+their offspring, for providing it with food during their first steps in
+life, or for hunting in common; though it may be mentioned by the way
+that such associations are the rule even with the least sociable
+carnivores and rapacious birds; and that they derive a special interest
+from being the field upon which tenderer feelings develop even amidst
+otherwise most cruel animals. It may also be added that the rarity of
+associations larger than that of the family among the carnivores and the
+birds of prey, though mostly being the result of their very modes of
+feeding, can also be explained to some extent as a consequence of the
+change produced in the animal world by the rapid increase of mankind. At
+any rate it is worthy of note that there are species living a quite
+isolated life in densely-inhabited regions, while the same species, or
+their nearest congeners, are gregarious in uninhabited countries.
+Wolves, foxes, and several birds of prey may be quoted as instances in
+point.
+
+However, associations which do not extend beyond the family bonds are of
+relatively small importance in our case, the more so as we know numbers
+of associations for more general purposes, such as hunting, mutual
+protection, and even simple enjoyment of life. Audubon already mentioned
+that eagles occasionally associate for hunting, and his description of
+the two bald eagles, male and female, hunting on the Mississippi, is
+well known for its graphic powers. But one of the most conclusive
+observations of the kind belongs to Syevertsoff. Whilst studying the
+fauna of the Russian Steppes, he once saw an eagle belonging to an
+altogether gregarious species (the white-tailed eagle, Haliactos
+albicilla) rising high in the air for half an hour it was describing its
+wide circles in silence when at once its piercing voice was heard. Its
+cry was soon answered by another eagle which approached it, and was
+followed by a third, a fourth, and so on, till nine or ten eagles came
+together and soon disappeared. In the afternoon, Syevertsoff went to the
+place whereto he saw the eagles flying; concealed by one of the
+undulations of the Steppe, he approached them, and discovered that they
+had gathered around the corpse of a horse. The old ones, which, as a
+rule, begin the meal first--such are their rules of propriety-already
+were sitting upon the haystacks of the neighbourhood and kept watch,
+while the younger ones were continuing the meal, surrounded by bands of
+crows. From this and like observations, Syevertsoff concluded that the
+white-tailed eagles combine for hunting; when they all have risen to a
+great height they are enabled, if they are ten, to survey an area of at
+least twenty-five miles square; and as soon as any one has discovered
+something, he warns the others.(11) Of course, it might be argued that a
+simple instinctive cry of the first eagle, or even its movements, would
+have had the same effect of bringing several eagles to the prey. But in
+this case there is strong evidence in favour of mutual warning, because
+the ten eagles came together before descending towards the prey, and
+Syevertsoff had later on several opportunities of ascertaining that the
+whitetailed eagles always assemble for devouring a corpse, and that some
+of them (the younger ones first) always keep watch while the others are
+eating. In fact, the white-tailed eagle--one of the bravest and best
+hunters--is a gregarious bird altogether, and Brehm says that when kept
+in captivity it very soon contracts an attachment to its keepers.
+
+Sociability is a common feature with very many other birds of prey. The
+Brazilian kite, one of the most "impudent" robbers, is nevertheless a
+most sociable bird. Its hunting associations have been described by
+Darwin and other naturalists, and it is a fact that when it has seized
+upon a prey which is too big, it calls together five or six friends to
+carry it away. After a busy day, when these kites retire for their
+night-rest to a tree or to the bushes, they always gather in bands,
+sometimes coming together from distances of ten or more miles, and they
+often are joined by several other vultures, especially the percnopters,
+"their true friends," D'Orbigny says. In another continent, in the
+Transcaspian deserts, they have, according to Zarudnyi, the same habit
+of nesting together. The sociable vulture, one of the strongest
+vultures, has received its very name from its love of society. They live
+in numerous bands, and decidedly enjoy society; numbers of them join in
+their high flights for sport. "They live in very good friendship," Le
+Vaillant says, "and in the same cave I sometimes found as many as three
+nests close together."(12) The Urubu vultures of Brazil are as, or
+perhaps even more, sociable than rooks.(13) The little Egyptian vultures
+live in close friendship. They play in bands in the air, they come
+together to spend the night, and in the morning they all go together to
+search for their food, and never does the slightest quarrel arise among
+them; such is the testimony of Brehm, who had plenty of opportunities of
+observing their life. The red-throated falcon is also met with in
+numerous bands in the forests of Brazil, and the kestrel (Tinnunculus
+cenchris), when it has left Europe, and has reached in the winter the
+prairies and forests of Asia, gathers in numerous societies. In the
+Steppes of South Russia it is (or rather was) so sociable that Nordmann
+saw them in numerous bands, with other falcons (Falco tinnunculus, F.
+oesulon, and F. subbuteo), coming together every fine afternoon about
+four o'clock, and enjoying their sports till late in the night. They set
+off flying, all at once, in a quite straight line, towards some
+determined point, and, having reached it, immediately returned over the
+same line, to repeat the same flight.(14)
+
+To take flights in flocks for the mere pleasure of the flight, is quite
+common among all sorts of birds. "In the Humber district especially,"
+Ch. Dixon writes, "vast flights of dunlins often appear upon the
+mud-flats towards the end of August, and remain for the winter.... The
+movements of these birds are most interesting, as a vast flock wheels
+and spreads out or closes up with as much precision as drilled troops.
+Scattered among them are many odd stints and sanderlings and
+ringed-plovers."(15)
+
+It would be quite impossible to enumerate here the various hunting
+associations of birds; but the fishing associations of the pelicans are
+certainly worthy of notice for the remarkable order and intelligence
+displayed by these clumsy birds. They always go fishing in numerous
+bands, and after having chosen an appropriate bay, they form a wide
+half-circle in face of the shore, and narrow it by paddling towards the
+shore, catching all fish that happen to be enclosed in the circle. On
+narrow rivers and canals they even divide into two parties, each of
+which draws up on a half-circle, and both paddle to meet each other,
+just as if two parties of men dragging two long nets should advance to
+capture all fish taken between the nets when both parties come to meet.
+As the night comes they fly to their resting-places--always the same for
+each flock--and no one has ever seen them fighting for the possession of
+either the bay or the resting place. In South America they gather in
+flocks of from forty to fifty thousand individuals, part of which enjoy
+sleep while the others keep watch, and others again go fishing.(16) And
+finally, I should be doing an injustice to the much-calumniated
+house-sparrows if I did not mention how faithfully each of them shares
+any food it discovers with all members of the society to which it
+belongs. The fact was known to the Greeks, and it has been transmitted
+to posterity how a Greek orator once exclaimed (I quote from
+memory):--"While I am speaking to you a sparrow has come to tell to
+other sparrows that a slave has dropped on the floor a sack of corn, and
+they all go there to feed upon the grain." The more, one is pleased to
+find this observation of old confirmed in a recent little book by Mr.
+Gurney, who does not doubt that the house sparrows always inform each
+other as to where there is some food to steal; he says, "When a stack
+has been thrashed ever so far from the yard, the sparrows in the yard
+have always had their crops full of the grain."(17) True, the sparrows
+are extremely particular in keeping their domains free from the
+invasions of strangers; thus the sparrows of the Jardin du Luxembourg
+bitterly fight all other sparrows which may attempt to enjoy their turn
+of the garden and its visitors; but within their own communities they
+fully practise mutual support, though occasionally there will be of
+course some quarrelling even amongst the best friends.
+
+Hunting and feeding in common is so much the habit in the feathered
+world that more quotations hardly would be needful: it must be
+considered as an established fact. As to the force derived from such
+associations, it is self-evident. The strongest birds of prey are
+powerless in face of the associations of our smallest bird pets. Even
+eagles--even the powerful and terrible booted eagle, and the martial
+eagle, which is strong enough to carry away a hare or a young antelope
+in its claws--are compelled to abandon their prey to bands of those
+beggars the kites, which give the eagle a regular chase as soon as they
+see it in possession of a good prey. The kites will also give chase to
+the swift fishing-hawk, and rob it of the fish it has captured; but no
+one ever saw the kites fighting together for the possession of the prey
+so stolen. On the Kerguelen Island, Dr. Coues saw the gulls to
+Buphogus--the sea-hen of the sealers--pursue make them disgorge their
+food, while, on the other side, the gulls and the terns combined to
+drive away the sea-hen as soon as it came near to their abodes,
+especially at nesting-time.(18) The little, but extremely swift lapwings
+(Vanellus cristatus) boldly attack the birds of prey. "To see them
+attacking a buzzard, a kite, a crow, or an eagle, is one of the most
+amusing spectacles. One feels that they are sure of victory, and one
+sees the anger of the bird of prey. In such circumstances they perfectly
+support one another, and their courage grows with their numbers."(19)
+The lapwing has well merited the name of a "good mother" which the
+Greeks gave to it, for it never fails to protect other aquatic birds
+from the attacks of their enemies. But even the little white wagtails
+(Motacilla alba), whom we well know in our gardens and whose whole
+length hardly attains eight inches, compel the sparrow-hawk to abandon
+its hunt. "I often admired their courage and agility," the old Brehm
+wrote, "and I am persuaded that the falcon alone is capable of capturing
+any of them.... When a band of wagtails has compelled a bird of prey to
+retreat, they make the air resound with their triumphant cries, and
+after that they separate." They thus come together for the special
+purpose of giving chase to their enemy, just as we see it when the whole
+bird-population of a forest has been raised by the news that a nocturnal
+bird has made its appearance during the day, and all together--birds of
+prey and small inoffensive singers--set to chase the stranger and make
+it return to its concealment.
+
+What an immense difference between the force of a kite, a buzzard or a
+hawk, and such small birds as the meadow-wagtail; and yet these little
+birds, by their common action and courage, prove superior to the
+powerfully-winged and armed robbers! In Europe, the wagtails not only
+chase the birds of prey which might be dangerous to them, but they chase
+also the fishing-hawk "rather for fun than for doing it any harm;" while
+in India, according to Dr. Jerdon's testimony, the jackdaws chase the
+gowinda-kite "for simple matter of amusement." Prince Wied saw the
+Brazilian eagle urubitinga surrounded by numberless flocks of toucans
+and cassiques (a bird nearly akin to our rook), which mocked it. "The
+eagle," he adds, "usually supports these insults very quietly, but from
+time to time it will catch one of these mockers." In all such cases the
+little birds, though very much inferior in force to the bird of prey,
+prove superior to it by their common action.(20)
+
+However, the most striking effects of common life for the security of
+the individual, for its enjoyment of life, and for the development of
+its intellectual capacities, are seen in two great families of birds,
+the cranes and the parrots. The cranes are extremely sociable and live
+in most excellent relations, not only with their congeners, but also
+with most aquatic birds. Their prudence is really astonishing, so also
+their intelligence; they grasp the new conditions in a moment, and act
+accordingly. Their sentries always keep watch around a flock which is
+feeding or resting, and the hunters know well how difficult it is to
+approach them. If man has succeeded in surprising them, they will never
+return to the same place without having sent out one single scout first,
+and a party of scouts afterwards; and when the reconnoitring party
+returns and reports that there is no danger, a second group of scouts is
+sent out to verify the first report, before the whole band moves. With
+kindred species the cranes contract real friendship; and in captivity
+there is no bird, save the also sociable and highly intelligent parrot,
+which enters into such real friendship with man. "It sees in man, not a
+master, but a friend, and endeavours to manifest it," Brehm concludes
+from a wide personal experience. The crane is in continual activity from
+early in the morning till late in the night; but it gives a few hours
+only in the morning to the task of searching its food, chiefly
+vegetable. All the remainder of the day is given to society life. "It
+picks up small pieces of wood or small stones, throws them in the air
+and tries to catch them; it bends its neck, opens its wings, dances,
+jumps, runs about, and tries to manifest by all means its good
+disposition of mind, and always it remains graceful and beautiful."(21)
+As it lives in society it has almost no enemies, and though Brehm
+occasionally saw one of them captured by a crocodile, he wrote that
+except the crocodile he knew no enemies of the crane. It eschews all of
+them by its proverbial prudence; and it attains, as a rule, a very old
+age. No wonder that for the maintenance of the species the crane need
+not rear a numerous offspring; it usually hatches but two eggs. As to
+its superior intelligence, it is sufficient to say that all observers
+are unanimous in recognizing that its intellectual capacities remind one
+very much of those of man.
+
+The other extremely sociable bird, the parrot, stands, as known, at the
+very top of the whole feathered world for the development of its
+intelligence. Brehm has so admirably summed up the manners of life of
+the parrot, that I cannot do better than translate the following
+sentence:--
+
+"Except in the pairing season, they live in very numerous societies or
+bands. They choose a place in the forest to stay there, and thence they
+start every morning for their hunting expeditions. The members of each
+band remain faithfully attached to each other, and they share in common
+good or bad luck. All together they repair in the morning to a field, or
+to a garden, or to a tree, to feed upon fruits. They post sentries to
+keep watch over the safety of the whole band, and are attentive to their
+warnings. In case of danger, all take to flight, mutually supporting
+each other, and all simultaneously return to their resting-place. In a
+word, they always live closely united."
+
+They enjoy society of other birds as well. In India, the jays and crows
+come together from many miles round, to spend the night in company with
+the parrots in the bamboo thickets. When the parrots start hunting, they
+display the most wonderful intelligence, prudence, and capacity of
+coping with circumstances. Take, for instance, a band of white cacadoos
+in Australia. Before starting to plunder a corn-field, they first send
+out a reconnoitring party which occupies the highest trees in the
+vicinity of the field, while other scouts perch upon the intermediate
+trees between the field and the forest and transmit the signals. If the
+report runs "All right," a score of cacadoos will separate from the bulk
+of the band, take a flight in the air, and then fly towards the trees
+nearest to the field. They also will scrutinize the neighbourhood for a
+long while, and only then will they give the signal for general advance,
+after which the whole band starts at once and plunders the field in no
+time. The Australian settlers have the greatest difficulties in
+beguiling the prudence of the parrots; but if man, with all his art and
+weapons, has succeeded in killing some of them, the cacadoos become so
+prudent and watchful that they henceforward baffle all stratagems.(22)
+
+There can be no doubt that it is the practice of life in society which
+enables the parrots to attain that very high level of almost human
+intelligence and almost human feelings which we know in them. Their high
+intelligence has induced the best naturalists to describe some species,
+namely the grey parrot, as the "birdman." As to their mutual attachment
+it is known that when a parrot has been killed by a hunter, the others
+fly over the corpse of their comrade with shrieks of complaints and
+"themselves fall the victims of their friendship," as Audubon said; and
+when two captive parrots, though belonging to two different species,
+have contracted mutual friendship, the accidental death of one of the
+two friends has sometimes been followed by the death from grief and
+sorrow of the other friend. It is no less evident that in their
+societies they find infinitely more protection than they possibly might
+find in any ideal development of beak and claw. Very few birds of prey
+or mammals dare attack any but the smaller species of parrots, and Brehm
+is absolutely right in saying of the parrots, as he also says of the
+cranes and the sociable monkeys, that they hardly have any enemies
+besides men; and he adds: "It is most probable that the larger parrots
+succumb chiefly to old age rather than die from the claws of any
+enemies." Only man, owing to his still more superior intelligence and
+weapons, also derived from association, succeeds in partially destroying
+them. Their very longevity would thus appear as a result of their social
+life. Could we not say the same as regards their wonderful memory, which
+also must be favoured in its development by society--life and by
+longevity accompanied by a full enjoyment of bodily and mental faculties
+till a very old age?
+
+As seen from the above, the war of each against all is not the law of
+nature. Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle, and
+that law will become still more apparent when we have analyzed some
+other associations of birds and those of the mammalia. A few hints as to
+the importance of the law of mutual aid for the evolution of the animal
+kingdom have already been given in the preceding pages; but their
+purport will still better appear when, after having given a few more
+illustrations, we shall be enabled presently to draw therefrom our
+conclusions.
+
+NOTES:
+
+1. Origin of Species, chap. iii, p. 62 of first edition.
+
+2. Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1888, p. 165.
+
+3. Leaving aside the pre-Darwinian writers, like Toussenel, Fee, and
+many others, several works containing many striking instances of mutual
+aid--chiefly, however, illustrating animal intelligence were issued
+previously to that date. I may mention those of Houzeau, Les facultes
+etales des animaux, 2 vols., Brussels, 1872; L. Buchner's Aus dem
+Geistesleben der Thiere, 2nd ed. in 1877; and Maximilian Perty's Ueber
+das Seelenleben der Thiere, Leipzig, 1876. Espinas published his most
+remarkable work, Les Societes animales, in 1877, and in that work he
+pointed out the importance of animal societies, and their bearing upon
+the preservation of species, and entered upon a most valuable discussion
+of the origin of societies. In fact, Espinas's book contains all that
+has been written since upon mutual aid, and many good things besides. If
+I nevertheless make a special mention of Kessler's address, it is
+because he raised mutual aid to the height of a law much more important
+in evolution than the law of mutual struggle. The same ideas were
+developed next year (in April 1881) by J. Lanessan in a lecture
+published in 1882 under this title: La lutte pour l'existence et
+l'association pour la lutte. G. Romanes's capital work, Animal
+Intelligence, was issued in 1882, and followed next year by the Mental
+Evolution in Animals. About the same time (1883), Buchner published
+another work, Liebe und Liebes-Leben in der Thierwelt, a second edition
+of which was issued in 1885. The idea, as seen, was in the air.
+
+4. Memoirs (Trudy) of the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists, vol.
+xi. 1880.
+
+5. George J. Romanes's Animal Intelligence, 1st ed. p. 233.
+
+6. Pierre Huber's Les fourmis indigees, Geneve, 1861; Forel's Recherches
+sur les fourmis de la Suisse, Zurich, 1874, and J.T. Moggridge's
+Harvesting Ants and Trapdoor Spiders, London, 1873 and 1874, ought to be
+in the hands of every boy and girl. See also: Blanchard's Metamorphoses
+des Insectes, Paris, 1868; J.H. Fabre's Souvenirs entomologiques, Paris,
+1886; Ebrard's Etudes des moeurs des fourmis, Geneve, 1864; Sir John
+Lubbock's Ants, Bees, and Wasps, and so on.
+
+7. Forel's Recherches, pp. 244, 275, 278. Huber's description of the
+process is admirable. It also contains a hint as to the possible origin
+of the instinct (popular edition, pp. 158, 160). See Appendix II.
+
+8. The agriculture of the ants is so wonderful that for a long time it
+has been doubted. The fact is now so well proved by Mr. Moggridge, Dr.
+Lincecum, Mr. MacCook, Col. Sykes, and Dr. Jerdon, that no doubt is
+possible. See an excellent summary of evidence in Mr. Romanes's work.
+See also Die Pilzgaerten einiger Sud-Amerikanischen Ameisen, by Alf.
+Moeller, in Schimper's Botan. Mitth. aus den Tropen, vi. 1893.
+
+9. This second principle was not recognized at once. Former observers
+often spoke of kings, queens, managers, and so on; but since Huber and
+Forel have published their minute observations, no doubt is possible as
+to the free scope left for every individual's initiative in whatever the
+ants do, including their wars.
+
+10. H.W. Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons, ii. 59 seq.
+
+11. N. Syevertsoff, Periodical Phenomena in the Life of Mammalia, Birds,
+and Reptiles of Voroneje, Moscow, 1855 (in Russian).
+
+12. A. Brehm, Life of Animals, iii. 477; all quotations after the French
+edition.
+
+13. Bates, p. 151.
+
+14. Catalogue raisonne des oiseaux de la faune pontique, in Demidoff's
+Voyage; abstracts in Brehm, iii. 360. During their migrations birds of
+prey often associate. One flock, which H. Seebohm saw crossing the
+Pyrenees, represented a curious assemblage of "eight kites, one crane,
+and a peregrine falcon" (The Birds of Siberia, 1901, p. 417).
+
+15. Birds in the Northern Shires, p. 207.
+
+16. Max. Perty, Ueber das Seelenleben der Thiere (Leipzig, 1876), pp.
+87, 103.
+
+17. G. H. Gurney, The House-Sparrow (London, 1885), p. 5.
+
+18. Dr. Elliot Coues, Birds of the Kerguelen Island, in Smithsonian
+Miscellaneous Collections, vol. xiii. No. 2, p. 11.
+
+19. Brehm, iv. 567.
+
+20. As to the house-sparrows, a New Zealand observer, Mr. T.W. Kirk,
+described as follows the attack of these "impudent" birds upon an
+"unfortunate" hawk.--"He heard one day a most unusual noise, as though
+all the small birds of the country had joined in one grand quarrel.
+Looking up, he saw a large hawk (C. gouldi--a carrion feeder) being
+buffeted by a flock of sparrows. They kept dashing at him in scores, and
+from all points at once. The unfortunate hawk was quite powerless. At
+last, approaching some scrub, the hawk dashed into it and remained
+there, while the sparrows congregated in groups round the bush, keeping
+up a constant chattering and noise" (Paper read before the New Zealand
+Institute; Nature, Oct. 10, 1891).
+
+21. Brehm, iv. 671 seq.
+
+22. R. Lendenfeld, in Der zoologische Garten, 1889.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+MUTUAL AID AMONG ANIMALS (continued)
+
+Migrations of birds. Breeding associations. Autumn societies. Mammals:
+small number of unsociable species. Hunting associations of wolves,
+lions, etc. Societies of rodents; of ruminants; of monkeys. Mutual Aid
+in the struggle for life. Darwin's arguments to prove the struggle for
+life within the species. Natural checks to over-multiplication. Supposed
+extermination of intermediate links. Elimination of competition in
+Nature.
+
+
+As soon as spring comes back to the temperate zone, myriads and myriads
+of birds which are scattered over the warmer regions of the South come
+together in numberless bands, and, full of vigour and joy, hasten
+northwards to rear their offspring. Each of our hedges, each grove, each
+ocean cliff, and each of the lakes and ponds with which Northern
+America, Northern Europe, and Northern Asia are dotted tell us at that
+time of the year the tale of what mutual aid means for the birds; what
+force, energy, and protection it confers to every living being, however
+feeble and defenceless it otherwise might be. Take, for instance, one of
+the numberless lakes of the Russian and Siberian Steppes. Its shores are
+peopled with myriads of aquatic birds, belonging to at least a score of
+different species, all living in perfect peace--all protecting one
+another.
+
+"For several hundred yards from the shore the air is filled with gulls
+and terns, as with snow-flakes on a winter day. Thousands of plovers and
+sand-coursers run over the beach, searching their food, whistling, and
+simply enjoying life. Further on, on almost each wave, a duck is
+rocking, while higher up you notice the flocks of the Casarki ducks.
+Exuberant life swarms everywhere."(1)
+
+And here are the robbers--the strongest, the most cunning ones, those
+"ideally organized for robbery." And you hear their hungry, angry,
+dismal cries as for hours in succession they watch the opportunity of
+snatching from this mass of living beings one single unprotected
+individual. But as soon as they approach, their presence is signalled by
+dozens of voluntary sentries, and hundreds of gulls and terns set to
+chase the robber. Maddened by hunger, the robber soon abandons his usual
+precautions: he suddenly dashes into the living mass; but, attacked from
+all sides, he again is compelled to retreat. From sheer despair he falls
+upon the wild ducks; but the intelligent, social birds rapidly gather in
+a flock and fly away if the robber is an erne; they plunge into the lake
+if it is a falcon; or they raise a cloud of water-dust and bewilder the
+assailant if it is a kite.(2) And while life continues to swarm on the
+lake, the robber flies away with cries of anger, and looks out for
+carrion, or for a young bird or a field-mouse not yet used to obey in
+time the warnings of its comrades. In the face of an exuberant life, the
+ideally-armed robber must be satisfied with the off-fall of that life.
+
+Further north, in the Arctic archipelagoes,
+
+"you may sail along the coast for many miles and see all the ledges, all
+the cliffs and corners of the mountain-sides, up to a height of from two
+to five hundred feet, literally covered with sea-birds, whose white
+breasts show against the dark rocks as if the rocks were closely
+sprinkled with chalk specks. The air, near and far, is, so to say, full
+with fowls."(3)
+
+Each of such "bird-mountains" is a living illustration of mutual aid, as
+well as of the infinite variety of characters, individual and specific,
+resulting from social life. The oyster-catcher is renowned for its
+readiness to attack the birds of prey. The barge is known for its
+watchfulness, and it easily becomes the leader of more placid birds. The
+turnstone, when surrounded by comrades belonging to more energetic
+species, is a rather timorous bird; but it undertakes to keep watch for
+the security of the commonwealth when surrounded by smaller birds. Here
+you have the dominative swans; there, the extremely sociable
+kittiwake-gulls, among whom quarrels are rare and short; the
+prepossessing polar guillemots, which continually caress each other; the
+egoist she-goose, who has repudiated the orphans of a killed comrade;
+and, by her side, another female who adopts any one's orphans, and now
+paddles surrounded by fifty or sixty youngsters, whom she conducts and
+cares for as if they all were her own breed. Side by side with the
+penguins, which steal one another's eggs, you have the dotterels, whose
+family relations are so "charming and touching" that even passionate
+hunters recoil from shooting a female surrounded by her young ones; or
+the eider-ducks, among which (like the velvet-ducks, or the coroyas of
+the Savannahs) several females hatch together in the same nest, or the
+lums, which sit in turn upon a common covey. Nature is variety itself,
+offering all possible varieties of characters, from the basest to the
+highest: and that is why she cannot be depicted by any sweeping
+assertion. Still less can she be judged from the moralist's point of
+view, because the views of the moralist are themselves a result--mostly
+unconscious--of the observation of Nature.
+
+Coming together at nesting-time is so common with most birds that more
+examples are scarcely needed. Our trees are crowned with groups of
+crows' nests; our hedges are full of nests of smaller birds; our
+farmhouses give shelter to colonies of swallows; our old towers are the
+refuge of hundreds of nocturnal birds; and pages might be filled with
+the most charming descriptions of the peace and harmony which prevail in
+almost all these nesting associations. As to the protection derived by
+the weakest birds from their unions, it is evident. That excellent
+observer, Dr. Coues, saw, for instance, the little cliff-swallows
+nesting in the immediate neighbourhood of the prairie falcon (Falco
+polyargus). The falcon had its nest on the top of one of the minarets of
+clay which are so common in the canons of Colorado, while a colony of
+swallows nested just beneath. The little peaceful birds had no fear of
+their rapacious neighbour; they never let it approach to their colony.
+They immediately surrounded it and chased it, so that it had to make off
+at once.(4)
+
+Life in societies does not cease when the nesting period is over; it
+begins then in a new form. The young broods gather in societies of
+youngsters, generally including several species. Social life is
+practised at that time chiefly for its own sake--partly for security,
+but chiefly for the pleasures derived from it. So we see in our forests
+the societies formed by the young nuthatchers (Sitta caesia), together
+with tit-mouses, chaffinches, wrens, tree-creepers, or some
+wood-peckers.(5) In Spain the swallow is met with in company with
+kestrels, fly-catchers, and even pigeons. In the Far West of America the
+young horned larks live in large societies, together with another lark
+(Sprague's), the skylark, the Savannah sparrow, and several species of
+buntings and longspurs.(6) In fact, it would be much easier to describe
+the species which live isolated than to simply name those species which
+join the autumnal societies of young birds--not for hunting or nesting
+purposes, but simply to enjoy life in society and to spend their time in
+plays and sports, after having given a few hours every day to find their
+daily food.
+
+And, finally, we have that immense display of mutual aid among
+birds-their migrations--which I dare not even enter upon in this place.
+Sufficient to say that birds which have lived for months in small bands
+scattered over a wide territory gather in thousands; they come together
+at a given place, for several days in succession, before they start, and
+they evidently discuss the particulars of the journey. Some species will
+indulge every afternoon in flights preparatory to the long passage. All
+wait for their tardy congeners, and finally they start in a certain well
+chosen direction--a fruit of accumulated collective experience--the
+strongest flying at the head of the band, and relieving one another in
+that difficult task. They cross the seas in large bands consisting of
+both big and small birds, and when they return next spring they repair
+to the same spot, and, in most cases, each of them takes possession of
+the very same nest which it had built or repaired the previous year.(7)
+
+This subject is so vast, and yet so imperfectly studied; it offers so
+many striking illustrations of mutual-aid habits, subsidiary to the main
+fact of migration--each of which would, however, require a special
+study--that I must refrain from entering here into more details. I can
+only cursorily refer to the numerous and animated gatherings of birds
+which take place, always on the same spot, before they begin their long
+journeys north or south, as also those which one sees in the north,
+after the birds have arrived at their breeding-places on the Yenisei or
+in the northern counties of England. For many days in
+succession--sometimes one month--they will come together every morning
+for one hour, before flying in search of food--perhaps discussing the
+spot where they are going to build their nests.(8) And if, during the
+migration, their columns are overtaken by a storm, birds of the most
+different species will be brought together by common misfortune. The
+birds which are not exactly migratory, but slowly move northwards and
+southwards with the seasons, also perform these peregrinations in
+flocks. So far from migrating isolately, in order to secure for each
+separate individual the advantages of better food or shelter which are
+to be found in another district--they always wait for each other, and
+gather in flocks, before they move north or south, in accordance with
+the season.(9)
+
+Going now over to mammals, the first thing which strikes us is the
+overwhelming numerical predominance of social species over those few
+carnivores which do not associate. The plateaus, the Alpine tracts, and
+the Steppes of the Old and New World are stocked with herds of deer,
+antelopes, gazelles, fallow deer, buffaloes, wild goats and sheep, all
+of which are sociable animals. When the Europeans came to settle in
+America, they found it so densely peopled with buffaloes, that pioneers
+had to stop their advance when a column of migrating buffaloes came to
+cross the route they followed; the march past of the dense column
+lasting sometimes for two and three days. And when the Russians took
+possession of Siberia they found it so densely peopled with deer,
+antelopes, squirrels, and other sociable animals, that the very conquest
+of Siberia was nothing but a hunting expedition which lasted for two
+hundred years; while the grass plains of Eastern Africa are still
+covered with herds composed of zebra, the hartebeest, and other
+antelopes.
+
+Not long ago the small streams of Northern America and Northern Siberia
+were peopled with colonies of beavers, and up to the seventeenth century
+like colonies swarmed in Northern Russia. The flat lands of the four
+great continents are still covered with countless colonies of mice,
+ground-squirrels, marmots, and other rodents. In the lower latitudes of
+Asia and Africa the forests are still the abode of numerous families of
+elephants, rhinoceroses, and numberless societies of monkeys. In the far
+north the reindeer aggregate in numberless herds; while still further
+north we find the herds of the musk-oxen and numberless bands of polar
+foxes. The coasts of the ocean are enlivened by flocks of seals and
+morses; its waters, by shoals of sociable cetaceans; and even in the
+depths of the great plateau of Central Asia we find herds of wild
+horses, wild donkeys, wild camels, and wild sheep. All these mammals
+live in societies and nations sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands
+of individuals, although now, after three centuries of gunpowder
+civilization, we find but the debris of the immense aggregations of old.
+How trifling, in comparison with them, are the numbers of the
+carnivores! And how false, therefore, is the view of those who speak of
+the animal world as if nothing were to be seen in it but lions and
+hyenas plunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of their victims!
+One might as well imagine that the whole of human life is nothing but a
+succession of war massacres.
+
+Association and mutual aid are the rule with mammals. We find social
+habits even among the carnivores, and we can only name the cat tribe
+(lions, tigers, leopards, etc.) as a division the members of which
+decidedly prefer isolation to society, and are but seldom met with even
+in small groups. And yet, even among lions "this is a very common
+practice to hunt in company."(10) The two tribes of the civets
+(Viverridae) and the weasels (Mustelidae) might also be characterized by
+their isolated life, but it is a fact that during the last century the
+common weasel was more sociable than it is now; it was seen then in
+larger groups in Scotland and in the Unterwalden canton of Switzerland.
+As to the great tribe of the dogs, it is eminently sociable, and
+association for hunting purposes may be considered as eminently
+characteristic of its numerous species. It is well known, in fact, that
+wolves gather in packs for hunting, and Tschudi left an excellent
+description of how they draw up in a half-circle, surround a cow which
+is grazing on a mountain slope, and then, suddenly appearing with a loud
+barking, make it roll in the abyss.(11) Audubon, in the thirties, also
+saw the Labrador wolves hunting in packs, and one pack following a man
+to his cabin, and killing the dogs. During severe winters the packs of
+wolves grow so numerous as to become a danger for human settlements, as
+was the case in France some five-and-forty years ago. In the Russian
+Steppes they never attack the horses otherwise than in packs; and yet
+they have to sustain bitter fights, during which the horses (according
+to Kohl's testimony) sometimes assume offensive warfare, and in such
+cases, if the wolves do not retreat promptly, they run the risk of being
+surrounded by the horses and killed by their hoofs. The prairie-wolves
+(Canis latrans) are known to associate in bands of from twenty to thirty
+individuals when they chase a buffalo occasionally separated from its
+herd.(12) Jackals, which are most courageous and may be considered as
+one of the most intelligent representatives of the dog tribe, always
+hunt in packs; thus united, they have no fear of the bigger
+carnivores.(13) As to the wild dogs of Asia (the Kholzuns, or Dholes),
+Williamson saw their large packs attacking all larger animals save
+elephants and rhinoceroses, and overpowering bears and tigers. Hyenas
+always live in societies and hunt in packs, and the hunting
+organizations of the painted lycaons are highly praised by Cumming. Nay,
+even foxes, which, as a rule, live isolated in our civilized countries,
+have been seen combining for hunting purposes.(14) As to the polar fox,
+it is--or rather was in Steller's time--one of the most sociable
+animals; and when one reads Steller's description of the war that was
+waged by Behring's unfortunate crew against these intelligent small
+animals, one does not know what to wonder at most: the extraordinary
+intelligence of the foxes and the mutual aid they displayed in digging
+out food concealed under cairns, or stored upon a pillar (one fox would
+climb on its top and throw the food to its comrades beneath), or the
+cruelty of man, driven to despair by the numerous packs of foxes. Even
+some bears live in societies where they are not disturbed by man. Thus
+Steller saw the black bear of Kamtchatka in numerous packs, and the
+polar bears are occasionally found in small groups. Even the
+unintelligent insectivores do not always disdain association.
+
+However, it is especially with the rodents, the ungulata, and the
+ruminants that we find a highly developed practice of mutual aid. The
+squirrels are individualist to a great extent. Each of them builds its
+own comfortable nest, and accumulates its own provision. Their
+inclinations are towards family life, and Brehm found that a family of
+squirrels is never so happy as when the two broods of the same year can
+join together with their parents in a remote corner of a forest. And yet
+they maintain social relations. The inhabitants of the separate nests
+remain in a close intercourse, and when the pine-cones become rare in
+the forest they inhabit, they emigrate in bands. As to the black
+squirrels of the Far West, they are eminently sociable. Apart from the
+few hours given every day to foraging, they spend their lives in playing
+in numerous parties. And when they multiply too rapidly in a region,
+they assemble in bands, almost as numerous as those of locusts, and move
+southwards, devastating the forests, the fields, and the gardens; while
+foxes, polecats, falcons, and nocturnal birds of prey follow their thick
+columns and live upon the individuals remaining behind. The
+ground-squirrel--a closely-akin genus--is still more sociable. It is
+given to hoarding, and stores up in its subterranean halls large amounts
+of edible roots and nuts, usually plundered by man in the autumn.
+According to some observers, it must know something of the joys of a
+miser. And yet it remains sociable. It always lives in large villages,
+and Audubon, who opened some dwellings of the hackee in the winter,
+found several individuals in the same apartment; they must have stored
+it with common efforts.
+
+The large tribe, of the marmots, which includes the three large genuses
+of Arctomys, Cynomys, and Spermophilus, is still more sociable and still
+more intelligent. They also prefer having each one its own dwelling; but
+they live in big villages. That terrible enemy of the crops of South
+Russia--the souslik--of which some ten millions are exterminated every
+year by man alone, lives in numberless colonies; and while the Russian
+provincial assemblies gravely discuss the means of getting rid of this
+enemy of society, it enjoys life in its thousands in the most joyful
+way. Their play is so charming that no observer could refrain from
+paying them a tribute of praise, and from mentioning the melodious
+concerts arising from the sharp whistlings of the males and the
+melancholic whistlings of the females, before--suddenly returning to his
+citizen's duties--he begins inventing the most diabolic means for the
+extermination of the little robbers. All kinds of rapacious birds and
+beasts of prey having proved powerless, the last word of science in this
+warfare is the inoculation of cholera! The villages of the prairie-dogs
+in America are one of the loveliest sights. As far as the eye can
+embrace the prairie, it sees heaps of earth, and on each of them a
+prairie-dog stands, engaged in a lively conversation with its neighbours
+by means of short barkings. As soon as the approach of man is signalled,
+all plunge in a moment into their dwellings; all have disappeared as by
+enchantment. But if the danger is over, the little creatures soon
+reappear. Whole families come out of their galleries and indulge in
+play. The young ones scratch one another, they worry one another, and
+display their gracefulness while standing upright, and in the meantime
+the old ones keep watch. They go visiting one another, and the beaten
+footpaths which connect all their heaps testify to the frequency of the
+visitations. In short, the best naturalists have written some of their
+best pages in describing the associations of the prairie-dogs of
+America, the marmots of the Old World, and the polar marmots of the
+Alpine regions. And yet, I must make, as regards the marmots, the same
+remark as I have made when speaking of the bees. They have maintained
+their fighting instincts, and these instincts reappear in captivity. But
+in their big associations, in the face of free Nature, the unsociable
+instincts have no opportunity to develop, and the general result is
+peace and harmony.
+
+Even such harsh animals as the rats, which continually fight in our
+cellars, are sufficiently intelligent not to quarrel when they plunder
+our larders, but to aid one another in their plundering expeditions and
+migrations, and even to feed their invalids. As to the beaver-rats or
+musk-rats of Canada, they are extremely sociable. Audubon could not but
+admire "their peaceful communities, which require only being left in
+peace to enjoy happiness." Like all sociable animals, they are lively
+and playful, they easily combine with other species, and they have
+attained a very high degree of intellectual development. In their
+villages, always disposed on the shores of lakes and rivers, they take
+into account the changing level of water; their domeshaped houses, which
+are built of beaten clay interwoven with reeds, have separate corners
+for organic refuse, and their halls are well carpeted at winter time;
+they are warm, and, nevertheless, well ventilated. As to the beavers,
+which are endowed, as known, with a most sympathetic character, their
+astounding dams and villages, in which generations live and die without
+knowing of any enemies but the otter and man, so wonderfully illustrate
+what mutual aid can achieve for the security of the species, the
+development of social habits, and the evolution of intelligence, that
+they are familiar to all interested in animal life. Let me only remark
+that with the beavers, the muskrats, and some other rodents, we already
+find the feature which will also be distinctive of human
+communities--that is, work in common.
+
+I pass in silence the two large families which include the jerboa, the
+chinchilla, the biscacha, and the tushkan, or underground hare of South
+Russia, though all these small rodents might be taken as excellent
+illustrations of the pleasures derived by animals from social life.(15)
+Precisely, the pleasures; because it is extremely difficult to say what
+brings animals together--the needs of mutual protection, or simply the
+pleasure of feeling surrounded by their congeners. At any rate, our
+common hares, which do not gather in societies for life in common, and
+which are not even endowed with intense parental feelings, cannot live
+without coming together for play. Dietrich de Winckell, who is
+considered to be among the best acquainted with the habits of hares,
+describes them as passionate players, becoming so intoxicated by their
+play that a hare has been known to take an approaching fox for a
+playmate.(16) As to the rabbit, it lives in societies, and its family
+life is entirely built upon the image of the old patriarchal family; the
+young ones being kept in absolute obedience to the father and even the
+grandfather.(17) And here we have the example of two very closely-allied
+species which cannot bear each other--not because they live upon nearly
+the same food, as like cases are too often explained, but most probably
+because the passionate, eminently-individualist hare cannot make friends
+with that placid, quiet, and submissive creature, the rabbit. Their
+tempers are too widely different not to be an obstacle to friendship.
+
+Life in societies is again the rule with the large family of horses,
+which includes the wild horses and donkeys of Asia, the zebras, the
+mustangs, the cimarrones of the Pampas, and the half-wild horses of
+Mongolia and Siberia. They all live in numerous associations made up of
+many studs, each of which consists of a number of mares under the
+leadership of a male. These numberless inhabitants of the Old and the
+New World, badly organized on the whole for resisting both their
+numerous enemies and the adverse conditions of climate, would soon have
+disappeared from the surface of the earth were it not for their sociable
+spirit. When a beast of prey approaches them, several studs unite at
+once; they repulse the beast and sometimes chase it: and neither the
+wolf nor the bear, not even the lion, can capture a horse or even a
+zebra as long as they are not detached from the herd. When a drought is
+burning the grass in the prairies, they gather in herds of sometimes
+10,000 individuals strong, and migrate. And when a snow-storm rages in
+the Steppes, each stud keeps close together, and repairs to a protected
+ravine. But if confidence disappears, or the group has been seized by
+panic, and disperses, the horses perish and the survivors are found
+after the storm half dying from fatigue. Union is their chief arm in the
+struggle for life, and man is their chief enemy. Before his increasing
+numbers the ancestors of our domestic horse (the Equus Przewalskii, so
+named by Polyakoff) have preferred to retire to the wildest and least
+accessible plateaus on the outskirts of Thibet, where they continue to
+live, surrounded by carnivores, under a climate as bad as that of the
+Arctic regions, but in a region inaccessible to man.(18)
+
+Many striking illustrations of social life could be taken from the life
+of the reindeer, and especially of that large division of ruminants
+which might include the roebucks, the fallow deer, the antelopes, the
+gazelles, the ibex, and, in fact, the whole of the three numerous
+families of the Antelopides, the Caprides, and the Ovides. Their
+watchfulness over the safety of their herds against attacks of
+carnivores; the anxiety displayed by all individuals in a herd of
+chamois as long as all of them have not cleared a difficult passage over
+rocky cliffs, the adoption of orphans; the despair of the gazelle whose
+mate, or even comrade of the same sex, has been killed; the plays of the
+youngsters, and many other features, could be mentioned. But perhaps the
+most striking illustration of mutual support is given by the occasional
+migrations of fallow deer, such as I saw once on the Amur. When I
+crossed the high plateau and its border ridge, the Great Khingan, on my
+way from Transbaikalia to Merghen, and further travelled over the high
+prairies on my way to the Amur, I could ascertain how thinly-peopled
+with fallow deer these mostly uninhabited regions are.(19) Two years
+later I was travelling up the Amur, and by the end of October reached
+the lower end of that picturesque gorge which the Amur pierces in the
+Dousse-alin (Little Khingan) before it enters the lowlands where it
+joins the Sungari. I found the Cossacks in the villages of that gorge in
+the greatest excitement, because thousands and thousands of fallow deer
+were crossing the Amur where it is narrowest, in order to reach the
+lowlands. For several days in succession, upon a length of some forty
+miles up the river, the Cossacks were butchering the deer as they
+crossed the Amur, in which already floated a good deal of ice. Thousands
+were killed every day, and the exodus nevertheless continued. Like
+migrations were never seen either before or since, and this one must
+have been called for by an early and heavy snow-fall in the Great
+Khingan, which compelled the deer to make a desperate attempt at
+reaching the lowlands in the east of the Dousse mountains. Indeed, a few
+days later the Dousse-alin was also buried under snow two or three feet
+deep. Now, when one imagines the immense territory (almost as big as
+Great Britain) from which the scattered groups of deer must have
+gathered for a migration which was undertaken under the pressure of
+exceptional circumstances, and realizes the difficulties which had to be
+overcome before all the deer came to the common idea of crossing the
+Amur further south, where it is narrowest, one cannot but deeply admire
+the amount of sociability displayed by these intelligent animals. The
+fact is not the less striking if we remember that the buffaloes of North
+America displayed the same powers of combination. One saw them grazing
+in great numbers in the plains, but these numbers were made up by an
+infinity of small groups which never mixed together. And yet, when
+necessity arose, all groups, however scattered over an immense
+territory, came together and made up those immense columns, numbering
+hundreds of thousands of individuals, which I mentioned on a preceding
+page.
+
+I also ought to say a few words at least about the "compound families"
+of the elephants, their mutual attachment, their deliberate ways in
+posting sentries, and the feelings of sympathy developed by such a life
+of close mutual support.(20) I might mention the sociable feelings of
+those disreputable creatures the wild boars, and find a word of praise
+for their powers of association in the case of an attack by a beast of
+prey.(21) The hippopotamus and the rhinoceros, too, would occupy a place
+in a work devoted to animal sociability. Several striking pages might be
+given to the sociability and mutual attachment of the seals and the
+walruses; and finally, one might mention the most excellent feelings
+existing among the sociable cetaceans. But I have to say yet a few words
+about the societies of monkeys, which acquire an additional interest
+from their being the link which will bring us to the societies of
+primitive men.
+
+It is hardly needful to say that those mammals, which stand at the very
+top of the animal world and most approach man by their structure and
+intelligence, are eminently sociable. Evidently we must be prepared to
+meet with all varieties of character and habits in so great a division
+of the animal kingdom which includes hundreds of species. But, all
+things considered, it must be said that sociability, action in common,
+mutual protection, and a high development of those feelings which are
+the necessary outcome of social life, are characteristic of most monkeys
+and apes. From the smallest species to the biggest ones, sociability is
+a rule to which we know but a few exceptions. The nocturnal apes prefer
+isolated life; the capuchins (Cebus capucinus), the monos, and the
+howling monkeys live but in small families; and the orang-outans have
+never been seen by A.R. Wallace otherwise than either solitary or in
+very small groups of three or four individuals, while the gorillas seem
+never to join in bands. But all the remainder of the monkey tribe--the
+chimpanzees, the sajous, the sakis, the mandrills, the baboons, and so
+on--are sociable in the highest degree. They live in great bands, and
+even join with other species than their own. Most of them become quite
+unhappy when solitary. The cries of distress of each one of the band
+immediately bring together the whole of the band, and they boldly
+repulse the attacks of most carnivores and birds of prey. Even eagles do
+not dare attack them. They plunder our fields always in bands--the old
+ones taking care for the safety of the commonwealth. The little
+tee-tees, whose childish sweet faces so much struck Humboldt, embrace
+and protect one another when it rains, rolling their tails over the
+necks of their shivering comrades. Several species display the greatest
+solicitude for their wounded, and do not abandon a wounded comrade
+during a retreat till they have ascertained that it is dead and that
+they are helpless to restore it to life. Thus James Forbes narrated in
+his Oriental Memoirs a fact of such resistance in reclaiming from his
+hunting party the dead body of a female monkey that one fully
+understands why "the witnesses of this extraordinary scene resolved
+never again to fire at one of the monkey race."(22) In some species
+several individuals will combine to overturn a stone in order to search
+for ants' eggs under it. The hamadryas not only post sentries, but have
+been seen making a chain for the transmission of the spoil to a safe
+place; and their courage is well known. Brehm's description of the
+regular fight which his caravan had to sustain before the hamadryas
+would let it resume its journey in the valley of the Mensa, in
+Abyssinia, has become classical.(23) The playfulness of the tailed apes
+and the mutual attachment which reigns in the families of chimpanzees
+also are familiar to the general reader. And if we find among the
+highest apes two species, the orang-outan and the gorilla, which are not
+sociable, we must remember that both--limited as they are to very small
+areas, the one in the heart of Africa, and the other in the two islands
+of Borneo and Sumatra have all the appearance of being the last remnants
+of formerly much more numerous species. The gorilla at least seems to
+have been sociable in olden times, if the apes mentioned in the Periplus
+really were gorillas.
+
+
+We thus see, even from the above brief review, that life in societies is
+no exception in the animal world; it is the rule, the law of Nature, and
+it reaches its fullest development with the higher vertebrates. Those
+species which live solitary, or in small families only, are relatively
+few, and their numbers are limited. Nay, it appears very probable that,
+apart from a few exceptions, those birds and mammals which are not
+gregarious now, were living in societies before man multiplied on the
+earth and waged a permanent war against them, or destroyed the sources
+from which they formerly derived food. "On ne s'associe pas pour
+mourir," was the sound remark of Espinas; and Houzeau, who knew the
+animal world of some parts of America when it was not yet affected by
+man, wrote to the same effect.
+
+Association is found in the animal world at all degrees of evolution;
+and, according to the grand idea of Herbert Spencer, so brilliantly
+developed in Perrier's Colonies Animales, colonies are at the very
+origin of evolution in the animal kingdom. But, in proportion as we
+ascend the scale of evolution, we see association growing more and more
+conscious. It loses its purely physical character, it ceases to be
+simply instinctive, it becomes reasoned. With the higher vertebrates it
+is periodical, or is resorted to for the satisfaction of a given
+want--propagation of the species, migration, hunting, or mutual defence.
+It even becomes occasional, when birds associate against a robber, or
+mammals combine, under the pressure of exceptional circumstances, to
+emigrate. In this last case, it becomes a voluntary deviation from
+habitual moods of life. The combination sometimes appears in two or more
+degrees--the family first, then the group, and finally the association
+of groups, habitually scattered, but uniting in case of need, as we saw
+it with the bisons and other ruminants. It also takes higher forms,
+guaranteeing more independence to the individual without depriving it of
+the benefits of social life. With most rodents the individual has its
+own dwelling, which it can retire to when it prefers being left alone;
+but the dwellings are laid out in villages and cities, so as to
+guarantee to all inhabitants the benefits and joys of social life. And
+finally, in several species, such as rats, marmots, hares, etc.,
+sociable life is maintained notwithstanding the quarrelsome or otherwise
+egotistic inclinations of the isolated individual. Thus it is not
+imposed, as is the case with ants and bees, by the very physiological
+structure of the individuals; it is cultivated for the benefits of
+mutual aid, or for the sake of its pleasures. And this, of course,
+appears with all possible gradations and with the greatest variety of
+individual and specific characters--the very variety of aspects taken by
+social life being a consequence, and for us a further proof, of its
+generality.(24)
+
+Sociability--that is, the need of the animal of associating with its
+like--the love of society for society's sake, combined with the "joy of
+life," only now begins to receive due attention from the zoologists.(25)
+We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants,
+going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of
+plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each
+other, teasing each other, and so on. And while many plays are, so to
+speak, a school for the proper behaviour of the young in mature life,
+there are others, which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are,
+together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of
+forces--"the joy of life," and a desire to communicate in some way or
+another with other individuals of the same or of other species--in
+short, a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive
+feature of all the animal world.(26) Whether the feeling be fear,
+experienced at the appearance of a bird of prey, or "a fit of gladness"
+which bursts out when the animals are in good health and especially when
+young, or merely the desire of giving play to an excess of impressions
+and of vital power--the necessity of communicating impressions, of
+playing, of chattering, or of simply feeling the proximity of other
+kindred living beings pervades Nature, and is, as much as any other
+physiological function, a distinctive feature of life and
+impressionability. This need takes a higher development and attains a
+more beautiful expression in mammals, especially amidst their young, and
+still more among the birds; but it pervades all Nature, and has been
+fully observed by the best naturalists, including Pierre Huber, even
+amongst the ants, and it is evidently the same instinct which brings
+together the big columns of butterflies which have been referred to
+already.
+
+The habit of coming together for dancing and of decorating the places
+where the birds habitually perform their dances is, of course, well
+known from the pages that Darwin gave to this subject in The Descent of
+Man (ch. xiii). Visitors of the London Zoological Gardens also know the
+bower of the satin bower-bird. But this habit of dancing seems to be
+much more widely spread than was formerly believed, and Mr. W. Hudson
+gives in his master-work on La Plata the most interesting description,
+which must be read in the original, of complicated dances, performed by
+quite a number of birds: rails, jacanas, lapwings, and so on.
+
+The habit of singing in concert, which exists in several species of
+birds, belongs to the same category of social instincts. It is most
+strikingly developed with the chakar (Chauna chavarris), to which the
+English have given the most unimaginative misnomer of "crested
+screamer." These birds sometimes assemble in immense flocks, and in such
+cases they frequently sing all in concert. W.H. Hudson found them once
+in countless numbers, ranged all round a pampas lake in well-defined
+flocks, of about 500 birds in each flock.
+
+"Presently," he writes, "one flock near me began singing, and continued
+their powerful chant for three or four minutes; when they ceased the
+next flock took up the strains, and after it the next, and so on, until
+once more the notes of the flocks on the opposite shore came floating
+strong and clear across the water--then passed away, growing fainter and
+fainter, until once more the sound approached me travelling round to my
+side again."
+
+On another occasion the same writer saw a whole plain covered with an
+endless flock of chakars, not in close order, but scattered in pairs and
+small groups. About nine o'clock in the evening, "suddenly the entire
+multitude of birds covering the marsh for miles around burst forth in a
+tremendous evening song.... It was a concert well worth riding a hundred
+miles to hear."(27) It may be added that like all sociable animals, the
+chakar easily becomes tame and grows very attached to man. "They are
+mild-tempered birds, and very rarely quarrel"--we are told--although
+they are well provided with formidable weapons. Life in societies
+renders these weapons useless.
+
+That life in societies is the most powerful weapon in the struggle for
+life, taken in its widest sense, has been illustrated by several
+examples on the foregoing pages, and could be illustrated by any amount
+of evidence, if further evidence were required. Life in societies
+enables the feeblest insects, the feeblest birds, and the feeblest
+mammals to resist, or to protect themselves from, the most terrible
+birds and beasts of prey; it permits longevity; it enables the species
+to rear its progeny with the least waste of energy and to maintain its
+numbers albeit a very slow birth-rate; it enables the gregarious animals
+to migrate in search of new abodes. Therefore, while fully admitting
+that force, swiftness, protective colours, cunningness, and endurance to
+hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many
+qualities making the individual, or the species, the fittest under
+certain circumstances, we maintain that under any circumstances
+sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those
+species which willingly or unwillingly abandon it are doomed to decay;
+while those animals which know best how to combine, have the greatest
+chances of survival and of further evolution, although they may be
+inferior to others in each of the faculties enumerated by Darwin and
+Wallace, save the intellectual faculty. The highest vertebrates, and
+especially mankind, are the best proof of this assertion. As to the
+intellectual faculty, while every Darwinist will agree with Darwin that
+it is the most powerful arm in the struggle for life, and the most
+powerful factor of further evolution, he also will admit that
+intelligence is an eminently social faculty. Language, imitation, and
+accumulated experience are so many elements of growing intelligence of
+which the unsociable animal is deprived. Therefore we find, at the top
+of each class of animals, the ants, the parrots, and the monkeys, all
+combining the greatest sociability with the highest development of
+intelligence. The fittest are thus the most sociable animals, and
+sociability appears as the chief factor of evolution, both directly, by
+securing the well-being of the species while diminishing the waste of
+energy, and indirectly, by favouring the growth of intelligence.
+
+Moreover, it is evident that life in societies would be utterly
+impossible without a corresponding development of social feelings, and,
+especially, of a certain collective sense of justice growing to become a
+habit. If every individual were constantly abusing its personal
+advantages without the others interfering in favour of the wronged, no
+society--life would be possible. And feelings of justice develop, more
+or less, with all gregarious animals. Whatever the distance from which
+the swallows or the cranes come, each one returns to the nest it has
+built or repaired last year. If a lazy sparrow intends appropriating the
+nest which a comrade is building, or even steals from it a few sprays of
+straw, the group interferes against the lazy comrade; and it is evident
+that without such interference being the rule, no nesting associations
+of birds could exist. Separate groups of penguins have separate
+resting-places and separate fishing abodes, and do not fight for them.
+The droves of cattle in Australia have particular spots to which each
+group repairs to rest, and from which it never deviates; and so on.(28)
+We have any numbers of direct observations of the peace that prevails in
+the nesting associations of birds, the villages of the rodents, and the
+herds of grass-eaters; while, on the other side, we know of few sociable
+animals which so continually quarrel as the rats in our cellars do, or
+as the morses, which fight for the possession of a sunny place on the
+shore. Sociability thus puts a limit to physical struggle, and leaves
+room for the development of better moral feelings. The high development
+of parental love in all classes of animals, even with lions and tigers,
+is generally known. As to the young birds and mammals whom we
+continually see associating, sympathy--not love--attains a further
+development in their associations. Leaving aside the really touching
+facts of mutual attachment and compassion which have been recorded as
+regards domesticated animals and with animals kept in captivity, we have
+a number of well certified facts of compassion between wild animals at
+liberty. Max Perty and L. Buchner have given a number of such facts.(29)
+J.C. Wood's narrative of a weasel which came to pick up and to carry
+away an injured comrade enjoys a well-merited popularity.(30) So also
+the observation of Captain Stansbury on his journey to Utah which is
+quoted by Darwin; he saw a blind pelican which was fed, and well fed, by
+other pelicans upon fishes which had to be brought from a distance of
+thirty miles.(31) And when a herd of vicunas was hotly pursued by
+hunters, H.A. Weddell saw more than once during his journey to Bolivia
+and Peru, the strong males covering the retreat of the herd and lagging
+behind in order to protect the retreat. As to facts of compassion with
+wounded comrades, they are continually mentioned by all field
+zoologists. Such facts are quite natural. Compassion is a necessary
+outcome of social life. But compassion also means a considerable advance
+in general intelligence and sensibility. It is the first step towards
+the development of higher moral sentiments. It is, in its turn, a
+powerful factor of further evolution.
+
+If the views developed on the preceding pages are correct, the question
+necessarily arises, in how far are they consistent with the theory of
+struggle for life as it has been developed by Darwin, Wallace, and their
+followers? and I will now briefly answer this important question. First
+of all, no naturalist will doubt that the idea of a struggle for life
+carried on through organic nature is the greatest generalization of our
+century. Life is struggle; and in that struggle the fittest survive. But
+the answers to the questions, "By which arms is this struggle chiefly
+carried on?" and "Who are the fittest in the struggle?" will widely
+differ according to the importance given to the two different aspects of
+the struggle: the direct one, for food and safety among separate
+individuals, and the struggle which Darwin described as
+"metaphorical"--the struggle, very often collective, against adverse
+circumstances. No one will deny that there is, within each species, a
+certain amount of real competition for food--at least, at certain
+periods. But the question is, whether competition is carried on to the
+extent admitted by Darwin, or even by Wallace; and whether this
+competition has played, in the evolution of the animal kingdom, the part
+assigned to it.
+
+The idea which permeates Darwin's work is certainly one of real
+competition going on within each animal group for food, safety, and
+possibility of leaving an offspring. He often speaks of regions being
+stocked with animal life to their full capacity, and from that
+overstocking he infers the necessity of competition. But when we look in
+his work for real proofs of that competition, we must confess that we do
+not find them sufficiently convincing. If we refer to the paragraph
+entitled "Struggle for Life most severe between Individuals and
+Varieties of the same Species," we find in it none of that wealth of
+proofs and illustrations which we are accustomed to find in whatever
+Darwin wrote. The struggle between individuals of the same species is
+not illustrated under that heading by even one single instance: it is
+taken as granted; and the competition between closely-allied animal
+species is illustrated by but five examples, out of which one, at least
+(relating to the two species of thrushes), now proves to be
+doubtful.(32) But when we look for more details in order to ascertain
+how far the decrease of one species was really occasioned by the
+increase of the other species, Darwin, with his usual fairness, tells
+us:
+
+"We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between
+allied forms which fill nearly the same place in nature; but probably in
+no case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over
+another in the great battle of life."
+
+As to Wallace, who quotes the same facts under a slightly-modified
+heading ("Struggle for Life between closely-allied Animals and Plants
+often most severe"), he makes the following remark (italics are mine),
+which gives quite another aspect to the facts above quoted. He says:
+
+"In some cases, no doubt, there is actual war between the two, the
+stronger killing the weaker. But this is by no means necessary, and
+there may be cases in which the weaker species, physically, may prevail
+by its power of more rapid multiplication, its better withstanding
+vicissitudes of climate, or its greater cunning in escaping the attacks
+of common enemies."
+
+In such cases what is described as competition may be no competition at
+all. One species succumbs, not because it is exterminated or starved out
+by the other species, but because it does not well accommodate itself to
+new conditions, which the other does. The term "struggle for life" is
+again used in its metaphorical sense, and may have no other. As to the
+real competition between individuals of the same species, which is
+illustrated in another place by the cattle of South America during a
+period of drought, its value is impaired by its being taken from among
+domesticated animals. Bisons emigrate in like circumstances in order to
+avoid competition. However severe the struggle between plants--and this
+is amply proved--we cannot but repeat Wallace's remark to the effect
+that "plants live where they can," while animals have, to a great
+extent, the power of choice of their abode. So that we again are asking
+ourselves, To what extent does competition really exist within each
+animal species? Upon what is the assumption based? The same remark must
+be made concerning the indirect argument in favour of a severe
+competition and struggle for life within each species, which may be
+derived from the "extermination of transitional varieties," so often
+mentioned by Darwin. It is known that for a long time Darwin was worried
+by the difficulty which he saw in the absence of a long chain of
+intermediate forms between closely-allied species, and that he found the
+solution of this difficulty in the supposed extermination of the
+intermediate forms.(33) However, an attentive reading of the different
+chapters in which Darwin and Wallace speak of this subject soon brings
+one to the conclusion that the word "extermination" does not mean real
+extermination; the same remark which Darwin made concerning his
+expression: "struggle for existence," evidently applies to the word
+"extermination" as well. It can by no means be understood in its direct
+sense, but must be taken "in its metaphoric sense." If we start from the
+supposition that a given area is stocked with animals to its fullest
+capacity, and that a keen competition for the sheer means of existence
+is consequently going on between all the inhabitants--each animal being
+compelled to fight against all its congeners in order to get its daily
+food--then the appearance of a new and successful variety would
+certainly mean in many cases (though not always) the appearance of
+individuals which are enabled to seize more than their fair share of the
+means of existence; and the result would be that those individuals would
+starve both the parental form which does not possess the new variation
+and the intermediate forms which do not possess it in the same degree.
+It may be that at the outset, Darwin understood the appearance of new
+varieties under this aspect; at least, the frequent use of the word
+"extermination" conveys such an impression. But both he and Wallace knew
+Nature too well not to perceive that this is by no means the only
+possible and necessary course of affairs.
+
+If the physical and the biological conditions of a given area, the
+extension of the area occupied by a given species, and the habits of all
+the members of the latter remained unchanged--then the sudden appearance
+of a new variety might mean the starving out and the extermination of
+all the individuals which were not endowed in a sufficient degree with
+the new feature by which the new variety is characterized. But such a
+combination of conditions is precisely what we do not see in Nature.
+Each species is continually tending to enlarge its abode; migration to
+new abodes is the rule with the slow snail, as with the swift bird;
+physical changes are continually going on in every given area; and new
+varieties among animals consist in an immense number of cases-perhaps in
+the majority--not in the growth of new weapons for snatching the food
+from the mouth of its congeners--food is only one out of a hundred of
+various conditions of existence--but, as Wallace himself shows in a
+charming paragraph on the "divergence of characters" (Darwinism, p.
+107), in forming new habits, moving to new abodes, and taking to new
+sorts of food. In all such cases there will be no extermination, even no
+competition--the new adaptation being a relief from competition, if it
+ever existed; and yet there will be, after a time, an absence of
+intermediate links, in consequence of a mere survival of those which are
+best fitted for the new conditions--as surely as under the hypothesis of
+extermination of the parental form. It hardly need be added that if we
+admit, with Spencer, all the Lamarckians, and Darwin himself, the
+modifying influence of the surroundings upon the species, there remains
+still less necessity for the extermination of the intermediate forms.
+
+The importance of migration and of the consequent isolation of groups of
+animals, for the origin of new varieties and ultimately of new species,
+which was indicated by Moritz Wagner, was fully recognized by Darwin
+himself. Consequent researches have only accentuated the importance of
+this factor, and they have shown how the largeness of the area occupied
+by a given species--which Darwin considered with full reason so
+important for the appearance of new varieties--can be combined with the
+isolation of parts of the species, in consequence of local geological
+changes, or of local barriers. It would be impossible to enter here into
+the discussion of this wide question, but a few remarks will do to
+illustrate the combined action of these agencies. It is known that
+portions of a given species will often take to a new sort of food. The
+squirrels, for instance, when there is a scarcity of cones in the larch
+forests, remove to the fir-tree forests, and this change of food has
+certain well-known physiological effects on the squirrels. If this
+change of habits does not last--if next year the cones are again
+plentiful in the dark larch woods--no new variety of squirrels will
+evidently arise from this cause. But if part of the wide area occupied
+by the squirrels begins to have its physical characters altered--in
+consequence of, let us say, a milder climate or desiccation, which both
+bring about an increase of the pine forests in proportion to the larch
+woods--and if some other conditions concur to induce the squirrels to
+dwell on the outskirts of the desiccating region--we shall have then a
+new variety, i.e. an incipient new species of squirrels, without there
+having been anything that would deserve the name of extermination among
+the squirrels. A larger proportion of squirrels of the new, better
+adapted variety would survive every year, and the intermediate links
+would die in the course of time, without having been starved out by
+Malthusian competitors. This is exactly what we see going on during the
+great physical changes which are accomplished over large areas in
+Central Asia, owing to the desiccation which is going on there since the
+glacial period.
+
+To take another example, it has been proved by geologists that the
+present wild horse (Equus Przewalski) has slowly been evolved during the
+later parts of the Tertiary and the Quaternary period, but that during
+this succession of ages its ancestors were not confined to some given,
+limited area of the globe. They wandered over both the Old and New
+World, returning, in all probability, after a time to the pastures which
+they had, in the course of their migrations, formerly left.(34)
+Consequently, if we do not find now, in Asia, all the intermediate links
+between the present wild horse and its Asiatic Post-Tertiary ancestors,
+this does not mean at all that the intermediate links have been
+exterminated. No such extermination has ever taken place. No exceptional
+mortality may even have occurred among the ancestral species: the
+individuals which belonged to intermediate varieties and species have
+died in the usual course of events--often amidst plentiful food, and
+their remains were buried all over the globe.
+
+In short, if we carefully consider this matter, and, carefully re-read
+what Darwin himself wrote upon this subject, we see that if the word
+"extermination" be used at all in connection with transitional
+varieties, it must be used in its metaphoric sense. As to "competition,"
+this expression, too, is continually used by Darwin (see, for instance,
+the paragraph "On Extinction") as an image, or as a way-of-speaking,
+rather than with the intention of conveying the idea of a real
+competition between two portions of the same species for the means of
+existence. At any rate, the absence of intermediate forms is no argument
+in favour of it.
+
+In reality, the chief argument in favour of a keen competition for the
+means of existence continually going on within every animal species
+is--to use Professor Geddes' expression--the "arithmetical argument"
+borrowed from Malthus.
+
+But this argument does not prove it at all. We might as well take a
+number of villages in South-East Russia, the inhabitants of which enjoy
+plenty of food, but have no sanitary accommodation of any kind; and
+seeing that for the last eighty years the birth-rate was sixty in the
+thousand, while the population is now what it was eighty years ago, we
+might conclude that there has been a terrible competition between the
+inhabitants. But the truth is that from year to year the population
+remained stationary, for the simple reason that one-third of the
+new-born died before reaching their sixth month of life; one-half died
+within the next four years, and out of each hundred born, only seventeen
+or so reached the age of twenty. The new-comers went away before having
+grown to be competitors. It is evident that if such is the case with
+men, it is still more the case with animals. In the feathered world the
+destruction of the eggs goes on on such a tremendous scale that eggs are
+the chief food of several species in the early summer; not to, say a
+word of the storms, the inundations which destroy nests by the million
+in America, and the sudden changes of weather which are fatal to the
+young mammals. Each storm, each inundation, each visit of a rat to a
+bird's nest, each sudden change of temperature, take away those
+competitors which appear so terrible in theory.
+
+As to the facts of an extremely rapid increase of horses and cattle in
+America, of pigs and rabbits in New Zealand, and even of wild animals
+imported from Europe (where their numbers are kept down by man, not by
+competition), they rather seem opposed to the theory of over-population.
+If horses and cattle could so rapidly multiply in America, it simply
+proved that, however numberless the buffaloes and other ruminants were
+at that time in the New World, its grass-eating population was far below
+what the prairies could maintain. If millions of intruders have found
+plenty of food without starving out the former population of the
+prairies, we must rather conclude that the Europeans found a want of
+grass-eaters in America, not an excess. And we have good reasons to
+believe that want of animal population is the natural state of things
+all over the world, with but a few temporary exceptions to the rule. The
+actual numbers of animals in a given region are determined, not by the
+highest feeding capacity of the region, but by what it is every year
+under the most unfavourable conditions. So that, for that reason alone,
+competition hardly can be a normal condition. But other causes intervene
+as well to cut, down the animal population below even that low standard.
+If we take the horses and cattle which are grazing all the winter
+through in the Steppes of Transbaikalia, we find them very lean and
+exhausted at the end of the winter. But they grow exhausted not because
+there is not enough food for all of them--the grass buried under a thin
+sheet of snow is everywhere in abundance--but because of the difficulty
+of getting it from beneath the snow, and this difficulty is the same for
+all horses alike. Besides, days of glazed frost are common in early
+spring, and if several such days come in succession the horses grow
+still more exhausted. But then comes a snow-storm, which compels the
+already weakened animals to remain without any food for several days,
+and very great numbers of them die. The losses during the spring are so
+severe that if the season has been more inclement than usual they are
+even not repaired by the new breeds--the more so as all horses are
+exhausted, and the young foals are born in a weaker condition. The
+numbers of horses and cattle thus always remain beneath what they
+otherwise might be; all the year round there is food for five or ten
+times as many animals, and yet their population increases extremely
+slowly. But as soon as the Buriate owner makes ever so small a provision
+of hay in the steppe, and throws it open during days of glazed frost, or
+heavier snow-fall, he immediately sees the increase of his herd. Almost
+all free grass-eating animals and many rodents in Asia and America being
+in very much the same conditions, we can safely say that their numbers
+are not kept down by competition; that at no time of the year they can
+struggle for food, and that if they never reach anything approaching to
+over-population, the cause is in the climate, not in competition.
+
+The importance of natural checks to over-multiplication, and especially
+their bearing upon the competition hypothesis, seems never to have been
+taken into due account. The checks, or rather some of them, are
+mentioned, but their action is seldom studied in detail. However, if we
+compare the action of the natural checks with that of competition, we
+must recognize at once that the latter sustains no comparison whatever
+with the other checks. Thus, Mr. Bates mentions the really astounding
+numbers of winged ants which are destroyed during their exodus. The dead
+or half-dead bodies of the formica de fuego (Myrmica saevissima) which
+had been blown into the river during a gale "were heaped in a line an
+inch or two in height and breadth, the line continuing without
+interruption for miles at the edge of the water."(35) Myriads of ants
+are thus destroyed amidst a nature which might support a hundred times
+as many ants as are actually living. Dr. Altum, a German forester, who
+wrote a very interesting book about animals injurious to our forests,
+also gives many facts showing the immense importance of natural checks.
+He says, that a succession of gales or cold and damp weather during the
+exodus of the pine-moth (Bombyx pini) destroy it to incredible amounts,
+and during the spring of 1871 all these moths disappeared at once,
+probably killed by a succession of cold nights.(36) Many like examples
+relative to various insects could be quoted from various parts of
+Europe. Dr. Altum also mentions the bird-enemies of the pine-moth, and
+the immense amount of its eggs destroyed by foxes; but he adds that the
+parasitic fungi which periodically infest it are a far more terrible
+enemy than any bird, because they destroy the moth over very large areas
+at once. As to various species of mice (Mus sylvaticus, Arvicola
+arvalis, and A. agrestis), the same author gives a long list of their
+enemies, but he remarks: "However, the most terrible enemies of mice are
+not other animals, but such sudden changes of weather as occur almost
+every year." Alternations of frost and warm weather destroy them in
+numberless quantities; "one single sudden change can reduce thousands of
+mice to the number of a few individuals." On the other side, a warm
+winter, or a winter which gradually steps in, make them multiply in
+menacing proportions, notwithstanding every enemy; such was the case in
+1876 and 1877.(37) Competition, in the case of mice, thus appears a
+quite trifling factor when compared with weather. Other facts to the
+same effect are also given as regards squirrels.
+
+As to birds, it is well known how they suffer from sudden changes of
+weather. Late snow-storms are as destructive of bird-life on the English
+moors, as they are in Siberia; and Ch. Dixon saw the red grouse so
+pressed during some exceptionally severe winters, that they quitted the
+moors in numbers, "and we have then known them actually to be taken in
+the streets of Sheffield. Persistent wet," he adds, "is almost as fatal
+to them."
+
+On the other side, the contagious diseases which continually visit most
+animal species destroy them in such numbers that the losses often cannot
+be repaired for many years, even with the most rapidly-multiplying
+animals. Thus, some sixty years ago, the sousliks suddenly disappeared
+in the neighbourhood of Sarepta, in South-Eastern Russia, in consequence
+of some epidemics; and for years no sousliks were seen in that
+neighbourhood. It took many years before they became as numerous as they
+formerly were.(38)
+
+Like facts, all tending to reduce the importance given to competition,
+could be produced in numbers. Of course, it might be replied, in
+Darwin's words, that nevertheless each organic being "at some period of
+its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at
+intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction,"
+and that the fittest survive during such periods of hard struggle for
+life. But if the evolution of the animal world were based exclusively,
+or even chiefly, upon the survival of the fittest during periods of
+calamities; if natural selection were limited in its action to periods
+of exceptional drought, or sudden changes of temperature, or
+inundations, retrogression would be the rule in the animal world. Those
+who survive a famine, or a severe epidemic of cholera, or small-pox, or
+diphtheria, such as we see them in uncivilized countries, are neither
+the strongest, nor the healthiest, nor the most intelligent. No progress
+could be based on those survivals--the less so as all survivors usually
+come out of the ordeal with an impaired health, like the Transbaikalian
+horses just mentioned, or the Arctic crews, or the garrison of a
+fortress which has been compelled to live for a few months on half
+rations, and comes out of its experience with a broken health, and
+subsequently shows a quite abnormal mortality. All that natural
+selection can do in times of calamities is to spare the individuals
+endowed with the greatest endurance for privations of all kinds. So it
+does among the Siberian horses and cattle. They are enduring; they can
+feed upon the Polar birch in case of need; they resist cold and hunger.
+But no Siberian horse is capable of carrying half the weight which a
+European horse carries with ease; no Siberian cow gives half the amount
+of milk given by a Jersey cow, and no natives of uncivilized countries
+can bear a comparison with Europeans. They may better endure hunger and
+cold, but their physical force is very far below that of a well-fed
+European, and their intellectual progress is despairingly slow. "Evil
+cannot be productive of good," as Tchernyshevsky wrote in a remarkable
+essay upon Darwinism.(39)
+
+Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world
+or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and
+natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better
+conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of
+mutual aid and mutual Support.(40) In the great struggle for life--for
+the greatest possible fulness and intensity of life with the least waste
+of energy--natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely
+for avoiding competition as much as possible. The ants combine in nests
+and nations; they pile up their stores, they rear their cattle--and thus
+avoid competition; and natural selection picks out of the ants' family
+the species which know best how to avoid competition, with its
+unavoidably deleterious consequences. Most of our birds slowly move
+southwards as the winter comes, or gather in numberless societies and
+undertake long journeys--and thus avoid competition. Many rodents fall
+asleep when the time comes that competition should set in; while other
+rodents store food for the winter, and gather in large villages for
+obtaining the necessary protection when at work. The reindeer, when the
+lichens are dry in the interior of the continent, migrate towards the
+sea. Buffaloes cross an immense continent in order to find plenty of
+food. And the beavers, when they grow numerous on a river, divide into
+two parties, and go, the old ones down the river, and the young ones up
+the river and avoid competition. And when animals can neither fall
+asleep, nor migrate, nor lay in stores, nor themselves grow their food
+like the ants, they do what the titmouse does, and what Wallace
+(Darwinism, ch. v) has so charmingly described: they resort to new kinds
+of food--and thus, again, avoid competition.
+
+"Don't compete!--competition is always injurious to the species, and you
+have plenty of resources to avoid it!" That is the tendency of nature,
+not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword
+which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean.
+"Therefore combine--practise mutual aid! That is the surest means for
+giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of
+existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral." That is what
+Nature teaches us; and that is what all those animals which have
+attained the highest position in their respective classes have done.
+That is also what man--the most primitive man--has been doing; and that
+is why man has reached the position upon which we stand now, as we shall
+see in the subsequent chapters devoted to mutual aid in human societies.
+
+NOTES:
+
+1. Syevettsoff's Periodical Phenomena, p. 251.
+
+2. Seyfferlitz, quoted by Brehm, iv. 760.
+
+3. The Arctic Voyages of A.E. Nordenskjold, London, 1879, p. 135. See
+also the powerful description of the St. Kilda islands by Mr. Dixon
+(quoted by Seebohm), and nearly all books of Arctic travel.
+
+4. Elliot Coues, in Bulletin U.S. Geol. Survey of Territories, iv. No.
+7, pp. 556, 579, etc. Among the gulls (Larus argentatus), Polyakoff saw
+on a marsh in Northern Russia, that the nesting grounds of a very great
+number of these birds were always patrolled by one male, which warned
+the colony of the approach of danger. All birds rose in such case and
+attacked the enemy with great vigour. The females, which had five or six
+nests together on each knoll of the marsh, kept a certain order in
+leaving their nests in search of food. The fledglings, which otherwise
+are extremely unprotected and easily become the prey of the rapacious
+birds, were never left alone ("Family Habits among the Aquatic Birds,"
+in Proceedings of the Zool. Section of St. Petersburg Soc. of Nat., Dec.
+17, 1874).
+
+5. Brehm Father, quoted by A. Brehm, iv. 34 seq. See also White's
+Natural History of Selborne, Letter XI.
+
+6. Dr. Coues, Birds of Dakota and Montana, in Bulletin U.S. Survey of
+Territories, iv. No. 7.
+
+7. It has often been intimated that larger birds may occasionally
+transport some of the smaller birds when they cross together the
+Mediterranean, but the fact still remains doubtful. On the other side,
+it is certain that some smaller birds join the bigger ones for
+migration. The fact has been noticed several times, and it was recently
+confirmed by L. Buxbaum at Raunheim. He saw several parties of cranes
+which had larks flying in the midst and on both sides of their migratory
+columns (Der zoologische Garten, 1886, p. 133).
+
+8. H. Seebohm and Ch. Dixon both mention this habit.
+
+9. The fact is well known to every field-naturalist, and with reference
+to England several examples may be found in Charles Dixon's Among the
+Birds in Northern Shires. The chaffinches arrive during winter in vast
+flocks; and about the same time, i.e. in November, come flocks of
+bramblings; redwings also frequent the same places "in similar large
+companies," and so on (pp. 165, 166).
+
+10. S.W. Baker, Wild Beasts, etc., vol. i. p. 316.
+
+11. Tschudi, Thierleben der Alpenwelt, p. 404.
+
+12. Houzeau's Etudes, ii. 463.
+
+13. For their hunting associations see Sir E. Tennant's Natural History
+of Ceylon, quoted in Romanes's Animal Intelligence, p. 432.
+
+14. See Emil Huter's letter in L. Buchner's Liebe.
+
+15. With regard to the viscacha it is very interesting to note that
+these highly-sociable little animals not only live peaceably together in
+each village, but that whole villages visit each other at nights.
+Sociability is thus extended to the whole species--not only to a given
+society, or to a nation, as we saw it with the ants. When the farmer
+destroys a viscacha-burrow, and buries the inhabitants under a heap of
+earth, other viscachas--we are told by Hudson--"come from a distance to
+dig out those that are buried alive" (l.c., p. 311). This is a
+widely-known fact in La Plata, verified by the author.
+
+16. Handbuch für Jäger und Jagdberechtigte, quoted by Brehm, ii. 223.
+
+17. Buffon's Histoire Naturelle.
+
+18. In connection with the horses it is worthy of notice that the quagga
+zebra, which never comes together with the dauw zebra, nevertheless
+lives on excellent terms, not only with ostriches, which are very good
+sentries, but also with gazelles, several species of antelopes, and
+gnus. We thus have a case of mutual dislike between the quagga and the
+dauw which cannot be explained by competition for food. The fact that
+the quagga lives together with ruminants feeding on the same grass as
+itself excludes that hypothesis, and we must look for some
+incompatibility of character, as in the case of the hare and the rabbit.
+Cf., among others, Clive Phillips-Wolley's Big Game Shooting (Badminton
+Library), which contains excellent illustrations of various species
+living together in East Africa.
+
+19. Our Tungus hunter, who was going to marry, and therefore was
+prompted by the desire of getting as many furs as he possibly could, was
+beating the hill-sides all day long on horseback in search of deer. His
+efforts were not rewarded by even so much as one fallow deer killed
+every day; and he was an excellent hunter.
+
+20. According to Samuel W. Baker, elephants combine in larger groups
+than the "compound family." "I have frequently observed," he wrote, "in
+the portion of Ceylon known as the Park Country, the tracks of elephants
+in great numbers which have evidently been considerable herds that have
+joined together in a general retreat from a ground which they considered
+insecure" (Wild Beasts and their Ways, vol. i. p. 102).
+
+21. Pigs, attacked by wolves, do the same (Hudson, l.c.).
+
+22. Romanes's Animal Intelligence, p. 472.
+
+23. Brehm, i. 82; Darwin's Descent of Man, ch. iii. The Kozloff
+expedition of 1899-1901 have also had to sustain in Northern Thibet a
+similar fight.
+
+24. The more strange was it to read in the previously-mentioned article
+by Huxley the following paraphrase of a well-known sentence of Rousseau:
+"The first men who substituted mutual peace for that of mutual
+war--whatever the motive which impelled them to take that step--created
+society" (Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1888, p. 165). Society has not been
+created by man; it is anterior to man.
+
+25. Such monographs as the chapter on "Music and Dancing in Nature"
+which we have in Hudson's Naturalist on the La Plata, and Carl Gross'
+Play of Animals, have already thrown a considerable light upon an
+instinct which is absolutely universal in Nature.
+
+26. Not only numerous species of birds possess the habit of assembling
+together--in many cases always at the same spot--to indulge in antics
+and dancing performances, but W.H. Hudson's experience is that nearly
+all mammals and birds ("probably there are really no exceptions")
+indulge frequently in more or less regular or set performances with or
+without sound, or composed of sound exclusively (p. 264).
+
+27. For the choruses of monkeys, see Brehm.
+
+28. Haygarth, Bush Life in Australia, p. 58.
+
+29. To quote but a few instances, a wounded badger was carried away by
+another badger suddenly appearing on the scene; rats have been seen
+feeding a blind couple (Seelenleben der Thiere, p. 64 seq.). Brehm
+himself saw two crows feeding in a hollow tree a third crow which was
+wounded; its wound was several weeks old (Hausfreund, 1874, 715;
+Buchner's Liebe, 203). Mr. Blyth saw Indian crows feeding two or three
+blind comrades; and so on.
+
+30. Man and Beast, p. 344.
+
+31. L.H. Morgan, The American Beaver, 1868, p. 272; Descent of Man, ch.
+iv.
+
+32. One species of swallow is said to have caused the decrease of
+another swallow species in North America; the recent increase of the
+missel-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush;
+the brown rat has taken the place of the black rat in Europe; in Russia
+the small cockroach has everywhere driven before it its greater
+congener; and in Australia the imported hive-bee is rapidly
+exterminating the small stingless bee. Two other cases, but relative to
+domesticated animals, are mentioned in the preceding paragraph. While
+recalling these same facts, A.R. Wallace remarks in a footnote relative
+to the Scottish thrushes: "Prof. A. Newton, however, informs me that
+these species do not interfere in the way here stated" (Darwinism, p.
+34). As to the brown rat, it is known that, owing to its amphibian
+habits, it usually stays in the lower parts of human dwellings (low
+cellars, sewers, etc.), as also on the banks of canals and rivers; it
+also undertakes distant migrations in numberless bands. The black rat,
+on the contrary, prefers staying in our dwellings themselves, under the
+floor, as well as in our stables and barns. It thus is much more exposed
+to be exterminated by man; and we cannot maintain, with any approach to
+certainty, that the black rat is being either exterminated or starved
+out by the brown rat and not by man.
+
+33. "But it may be urged that when several closely-allied species
+inhabit the same territory, we surely ought to find at the present time
+many transitional forms.... By my theory these allied species are
+descended from a common parent; and during the process of modification,
+each has become adapted to the conditions of life of its own region, and
+has supplanted and exterminated its original parent-form and all the
+transitional varieties between its past and present states" (Origin of
+Species, 6th ed. p. 134); also p. 137, 296 (all paragraph "On
+Extinction").
+
+34. According to Madame Marie Pavloff, who has made a special study of
+this subject, they migrated from Asia to Africa, stayed there some time,
+and returned next to Asia. Whether this double migration be confirmed or
+not, the fact of a former extension of the ancestor of our horse over
+Asia, Africa, and America is settled beyond doubt.
+
+35. The Naturalist on the River Amazons, ii. 85, 95.
+
+36. Dr. B. Altum, Waldbeschadigungen durch Thiere und Gegenmittel
+(Berlin, 1889), pp. 207 seq.
+
+37. Dr. B. Altum, ut supra, pp. 13 and 187.
+
+38. A. Becker in the Bulletin de la Societe des Naturalistes de Moscou,
+1889, p. 625.
+
+39. Russkaya Mysl, Sept. 1888: "The Theory of Beneficency of Struggle
+for Life, being a Preface to various Treatises on Botanics, Zoology, and
+Human Life," by an Old Transformist.
+
+40. "One of the most frequent modes in which Natural Selection acts is,
+by adapting some individuals of a species to a somewhat different mode
+of life, whereby they are able to seize unappropriated places in Nature"
+(Origin of Species, p. 145)--in other words, to avoid competition.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+MUTUAL AID AMONG SAVAGES
+
+Supposed war of each against all. Tribal origin of human society. Late
+appearance of the separate family. Bushmen and Hottentots. Australians,
+Papuas. Eskimos, Aleoutes. Features of savage life difficult to
+understand for the European. The Dayak's conception of justice. Common
+law.
+
+
+The immense part played by mutual aid and mutual support in the
+evolution of the animal world has been briefly analyzed in the preceding
+chapters. We have now to cast a glance upon the part played by the same
+agencies in the evolution of mankind. We saw how few are the animal
+species which live an isolated life, and how numberless are those which
+live in societies, either for mutual defence, or for hunting and storing
+up food, or for rearing their offspring, or simply for enjoying life in
+common. We also saw that, though a good deal of warfare goes on between
+different classes of animals, or different species, or even different
+tribes of the same species, peace and mutual support are the rule within
+the tribe or the species; and that those species which best know how to
+combine, and to avoid competition, have the best chances of survival and
+of a further progressive development. They prosper, while the unsociable
+species decay.
+
+It is evident that it would be quite contrary to all that we know of
+nature if men were an exception to so general a rule: if a creature so
+defenceless as man was at his beginnings should have found his
+protection and his way to progress, not in mutual support, like other
+animals, but in a reckless competition for personal advantages, with no
+regard to the interests of the species. To a mind accustomed to the idea
+of unity in nature, such a proposition appears utterly indefensible. And
+yet, improbable and unphilosophical as it is, it has never found a lack
+of supporters. There always were writers who took a pessimistic view of
+mankind. They knew it, more or less superficially, through their own
+limited experience; they knew of history what the annalists, always
+watchful of wars, cruelty, and oppression, told of it, and little more
+besides; and they concluded that mankind is nothing but a loose
+aggregation of beings, always ready to fight with each other, and only
+prevented from so doing by the intervention of some authority.
+
+Hobbes took that position; and while some of his eighteenth-century
+followers endeavoured to prove that at no epoch of its existence--not
+even in its most primitive condition--mankind lived in a state of
+perpetual warfare; that men have been sociable even in "the state of
+nature," and that want of knowledge, rather than the natural bad
+inclinations of man, brought humanity to all the horrors of its early
+historical life,--his idea was, on the contrary, that the so-called
+"state of nature" was nothing but a permanent fight between individuals,
+accidentally huddled together by the mere caprice of their bestial
+existence. True, that science has made some progress since Hobbes's
+time, and that we have safer ground to stand upon than the speculations
+of Hobbes or Rousseau. But the Hobbesian philosophy has plenty of
+admirers still; and we have had of late quite a school of writers who,
+taking possession of Darwin's terminology rather than of his leading
+ideas, made of it an argument in favour of Hobbes's views upon primitive
+man, and even succeeded in giving them a scientific appearance. Huxley,
+as is known, took the lead of that school, and in a paper written in
+1888 he represented primitive men as a sort of tigers or lions, deprived
+of all ethical conceptions, fighting out the struggle for existence to
+its bitter end, and living a life of "continual free fight"; to quote
+his own words--"beyond the limited and, temporary relations of the
+family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of
+existence."(1)
+
+It has been remarked more than once that the chief error of Hobbes, and
+the eighteenth-century philosophers as well, was to imagine that mankind
+began its life in the shape of small straggling families, something like
+the "limited and temporary" families of the bigger carnivores, while in
+reality it is now positively known that such was not the case. Of
+course, we have no direct evidence as to the modes of life of the first
+man-like beings. We are not yet settled even as to the time of their
+first appearance, geologists being inclined at present to see their
+traces in the pliocene, or even the miocene, deposits of the Tertiary
+period. But we have the indirect method which permits us to throw some
+light even upon that remote antiquity. A most careful investigation into
+the social institutions of the lowest races has been carried on during
+the last forty years, and it has revealed among the present institutions
+of primitive folk some traces of still older institutions which have
+long disappeared, but nevertheless left unmistakable traces of their
+previous existence. A whole science devoted to the embryology of human
+institutions has thus developed in the hands of Bachofen, MacLennan,
+Morgan, Edwin Tylor, Maine, Post, Kovalevsky, Lubbock, and many others.
+And that science has established beyond any doubt that mankind did not
+begin its life in the shape of small isolated families.
+
+Far from being a primitive form of organization, the family is a very
+late product of human evolution. As far as we can go back in the
+palaeo-ethnology of mankind, we find men living in societies--in tribes
+similar to those of the highest mammals; and an extremely slow and long
+evolution was required to bring these societies to the gentile, or clan
+organization, which, in its turn, had to undergo another, also very long
+evolution, before the first germs of family, polygamous or monogamous,
+could appear. Societies, bands, or tribes--not families--were thus the
+primitive form of organization of mankind and its earliest ancestors.
+That is what ethnology has come to after its painstaking researches. And
+in so doing it simply came to what might have been foreseen by the
+zoologist. None of the higher mammals, save a few carnivores and a few
+undoubtedly-decaying species of apes (orang-outans and gorillas), live
+in small families, isolatedly straggling in the woods. All others live
+in societies. And Darwin so well understood that isolately-living apes
+never could have developed into man-like beings, that he was inclined to
+consider man as descended from some comparatively weak but social
+species, like the chimpanzee, rather than from some stronger but
+unsociable species, like the gorilla.(2) Zoology and palaeo-ethnology
+are thus agreed in considering that the band, not the family, was the
+earliest form of social life. The first human societies simply were a
+further development of those societies which constitute the very essence
+of life of the higher animals.(3)
+
+If we now go over to positive evidence, we see that the earliest traces
+of man, dating from the glacial or the early post-glacial period, afford
+unmistakable proofs of man having lived even then in societies. Isolated
+finds of stone implements, even from the old stone age, are very rare;
+on the contrary, wherever one flint implement is discovered others are
+sure to be found, in most cases in very large quantities. At a time when
+men were dwelling in caves, or under occasionally protruding rocks, in
+company with mammals now extinct, and hardly succeeded in making the
+roughest sorts of flint hatchets, they already knew the advantages of
+life in societies. In the valleys of the tributaries of the Dordogne,
+the surface of the rocks is in some places entirely covered with caves
+which were inhabited by palaeolithic men.(4) Sometimes the
+cave-dwellings are superposed in storeys, and they certainly recall much
+more the nesting colonies of swallows than the dens of carnivores. As to
+the flint implements discovered in those caves, to use Lubbock's words,
+"one may say without exaggeration that they are numberless." The same is
+true of other palaeolithic stations. It also appears from Lartet's
+investigations that the inhabitants of the Aurignac region in the south
+of France partook of tribal meals at the burial of their dead. So that
+men lived in societies, and had germs of a tribal worship, even at that
+extremely remote epoch.
+
+The same is still better proved as regards the later part of the stone
+age. Traces of neolithic man have been found in numberless quantities,
+so that we can reconstitute his manner of life to a great extent. When
+the ice-cap (which must have spread from the Polar regions as far south
+as middle France, middle Germany, and middle Russia, and covered Canada
+as well as a good deal of what is now the United States) began to melt
+away, the surfaces freed from ice were covered, first, with swamps and
+marshes, and later on with numberless lakes.(5) Lakes filled all
+depressions of the valleys before their waters dug out those permanent
+channels which, during a subsequent epoch, became our rivers. And
+wherever we explore, in Europe, Asia, or America, the shores of the
+literally numberless lakes of that period, whose proper name would be
+the Lacustrine period, we find traces of neolithic man. They are so
+numerous that we can only wonder at the relative density of population
+at that time. The "stations" of neolithic man closely follow each other
+on the terraces which now mark the shores of the old lakes. And at each
+of those stations stone implements appear in such numbers, that no doubt
+is possible as to the length of time during which they were inhabited by
+rather numerous tribes. Whole workshops of flint implements, testifying
+of the numbers of workers who used to come together, have been
+discovered by the archaeologists.
+
+Traces of a more advanced period, already characterized by the use of
+some pottery, are found in the shell-heaps of Denmark. They appear, as
+is well known, in the shape of heaps from five to ten feet thick, from
+100 to 200 feet wide, and 1,000 feet or more in length, and they are so
+common along some parts of the sea-coast that for a long time they were
+considered as natural growths. And yet they "contain nothing but what
+has been in some way or other subservient to the use of man," and they
+are so densely stuffed with products of human industry that, during a
+two days' stay at Milgaard, Lubbock dug out no less than 191 pieces of
+stone-implements and four fragments of pottery.(6) The very size and
+extension of the shell heaps prove that for generations and generations
+the coasts of Denmark were inhabited by hundreds of small tribes which
+certainly lived as peacefully together as the Fuegian tribes, which also
+accumulate like shellheaps, are living in our own times.
+
+As to the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, which represent a still further
+advance in civilization, they yield still better evidence of life and
+work in societies. It is known that even during the stone age the shores
+of the Swiss lakes were dotted with a succession of villages, each of
+which consisted of several huts, and was built upon a platform supported
+by numberless pillars in the lake. No less than twenty-four, mostly
+stone age villages, were discovered along the shores of Lake Leman,
+thirty-two in the Lake of Constance, forty-six in the Lake of Neuchatel,
+and so on; and each of them testifies to the immense amount of labour
+which was spent in common by the tribe, not by the family. It has even
+been asserted that the life of the lake-dwellers must have been
+remarkably free of warfare. And so it probably was, especially if we
+refer to the life of those primitive folk who live until the present
+time in similar villages built upon pillars on the sea coasts.
+
+It is thus seen, even from the above rapid hints, that our knowledge of
+primitive man is not so scanty after all, and that, so far as it goes,
+it is rather opposed than favourable to the Hobbesian speculations.
+Moreover, it may be supplemented, to a great extent, by the direct
+observation of such primitive tribes as now stand on the same level of
+civilization as the inhabitants of Europe stood in prehistoric times.
+
+That these primitive tribes which we find now are not degenerated
+specimens of mankind who formerly knew a higher civilization, as it has
+occasionally been maintained, has sufficiently been proved by Edwin
+Tylor and Lubbock. However, to the arguments already opposed to the
+degeneration theory, the following may be added. Save a few tribes
+clustering in the less-accessible highlands, the "savages" represent a
+girdle which encircles the more or less civilized nations, and they
+occupy the extremities of our continents, most of which have retained
+still, or recently were bearing, an early post-glacial character. Such
+are the Eskimos and their congeners in Greenland, Arctic America, and
+Northern Siberia; and, in the Southern hemisphere, the Australians, the
+Papuas, the Fuegians, and, partly, the Bushmen; while within the
+civilized area, like primitive folk are only found in the Himalayas, the
+highlands of Australasia, and the plateaus of Brazil. Now it must be
+borne in mind that the glacial age did not come to an end at once over
+the whole surface of the earth. It still continues in Greenland.
+Therefore, at a time when the littoral regions of the Indian Ocean, the
+Mediterranean, or the Gulf of Mexico already enjoyed a warmer climate,
+and became the seats of higher civilizations, immense territories in
+middle Europe, Siberia, and Northern America, as well as in Patagonia,
+Southern Africa, and Southern Australasia, remained in early postglacial
+conditions which rendered them inaccessible to the civilized nations of
+the torrid and sub-torrid zones. They were at that time what the
+terrible urmans of North-West Siberia are now, and their population,
+inaccessible to and untouched by civilization, retained the characters
+of early post-glacial man. Later on, when desiccation rendered these
+territories more suitable for agriculture, they were peopled with more
+civilized immigrants; and while part of their previous inhabitants were
+assimilated by the new settlers, another part migrated further, and
+settled where we find them. The territories they inhabit now are still,
+or recently were, sub-glacial, as to their physical features; their arts
+and implements are those of the neolithic age; and, notwithstanding
+their racial differences, and the distances which separate them, their
+modes of life and social institutions bear a striking likeness. So we
+cannot but consider them as fragments of the early post-glacial
+population of the now civilized area.
+
+The first thing which strikes us as soon as we begin studying primitive
+folk is the complexity of the organization of marriage relations under
+which they are living. With most of them the family, in the sense we
+attribute to it, is hardly found in its germs. But they are by no means
+loose aggregations of men and women coming in a disorderly manner
+together in conformity with their momentary caprices. All of them are
+under a certain organization, which has been described by Morgan in its
+general aspects as the "gentile," or clan organization.(7)
+
+To tell the matter as briefly as possible, there is little doubt that
+mankind has passed at its beginnings through a stage which may be
+described as that of "communal marriage"; that is, the whole tribe had
+husbands and wives in common with but little regard to consanguinity.
+But it is also certain that some restrictions to that free intercourse
+were imposed at a very early period. Inter-marriage was soon prohibited
+between the sons of one mother and her sisters, granddaughters, and
+aunts. Later on it was prohibited between the sons and daughters of the
+same mother, and further limitations did not fail to follow. The idea of
+a gens, or clan, which embodied all presumed descendants from one stock
+(or rather all those who gathered in one group) was evolved, and
+marriage within the clan was entirely prohibited. It still remained
+"communal," but the wife or the husband had to be taken from another
+clan. And when a gens became too numerous, and subdivided into several
+gentes, each of them was divided into classes (usually four), and
+marriage was permitted only between certain well-defined classes. That
+is the stage which we find now among the Kamilaroi-speaking Australians.
+As to the family, its first germs appeared amidst the clan organization.
+A woman who was captured in war from some other clan, and who formerly
+would have belonged to the whole gens, could be kept at a later period
+by the capturer, under certain obligations towards the tribe. She may be
+taken by him to a separate hut, after she had paid a certain tribute to
+the clan, and thus constitute within the gens a separate family, the
+appearance of which evidently was opening a quite new phase of
+civilization.
+
+Now, if we take into consideration that this complicated organization
+developed among men who stood at the lowest known degree of development,
+and that it maintained itself in societies knowing no kind of authority
+besides the authority of public opinion, we at once see how deeply
+inrooted social instincts must have been in human nature, even at its
+lowest stages. A savage who is capable of living under such an
+organization, and of freely submitting to rules which continually clash
+with his personal desires, certainly is not a beast devoid of ethical
+principles and knowing no rein to its passions. But the fact becomes
+still more striking if we consider the immense antiquity of the clan
+organization. It is now known that the primitive Semites, the Greeks of
+Homer, the prehistoric Romans, the Germans of Tacitus, the early Celts
+and the early Slavonians, all have had their own period of clan
+organization, closely analogous to that of the Australians, the Red
+Indians, the Eskimos, and other inhabitants of the "savage girdle."(9)
+So we must admit that either the evolution of marriage laws went on on
+the same lines among all human races, or the rudiments of the clan rules
+were developed among some common ancestors of the Semites, the Aryans,
+the Polynesians, etc., before their differentiation into separate races
+took place, and that these rules were maintained, until now, among races
+long ago separated from the common stock. Both alternatives imply,
+however, an equally striking tenacity of the institution--such a
+tenacity that no assaults of the individual could break it down through
+the scores of thousands of years that it was in existence. The very
+persistence of the clan organization shows how utterly false it is to
+represent primitive mankind as a disorderly agglomeration of
+individuals, who only obey their individual passions, and take advantage
+of their personal force and cunningness against all other
+representatives of the species. Unbridled individualism is a modern
+growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.(10)
+
+Going now over to the existing savages, we may begin with the Bushmen,
+who stand at a very low level of development--so low indeed that they
+have no dwellings and sleep in holes dug in the soil, occasionally
+protected by some screens. It is known that when Europeans settled in
+their territory and destroyed deer, the Bushmen began stealing the
+settlers' cattle, whereupon a war of extermination, too horrible to be
+related here, was waged against them. Five hundred Bushmen were
+slaughtered in 1774, three thousand in 1808 and 1809 by the Farmers'
+Alliance, and so on. They were poisoned like rats, killed by hunters
+lying in ambush before the carcass of some animal, killed wherever met
+with.(11) So that our knowledge of the Bushmen, being chiefly borrowed
+from those same people who exterminated them, is necessarily limited.
+But still we know that when the Europeans came, the Bushmen lived in
+small tribes (or clans), sometimes federated together; that they used to
+hunt in common, and divided the spoil without quarrelling; that they
+never abandoned their wounded, and displayed strong affection to their
+comrades. Lichtenstein has a most touching story about a Bushman, nearly
+drowned in a river, who was rescued by his companions. They took off
+their furs to cover him, and shivered themselves; they dried him, rubbed
+him before the fire, and smeared his body with warm grease till they
+brought him back to life. And when the Bushmen found, in Johan van der
+Walt, a man who treated them well, they expressed their thankfulness by
+a most touching attachment to that man.(12) Burchell and Moffat both
+represent them as goodhearted, disinterested, true to their promises,
+and grateful,(13) all qualities which could develop only by being
+practised within the tribe. As to their love to children, it is
+sufficient to say that when a European wished to secure a Bushman woman
+as a slave, he stole her child: the mother was sure to come into slavery
+to share the fate of her child.(14)
+
+The same social manners characterize the Hottentots, who are but a
+little more developed than the Bushmen. Lubbock describes them as "the
+filthiest animals," and filthy they really are. A fur suspended to the
+neck and worn till it falls to pieces is all their dress; their huts are
+a few sticks assembled together and covered with mats, with no kind of
+furniture within. And though they kept oxen and sheep, and seem to have
+known the use of iron before they made acquaintance with the Europeans,
+they still occupy one of the lowest degrees of the human scale. And yet
+those who knew them highly praised their sociability and readiness to
+aid each other. If anything is given to a Hottentot, he at once divides
+it among all present--a habit which, as is known, so much struck Darwin
+among the Fuegians. He cannot eat alone, and, however hungry, he calls
+those who pass by to share his food. And when Kolben expressed his
+astonishment thereat, he received the answer. "That is Hottentot
+manner." But this is not Hottentot manner only: it is an all but
+universal habit among the "savages." Kolben, who knew the Hottentots
+well and did not pass by their defects in silence, could not praise
+their tribal morality highly enough.
+
+"Their word is sacred," he wrote. They know "nothing of the corruptness
+and faithless arts of Europe." "They live in great tranquillity and are
+seldom at war with their neighbours." They are "all kindness and
+goodwill to one another.. One of the greatest pleasures of the
+Hottentots certainly lies in their gifts and good offices to one
+another." "The integrity of the Hottentots, their strictness and
+celerity in the exercise of justice, and their chastity, are things in
+which they excel all or most nations in the world."(15)
+
+Tachart, Barrow, and Moodie(16) fully confirm Kolben's testimony. Let me
+only remark that when Kolben wrote that "they are certainly the most
+friendly, the most liberal and the most benevolent people to one another
+that ever appeared on the earth" (i. 332), he wrote a sentence which has
+continually appeared since in the description of savages. When first
+meeting with primitive races, the Europeans usually make a caricature of
+their life; but when an intelligent man has stayed among them for a
+longer time, he generally describes them as the "kindest" or "the
+gentlest" race on the earth. These very same words have been applied to
+the Ostyaks, the Samoyedes, the Eskimos, the Dayaks, the Aleoutes, the
+Papuas, and so on, by the highest authorities. I also remember having
+read them applied to the Tunguses, the Tchuktchis, the Sioux, and
+several others. The very frequency of that high commendation already
+speaks volumes in itself.
+
+The natives of Australia do not stand on a higher level of development
+than their South African brothers. Their huts are of the same character:
+very often simple screens are the only protection against cold winds. In
+their food they are most indifferent: they devour horribly putrefied
+corpses, and cannibalism is resorted to in times of scarcity. When first
+discovered by Europeans, they had no implements but in stone or bone,
+and these were of the roughest description. Some tribes had even no
+canoes, and did not know barter-trade. And yet, when their manners and
+customs were carefully studied, they proved to be living under that
+elaborate clan organization which I have mentioned on a preceding
+page.(17)
+
+The territory they inhabit is usually allotted between the different
+gentes or clans; but the hunting and fishing territories of each clan
+are kept in common, and the produce of fishing and hunting belongs to
+the whole clan; so also the fishing and hunting implements.(18) The
+meals are taken in common. Like many other savages, they respect certain
+regulations as to the seasons when certain gums and grasses may be
+collected.(19) As to their morality altogether, we cannot do better than
+transcribe the following answers given to the questions of the Paris
+Anthropological Society by Lumholtz, a missionary who sojourned in North
+Queensland:(20)--
+
+"The feeling of friendship is known among them; it is strong. Weak
+people are usually supported; sick people are very well attended to;
+they never are abandoned or killed. These tribes are cannibals, but they
+very seldom eat members of their own tribe (when immolated on religious
+principles, I suppose); they eat strangers only. The parents love their
+children, play with them, and pet them. Infanticide meets with common
+approval. Old people are very well treated, never put to death. No
+religion, no idols, only a fear of death. Polygamous marriage, quarrels
+arising within the tribe are settled by means of duels fought with
+wooden swords and shields. No slaves; no culture of any kind; no
+pottery; no dress, save an apron sometimes worn by women. The clan
+consists of two hundred individuals, divided into four classes of men
+and four of women; marriage being only permitted within the usual
+classes, and never within the gens."
+
+For the Papuas, closely akin to the above, we have the testimony of G.L.
+Bink, who stayed in New Guinea, chiefly in Geelwink Bay, from 1871 to
+1883. Here is the essence of his answers to the same questioner:(21)--
+
+"They are sociable and cheerful; they laugh very much. Rather timid than
+courageous. Friendship is relatively strong among persons belonging to
+different tribes, and still stronger within the tribe. A friend will
+often pay the debt of his friend, the stipulation being that the latter
+will repay it without interest to the children of the lender. They take
+care of the ill and the old; old people are never abandoned, and in no
+case are they killed--unless it be a slave who was ill for a long time.
+War prisoners are sometimes eaten. The children are very much petted and
+loved. Old and feeble war prisoners are killed, the others are sold as
+slaves. They have no religion, no gods, no idols, no authority of any
+description; the oldest man in the family is the judge. In cases of
+adultery a fine is paid, and part of it goes to the negoria (the
+community). The soil is kept in common, but the crop belongs to those
+who have grown it. They have pottery, and know barter-trade--the custom
+being that the merchant gives them the goods, whereupon they return to
+their houses and bring the native goods required by the merchant; if the
+latter cannot be obtained, the European goods are returned.(22) They are
+head-hunters, and in so doing they prosecute blood revenge. 'Sometimes,'
+Finsch says, 'the affair is referred to the Rajah of Namototte, who
+terminates it by imposing a fine.'"
+
+When well treated, the Papuas are very kind. Miklukho-Maclay landed on
+the eastern coast of New Guinea, followed by one single man, stayed for
+two years among tribes reported to be cannibals, and left them with
+regret; he returned again to stay one year more among them, and never
+had he any conflict to complain of. True that his rule was never--under
+no pretext whatever--to say anything which was not truth, nor make any
+promise which he could not keep. These poor creatures, who even do not
+know how to obtain fire, and carefully maintain it in their huts, live
+under their primitive communism, without any chiefs; and within their
+villages they have no quarrels worth speaking of. They work in common,
+just enough to get the food of the day; they rear their children in
+common; and in the evenings they dress themselves as coquettishly as
+they can, and dance. Like all savages, they are fond of dancing. Each
+village has its barla, or balai--the "long house," "longue maison," or
+"grande maison"--for the unmarried men, for social gatherings, and for
+the discussion of common affairs--again a trait which is common to most
+inhabitants of the Pacific Islands, the Eskimos, the Red Indians, and so
+on. Whole groups of villages are on friendly terms, and visit each other
+en bloc.
+
+Unhappily, feuds are not uncommon--not in consequence of "Overstocking
+of the area," or "keen competition," and like inventions of a mercantile
+century, but chiefly in consequence of superstition. As soon as any one
+falls ill, his friends and relatives come together, and deliberately
+discuss who might be the cause of the illness. All possible enemies are
+considered, every one confesses of his own petty quarrels, and finally
+the real cause is discovered. An enemy from the next village has called
+it down, and a raid upon that village is decided upon. Therefore, feuds
+are rather frequent, even between the coast villages, not to say a word
+of the cannibal mountaineers who are considered as real witches and
+enemies, though, on a closer acquaintance, they prove to be exactly the
+same sort of people as their neighbours on the seacoast.(23)
+
+Many striking pages could be written about the harmony which prevails in
+the villages of the Polynesian inhabitants of the Pacific Islands. But
+they belong to a more advanced stage of civilization. So we shall now
+take our illustrations from the far north. I must mention, however,
+before leaving the Southern Hemisphere, that even the Fuegians, whose
+reputation has been so bad, appear under a much better light since they
+begin to be better known. A few French missionaries who stay among them
+"know of no act of malevolence to complain of." In their clans,
+consisting of from 120 to 150 souls, they practise the same primitive
+communism as the Papuas; they share everything in common, and treat
+their old people very well. Peace prevails among these tribes.(24) With
+the Eskimos and their nearest congeners, the Thlinkets, the Koloshes,
+and the Aleoutes, we find one of the nearest illustrations of what man
+may have been during the glacial age. Their implements hardly differ
+from those of palaeolithic man, and some of their tribes do not yet know
+fishing: they simply spear the fish with a kind of harpoon.(25) They
+know the use of iron, but they receive it from the Europeans, or find it
+on wrecked ships. Their social organization is of a very primitive kind,
+though they already have emerged from the stage of "communal marriage,"
+even under the gentile restrictions. They live in families, but the
+family bonds are often broken; husbands and wives are often
+exchanged.(26) The families, however, remain united in clans, and how
+could it be otherwise? How could they sustain the hard struggle for life
+unless by closely combining their forces? So they do, and the tribal
+bonds are closest where the struggle for life is hardest, namely, in
+North-East Greenland. The "long house" is their usual dwelling, and
+several families lodge in it, separated from each other by small
+partitions of ragged furs, with a common passage in the front. Sometimes
+the house has the shape of a cross, and in such case a common fire is
+kept in the centre. The German Expedition which spent a winter close by
+one of those "long houses" could ascertain that "no quarrel disturbed
+the peace, no dispute arose about the use of this narrow space"
+throughout the long winter. "Scolding, or even unkind words, are
+considered as a misdemeanour, if not produced under the legal form of
+process, namely, the nith-song."(27) Close cohabitation and close
+interdependence are sufficient for maintaining century after century
+that deep respect for the interests of the community which is
+characteristic of Eskimo life. Even in the larger communities of
+Eskimos, "public opinion formed the real judgment-seat, the general
+punishment consisting in the offenders being shamed in the eyes of the
+people."(28)
+
+Eskimo life is based upon communism. What is obtained by hunting and
+fishing belongs to the clan. But in several tribes, especially in the
+West, under the influence of the Danes, private property penetrates into
+their institutions. However, they have an original means for obviating
+the inconveniences arising from a personal accumulation of wealth which
+would soon destroy their tribal unity. When a man has grown rich, he
+convokes the folk of his clan to a great festival, and, after much
+eating, distributes among them all his fortune. On the Yukon river, Dall
+saw an Aleonte family distributing in this way ten guns, ten full fur
+dresses, 200 strings of beads, numerous blankets, ten wolf furs, 200
+beavers, and 500 zibelines. After that they took off their festival
+dresses, gave them away, and, putting on old ragged furs, addressed a
+few words to their kinsfolk, saying that though they are now poorer than
+any one of them, they have won their friendship.(29) Like distributions
+of wealth appear to be a regular habit with the Eskimos, and to take
+place at a certain season, after an exhibition of all that has been
+obtained during the year.(30) In my opinion these distributions reveal a
+very old institution, contemporaneous with the first apparition of
+personal wealth; they must have been a means for re-establishing
+equality among the members of the clan, after it had been disturbed by
+the enrichment of the few. The periodical redistribution of land and the
+periodical abandonment of all debts which took place in historical times
+with so many different races (Semites, Aryans, etc.), must have been a
+survival of that old custom. And the habit of either burying with the
+dead, or destroying upon his grave, all that belonged to him
+personally--a habit which we find among all primitive races--must have
+had the same origin. In fact, while everything that belongs personally
+to the dead is burnt or broken upon his grave, nothing is destroyed of
+what belonged to him in common with the tribe, such as boats, or the
+communal implements of fishing. The destruction bears upon personal
+property alone. At a later epoch this habit becomes a religious
+ceremony. It receives a mystical interpretation, and is imposed by
+religion, when public opinion alone proves incapable of enforcing its
+general observance. And, finally, it is substituted by either burning
+simple models of the dead man's property (as in China), or by simply
+carrying his property to the grave and taking it back to his house after
+the burial ceremony is over--a habit which still prevails with the
+Europeans as regards swords, crosses, and other marks of public
+distinction.(31)
+
+The high standard of the tribal morality of the Eskimos has often been
+mentioned in general literature. Nevertheless the following remarks upon
+the manners of the Aleoutes--nearly akin to the Eskimos--will better
+illustrate savage morality as a whole. They were written, after a ten
+years' stay among the Aleoutes, by a most remarkable man--the Russian
+missionary, Veniaminoff. I sum them up, mostly in his own words:--
+
+Endurability (he wrote) is their chief feature. It is simply colossal.
+Not only do they bathe every morning in the frozen sea, and stand naked
+on the beach, inhaling the icy wind, but their endurability, even when
+at hard work on insufficient food, surpasses all that can be imagined.
+During a protracted scarcity of food, the Aleoute cares first for his
+children; he gives them all he has, and himself fasts. They are not
+inclined to stealing; that was remarked even by the first Russian
+immigrants. Not that they never steal; every Aleoute would confess
+having sometime stolen something, but it is always a trifle; the whole
+is so childish. The attachment of the parents to their children is
+touching, though it is never expressed in words or pettings. The Aleoute
+is with difficulty moved to make a promise, but once he has made it he
+will keep it whatever may happen. (An Aleoute made Veniaminoff a gift of
+dried fish, but it was forgotten on the beach in the hurry of the
+departure. He took it home. The next occasion to send it to the
+missionary was in January; and in November and December there was a
+great scarcity of food in the Aleoute encampment. But the fish was never
+touched by the starving people, and in January it was sent to its
+destination.) Their code of morality is both varied and severe. It is
+considered shameful to be afraid of unavoidable death; to ask pardon
+from an enemy; to die without ever having killed an enemy; to be
+convicted of stealing; to capsize a boat in the harbour; to be afraid of
+going to sea in stormy weather; to be the first in a party on a long
+journey to become an invalid in case of scarcity of food; to show
+greediness when spoil is divided, in which case every one gives his own
+part to the greedy man to shame him; to divulge a public secret to his
+wife; being two persons on a hunting expedition, not to offer the best
+game to the partner; to boast of his own deeds, especially of invented
+ones; to scold any one in scorn. Also to beg; to pet his wife in other
+people's presence, and to dance with her to bargain personally: selling
+must always be made through a third person, who settles the price. For a
+woman it is a shame not to know sewing, dancing and all kinds of woman's
+work; to pet her husband and children, or even to speak to her husband
+in the presence of a stranger.(32)
+
+Such is Aleoute morality, which might also be further illustrated by
+their tales and legends. Let me also add that when Veniaminoff wrote (in
+1840) one murder only had been committed since the last century in a
+population of 60,000 people, and that among 1,800 Aleoutes not one
+single common law offence had been known for forty years. This will not
+seem strange if we remark that scolding, scorning, and the use of rough
+words are absolutely unknown in Aleoute life. Even their children never
+fight, and never abuse each other in words. All they may say is, "Your
+mother does not know sewing," or "Your father is blind of one eye."(33)
+
+Many features of savage life remain, however, a puzzle to Europeans. The
+high development of tribal solidarity and the good feelings with which
+primitive folk are animated towards each other, could be illustrated by
+any amount of reliable testimony. And yet it is not the less certain
+that those same savages practise infanticide; that in some cases they
+abandon their old people, and that they blindly obey the rules of
+blood-revenge. We must then explain the coexistence of facts which, to
+the European mind, seem so contradictory at the first sight. I have just
+mentioned how the Aleoute father starves for days and weeks, and gives
+everything eatable to his child; and how the Bushman mother becomes a
+slave to follow her child; and I might fill pages with illustrations of
+the really tender relations existing among the savages and their
+children. Travellers continually mention them incidentally. Here you
+read about the fond love of a mother; there you see a father wildly
+running through the forest and carrying upon his shoulders his child
+bitten by a snake; or a missionary tells you the despair of the parents
+at the loss of a child whom he had saved, a few years before, from being
+immolated at its birth, you learn that the "savage" mothers usually
+nurse their children till the age of four, and that, in the New
+Hebrides, on the loss of a specially beloved child, its mother, or aunt,
+will kill herself to take care of it in the other world.(34) And so on.
+
+Like facts are met with by the score; so that, when we see that these
+same loving parents practise infanticide, we are bound to recognize that
+the habit (whatever its ulterior transformations may be) took its origin
+under the sheer pressure of necessity, as an obligation towards the
+tribe, and a means for rearing the already growing children. The
+savages, as a rule, do not "multiply without stint," as some English
+writers put it. On the contrary, they take all kinds of measures for
+diminishing the birth-rate. A whole series of restrictions, which
+Europeans certainly would find extravagant, are imposed to that effect,
+and they are strictly obeyed. But notwithstanding that, primitive folk
+cannot rear all their children. However, it has been remarked that as
+soon as they succeed in increasing their regular means of subsistence,
+they at once begin to abandon the practice of infanticide. On the whole,
+the parents obey that obligation reluctantly, and as soon as they can
+afford it they resort to all kinds of compromises to save the lives of
+their new-born. As has been so well pointed out by my friend Elie
+Reclus,(35) they invent the lucky and unlucky days of births, and spare
+the children born on the lucky days; they try to postpone the sentence
+for a few hours, and then say that if the baby has lived one day it must
+live all its natural life.(36) They hear the cries of the little ones
+coming from the forest, and maintain that, if heard, they forbode a
+misfortune for the tribe; and as they have no baby-farming nor creches
+for getting rid of the children, every one of them recoils before the
+necessity of performing the cruel sentence; they prefer to expose the
+baby in the wood rather than to take its life by violence. Ignorance,
+not cruelty, maintains infanticide; and, instead of moralizing the
+savages with sermons, the missionaries would do better to follow the
+example of Veniaminoff, who, every year till his old age, crossed the
+sea of Okhotsk in a miserable boat, or travelled on dogs among his
+Tchuktchis, supplying them with bread and fishing implements. He thus
+had really stopped infanticide.
+
+The same is true as regards what superficial observers describe as
+parricide. We just now saw that the habit of abandoning old people is
+not so widely spread as some writers have maintained it to be. It has
+been extremely exaggerated, but it is occasionally met with among nearly
+all savages; and in such cases it has the same origin as the exposure of
+children. When a "savage" feels that he is a burden to his tribe; when
+every morning his share of food is taken from the mouths of the
+children--and the little ones are not so stoical as their fathers: they
+cry when they are hungry; when every day he has to be carried across the
+stony beach, or the virgin forest, on the shoulders of younger people
+there are no invalid carriages, nor destitutes to wheel them in savage
+lands--he begins to repeat what the old Russian peasants say until
+now-a-day. "Tchujoi vek zayedayu, Pora na pokoi!" ("I live other
+people's life: it is time to retire!") And he retires. He does what the
+soldier does in a similar case. When the salvation of his detachment
+depends upon its further advance, and he can move no more, and knows
+that he must die if left behind, the soldier implores his best friend to
+render him the last service before leaving the encampment. And the
+friend, with shivering hands, discharges his gun into the dying body. So
+the savages do. The old man asks himself to die; he himself insists upon
+this last duty towards the community, and obtains the consent of the
+tribe; he digs out his grave; he invites his kinsfolk to the last
+parting meal. His father has done so, it is now his turn; and he parts
+with his kinsfolk with marks of affection. The savage so much considers
+death as part of his duties towards his community, that he not only
+refuses to be rescued (as Moffat has told), but when a woman who had to
+be immolated on her husband's grave was rescued by missionaries, and was
+taken to an island, she escaped in the night, crossed a broad sea-arm,
+swimming and rejoined her tribe, to die on the grave.(37) It has become
+with them a matter of religion. But the savages, as a rule, are so
+reluctant to take any one's life otherwise than in fight, that none of
+them will take upon himself to shed human blood, and they resort to all
+kinds of stratagems, which have been so falsely interpreted. In most
+cases, they abandon the old man in the wood, after having given him more
+than his share of the common food. Arctic expeditions have done the same
+when they no more could carry their invalid comrades. "Live a few days
+more, maybe there will be some unexpected rescue!" West European men of
+science, when coming across these facts, are absolutely unable to stand
+them; they can not reconcile them with a high development of tribal
+morality, and they prefer to cast a doubt upon the exactitude of
+absolutely reliable observers, instead of trying to explain the parallel
+existence of the two sets of facts: a high tribal morality together with
+the abandonment of the parents and infanticide. But if these same
+Europeans were to tell a savage that people, extremely amiable, fond of
+their own children, and so impressionable that they cry when they see a
+misfortune simulated on the stage, are living in Europe within a stone's
+throw from dens in which children die from sheer want of food, the
+savage, too, would not understand them. I remember how vainly I tried to
+make some of my Tungus friends understand our civilization of
+individualism: they could not, and they resorted to the most fantastical
+suggestions. The fact is that a savage, brought up in ideas of a tribal
+solidarity in everything for bad and for good, is as incapable of
+understanding a "moral" European, who knows nothing of that solidarity,
+as the average European is incapable of understanding the savage. But if
+our scientist had lived amidst a half-starving tribe which does not
+possess among them all one man's food for so much as a few days to come,
+he probably might have understood their motives. So also the savage, if
+he had stayed among us, and received our education, may be, would
+understand our European indifference towards our neighbours, and our
+Royal Commissions for the prevention of "babyfarming." "Stone houses
+make stony hearts," the Russian peasants say. But he ought to live in a
+stone house first.
+
+Similar remarks must be made as regards cannibalism. Taking into account
+all the facts which were brought to light during a recent controversy on
+this subject at the Paris Anthropological Society, and many incidental
+remarks scattered throughout the "savage" literature, we are bound to
+recognize that that practice was brought into existence by sheer
+necessity. But that it was further developed by superstition and
+religion into the proportions it attained in Fiji or in Mexico. It is a
+fact that until this day many savages are compelled to devour corpses in
+the most advanced state of putrefaction, and that in cases of absolute
+scarcity some of them have had to disinter and to feed upon human
+corpses, even during an epidemic. These are ascertained facts. But if we
+now transport ourselves to the conditions which man had to face during
+the glacial period, in a damp and cold climate, with but little
+vegetable food at his disposal; if we take into account the terrible
+ravages which scurvy still makes among underfed natives, and remember
+that meat and fresh blood are the only restoratives which they know, we
+must admit that man, who formerly was a granivorous animal, became a
+flesh-eater during the glacial period. He found plenty of deer at that
+time, but deer often migrate in the Arctic regions, and sometimes they
+entirely abandon a territory for a number of years. In such cases his
+last resources disappeared. During like hard trials, cannibalism has
+been resorted to even by Europeans, and it was resorted to by the
+savages. Until the present time, they occasionally devour the corpses of
+their own dead: they must have devoured then the corpses of those who
+had to die. Old people died, convinced that by their death they were
+rendering a last service to the tribe. This is why cannibalism is
+represented by some savages as of divine origin, as something that has
+been ordered by a messenger from the sky. But later on it lost its
+character of necessity, and survived as a superstition. Enemies had to
+be eaten in order to inherit their courage; and, at a still later epoch,
+the enemy's eye or heart was eaten for the same purpose; while among
+other tribes, already having a numerous priesthood and a developed
+mythology, evil gods, thirsty for human blood, were invented, and human
+sacrifices required by the priests to appease the gods. In this
+religious phase of its existence, cannibalism attained its most
+revolting characters. Mexico is a well-known example; and in Fiji, where
+the king could eat any one of his subjects, we also find a mighty cast
+of priests, a complicated theology,(38) and a full development of
+autocracy. Originated by necessity, cannibalism became, at a later
+period, a religious institution, and in this form it survived long after
+it had disappeared from among tribes which certainly practised it in
+former times, but did not attain the theocratical stage of evolution.
+The same remark must be made as regards infanticide and the abandonment
+of parents. In some cases they also have been maintained as a survival
+of olden times, as a religiously-kept tradition of the past.
+
+I will terminate my remarks by mentioning another custom which also is a
+source of most erroneous conclusions. I mean the practice of
+blood-revenge. All savages are under the impression that blood shed must
+be revenged by blood. If any one has been killed, the murderer must die;
+if any one has been wounded, the aggressor's blood must be shed. There
+is no exception to the rule, not even for animals; so the hunter's blood
+is shed on his return to the village when he has shed the blood of an
+animal. That is the savages' conception of justice--a conception which
+yet prevails in Western Europe as regards murder. Now, when both the
+offender and the offended belong to the same tribe, the tribe and the
+offended person settle the affair.(39) But when the offender belongs to
+another tribe, and that tribe, for one reason or another, refuses a
+compensation, then the offended tribe decides to take the revenge
+itself. Primitive folk so much consider every one's acts as a tribal
+affair, dependent upon tribal approval, that they easily think the clan
+responsible for every one's acts. Therefore, the due revenge may be
+taken upon any member of the offender's clan or relatives.(40) It may
+often happen, however, that the retaliation goes further than the
+offence. In trying to inflict a wound, they may kill the offender, or
+wound him more than they intended to do, and this becomes a cause for a
+new feud, so that the primitive legislators were careful in requiring
+the retaliation to be limited to an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
+and blood for blood.(41)
+
+It is remarkable, however, that with most primitive folk like feuds are
+infinitely rarer than might be expected; though with some of them they
+may attain abnormal proportions, especially with mountaineers who have
+been driven to the highlands by foreign invaders, such as the
+mountaineers of Caucasia, and especially those of Borneo--the Dayaks.
+With the Dayaks--we were told lately--the feuds had gone so far that a
+young man could neither marry nor be proclaimed of age before he had
+secured the head of an enemy. This horrid practice was fully described
+in a modern English work.(42) It appears, however, that this affirmation
+was a gross exaggeration. Moreover, Dayak "head-hunting" takes quite
+another aspect when we learn that the supposed "headhunter" is not
+actuated at all by personal passion. He acts under what he considers as
+a moral obligation towards his tribe, just as the European judge who, in
+obedience to the same, evidently wrong, principle of "blood for blood,"
+hands over the condemned murderer to the hangman. Both the Dayak and the
+judge would even feel remorse if sympathy moved them to spare the
+murderer. That is why the Dayaks, apart from the murders they commit
+when actuated by their conception of justice, are depicted, by all those
+who know them, as a most sympathetic people. Thus Carl Bock, the same
+author who has given such a terrible picture of head-hunting, writes:
+
+     "As regards morality, I am bound to assign to the Dayaks a high
+     place in the scale of civilization.... Robberies and theft are
+     entirely unknown among them. They also are very truthful.... If I
+     did not always get the 'whole truth,' I always got, at least,
+     nothing but the truth from them. I wish I could say the same of the
+     Malays" (pp. 209 and 210).
+
+Bock's testimony is fully corroborated by that of Ida Pfeiffer. "I fully
+recognized," she wrote, "that I should be pleased longer to travel among
+them. I usually found them honest, good, and reserved ... much more so
+than any other nation I know."(43) Stoltze used almost the same language
+when speaking of them. The Dayaks usually have but one wife, and treat
+her well. They are very sociable, and every morning the whole clan goes
+out for fishing, hunting, or gardening, in large parties. Their villages
+consist of big huts, each of which is inhabited by a dozen families, and
+sometimes by several hundred persons, peacefully living together. They
+show great respect for their wives, and are fond of their children; and
+when one of them falls ill, the women nurse him in turn. As a rule they
+are very moderate in eating and drinking. Such is the Dayak in his real
+daily life.
+
+It would be a tedious repetition if more illustrations from savage life
+were given. Wherever we go we find the same sociable manners, the same
+spirit of solidarity. And when we endeavour to penetrate into the
+darkness of past ages, we find the same tribal life, the same
+associations of men, however primitive, for mutual support. Therefore,
+Darwin was quite right when he saw in man's social qualities the chief
+factor for his further evolution, and Darwin's vulgarizers are entirely
+wrong when they maintain the contrary.
+
+The small strength and speed of man (he wrote), his want of natural
+weapons, etc., are more than counterbalanced, firstly, by his
+intellectual faculties (which, he remarked on another page, have been
+chiefly or even exclusively gained for the benefit of the community).
+and secondly, by his social qualities, which led him to give and receive
+aid from his fellow men.(44)
+
+In the last century the "savage" and his "life in the state of nature"
+were idealized. But now men of science have gone to the opposite
+extreme, especially since some of them, anxious to prove the animal
+origin of man, but not conversant with the social aspects of animal
+life, began to charge the savage with all imaginable "bestial" features.
+It is evident, however, that this exaggeration is even more unscientific
+than Rousseau's idealization. The savage is not an ideal of virtue, nor
+is he an ideal of "savagery." But the primitive man has one quality,
+elaborated and maintained by the very necessities of his hard struggle
+for life--he identifies his own existence with that of his tribe; and
+without that quality mankind never would have attained the level it has
+attained now.
+
+Primitive folk, as has been already said, so much identify their lives
+with that of the tribe, that each of their acts, however insignificant,
+is considered as a tribal affair. Their whole behaviour is regulated by
+an infinite series of unwritten rules of propriety which are the fruit
+of their common experience as to what is good or bad--that is,
+beneficial or harmful for their own tribe. Of course, the reasonings
+upon which their rules of propriety are based sometimes are absurd in
+the extreme. Many of them originate in superstition; and altogether, in
+whatever the savage does, he sees but the immediate consequences of his
+acts; he cannot foresee their indirect and ulterior consequences--thus
+simply exaggerating a defect with which Bentham reproached civilized
+legislators. But, absurd or not, the savage obeys the prescriptions of
+the common law, however inconvenient they may be. He obeys them even
+more blindly than the civilized man obeys the prescriptions of the
+written law. His common law is his religion; it is his very habit of
+living. The idea of the clan is always present to his mind, and
+self-restriction and self-sacrifice in the interest of the clan are of
+daily occurrence. If the savage has infringed one of the smaller tribal
+rules, he is prosecuted by the mockeries of the women. If the
+infringement is grave, he is tortured day and night by the fear of
+having called a calamity upon his tribe. If he has wounded by accident
+any one of his own clan, and thus has committed the greatest of all
+crimes, he grows quite miserable: he runs away in the woods, and is
+ready to commit suicide, unless the tribe absolves him by inflicting
+upon him a physical pain and sheds some of his own blood.(45) Within the
+tribe everything is shared in common; every morsel of food is divided
+among all present; and if the savage is alone in the woods, he does not
+begin eating before he has loudly shouted thrice an invitation to any
+one who may hear his voice to share his meal.(46)
+
+In short, within the tribe the rule of "each for all" is supreme, so
+long as the separate family has not yet broken up the tribal unity. But
+that rule is not extended to the neighbouring clans, or tribes, even
+when they are federated for mutual protection. Each tribe, or clan, is a
+separate unity. Just as among mammals and birds, the territory is
+roughly allotted among separate tribes, and, except in times of war, the
+boundaries are respected. On entering the territory of his neighbours
+one must show that he has no bad intentions. The louder one heralds his
+coming, the more confidence he wins; and if he enters a house, he must
+deposit his hatchet at the entrance. But no tribe is bound to share its
+food with the others: it may do so or it may not. Therefore the life of
+the savage is divided into two sets of actions, and appears under two
+different ethical aspects: the relations within the tribe, and the
+relations with the outsiders; and (like our international law) the
+"inter-tribal" law widely differs from the common law. Therefore, when
+it comes to a war the most revolting cruelties may be considered as so
+many claims upon the admiration of the tribe. This double conception of
+morality passes through the whole evolution of mankind, and maintains
+itself until now. We Europeans have realized some progress--not immense,
+at any rate--in eradicating that double conception of ethics; but it
+also must be said that while we have in some measure extended our ideas
+of solidarity--in theory, at least--over the nation, and partly over
+other nations as well, we have lessened the bonds of solidarity within
+our own nations, and even within our own families.
+
+The appearance of a separate family amidst the clan necessarily disturbs
+the established unity. A separate family means separate property and
+accumulation of wealth. We saw how the Eskimos obviate its
+inconveniences; and it is one of the most interesting studies to follow
+in the course of ages the different institutions (village communities,
+guilds, and so on) by means of which the masses endeavoured to maintain
+the tribal unity, notwithstanding the agencies which were at work to
+break it down. On the other hand, the first rudiments of knowledge which
+appeared at an extremely remote epoch, when they confounded themselves
+with witchcraft, also became a power in the hands of the individual
+which could be used against the tribe. They were carefully kept in
+secrecy, and transmitted to the initiated only, in the secret societies
+of witches, shamans, and priests, which we find among all savages. By
+the same time, wars and invasions created military authority, as also
+castes of warriors, whose associations or clubs acquired great powers.
+However, at no period of man's life were wars the normal state of
+existence. While warriors exterminated each other, and the priests
+celebrated their massacres, the masses continued to live their daily
+life, they prosecuted their daily toil. And it is one of the most
+interesting studies to follow that life of the masses; to study the
+means by which they maintained their own social organization, which was
+based upon their own conceptions of equity, mutual aid, and mutual
+support--of common law, in a word, even when they were submitted to the
+most ferocious theocracy or autocracy in the State.
+
+NOTES:
+
+1. Nineteenth Century, February 1888, p. 165.
+
+2. The Descent of Man, end of ch. ii. pp. 63 and 64 of the 2nd edition.
+
+3. Anthropologists who fully endorse the above views as regards man
+nevertheless intimate, sometimes, that the apes live in polygamous
+families, under the leadership of "a strong and jealous male." I do not
+know how far that assertion is based upon conclusive observation. But
+the passage from Brehm's Life of Animals, which is sometimes referred
+to, can hardly be taken as very conclusive. It occurs in his general
+description of monkeys; but his more detailed descriptions of separate
+species either contradict it or do not confirm it. Even as regards the
+cercopitheques, Brehm is affirmative in saying that they "nearly always
+live in bands, and very seldom in families" (French edition, p. 59). As
+to other species, the very numbers of their bands, always containing
+many males, render the "polygamous family" more than doubtful further
+observation is evidently wanted.
+
+4. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, fifth edition, 1890.
+
+5. That extension of the ice-cap is admitted by most of the geologists
+who have specially studied the glacial age. The Russian Geological
+Survey already has taken this view as regards Russia, and most German
+specialists maintain it as regards Germany. The glaciation of most of
+the central plateau of France will not fail to be recognized by the
+French geologists, when they pay more attention to the glacial deposits
+altogether.
+
+6. Prehistoric Times, pp. 232 and 242.
+
+7. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, 1861; Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient
+Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery
+through Barbarism to Civilization, New York, 1877; J.F. MacLennan,
+Studies in Ancient History, 1st series, new edition, 1886; 2nd series,
+1896; L. Fison and A.W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, Melbourne. These
+four writers--as has been very truly remarked by Giraud
+Teulon,--starting from different facts and different general ideas, and
+following different methods, have come to the same conclusion. To
+Bachofen we owe the notion of the maternal family and the maternal
+succession; to Morgan--the system of kinship, Malayan and Turanian, and
+a highly gifted sketch of the main phases of human evolution; to
+MacLennan--the law of exogeny; and to Fison and Howitt--the cuadro, or
+scheme, of the conjugal societies in Australia. All four end in
+establishing the same fact of the tribal origin of the family. When
+Bachofen first drew attention to the maternal family, in his
+epoch-making work, and Morgan described the clan-organization,--both
+concurring to the almost general extension of these forms and
+maintaining that the marriage laws lie at the very basis of the
+consecutive steps of human evolution, they were accused of exaggeration.
+However, the most careful researches prosecuted since, by a phalanx of
+students of ancient law, have proved that all races of mankind bear
+traces of having passed through similar stages of development of
+marriage laws, such as we now see in force among certain savages. See
+the works of Post, Dargun, Kovalevsky, Lubbock, and their numerous
+followers: Lippert, Mucke, etc.
+
+8. None
+
+9. For the Semites and the Aryans, see especially Prof. Maxim
+Kovalevsky's Primitive Law (in Russian), Moscow, 1886 and 1887. Also his
+Lectures delivered at Stockholm (Tableau des origines et de l'evolution
+de la famille et de la propriete, Stockholm, 1890), which represents an
+admirable review of the whole question. Cf. also A. Post, Die
+Geschlechtsgenossenschaft der Urzeit, Oldenburg 1875.
+
+10. It would be impossible to enter here into a discussion of the origin
+of the marriage restrictions. Let me only remark that a division into
+groups, similar to Morgan's Hawaian, exists among birds; the young
+broods live together separately from their parents. A like division
+might probably be traced among some mammals as well. As to the
+prohibition of relations between brothers and sisters, it is more likely
+to have arisen, not from speculations about the bad effects of
+consanguinity, which speculations really do not seem probable, but to
+avoid the too-easy precocity of like marriages. Under close cohabitation
+it must have become of imperious necessity. I must also remark that in
+discussing the origin of new customs altogether, we must keep in mind
+that the savages, like us, have their "thinkers" and savants-wizards,
+doctors, prophets, etc.--whose knowledge and ideas are in advance upon
+those of the masses. United as they are in their secret unions (another
+almost universal feature) they are certainly capable of exercising a
+powerful influence, and of enforcing customs the utility of which may
+not yet be recognized by the majority of the tribe.
+
+11. Col. Collins, in Philips' Researches in South Africa, London, 1828.
+Quoted by Waitz, ii. 334.
+
+12. Lichtenstein's Reisen im sudlichen Afrika, ii. Pp. 92, 97. Berlin,
+1811.
+
+13. Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, ii. pp. 335 seq. See also
+Fritsch's Die Eingeboren Süd-Afrika's, Breslau, 1872, pp. 386 seq.; and
+Drei Jahre in Süd-Afrika. Also W. Bleck, A Brief Account of Bushmen
+Folklore, Capetown, 1875.
+
+14. Elisee Reclus, Geographie Universelle, xiii. 475.
+
+15. P. Kolben, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope, translated
+from the German by Mr. Medley, London, 1731, vol. i. pp. 59, 71, 333,
+336, etc.
+
+16. Quoted in Waitz's Anthropologie, ii. 335 seq.
+
+17. The natives living in the north of Sidney, and speaking the
+Kamilaroi language, are best known under this aspect, through the
+capital work of Lorimer Fison and A.W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnaii,
+Melbourne, 1880. See also A.W. Howitt's "Further Note on the Australian
+Class Systems," in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1889, vol.
+xviii. p. 31, showing the wide extension of the same organization in
+Australia.
+
+18. The Folklore, Manners, etc., of Australian Aborigines, Adelaide,
+1879, p. 11.
+
+19. Grey's Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and
+Western Australia, London, 1841, vol. ii. pp. 237, 298.
+
+20. Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropologie, 1888, vol. xi. p. 652. I
+abridge the answers.
+
+21. Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropologie, 1888, vol. xi. p. 386.
+
+22. The same is the practice with the Papuas of Kaimani Bay, who have a
+high reputation of honesty. "It never happens that the Papua be untrue
+to his promise," Finsch says in Neuguinea und seine Bewohner, Bremen,
+1865, p. 829.
+
+23. Izvestia of the Russian Geographical Society, 1880, pp. 161 seq. Few
+books of travel give a better insight into the petty details of the
+daily life of savages than these scraps from Maklay's notebooks.
+
+24. L.F. Martial, in Mission Scientifique au Cap Horn, Paris, 1883, vol.
+i. pp. 183-201.
+
+25. Captain Holm's Expedition to East Greenland.
+
+26. In Australia whole clans have been seen exchanging all their wives,
+in order to conjure a calamity (Post, Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte
+des Familienrechts, 1890, p. 342). More brotherhood is their specific
+against calamities.
+
+27. Dr. H. Rink, The Eskimo Tribes, p. 26 (Meddelelser om Gronland, vol.
+xi. 1887).
+
+28. Dr. Rink, loc. cit. p. 24. Europeans, grown in the respect of Roman
+law, are seldom capable of understanding that force of tribal authority.
+"In fact," Dr. Rink writes, "it is not the exception, but the rule, that
+white men who have stayed for ten or twenty years among the Eskimo,
+return without any real addition to their knowledge of the traditional
+ideas upon which their social state is based. The white man, whether a
+missionary or a trader, is firm in his dogmatic opinion that the most
+vulgar European is better than the most distinguished native."--The
+Eskimo Tribes, p. 31.
+
+29. Dall, Alaska and its Resources, Cambridge, U.S., 1870.
+
+30. Dall saw it in Alaska, Jacobsen at Ignitok in the vicinity of the
+Bering Strait. Gilbert Sproat mentions it among the Vancouver indians;
+and Dr. Rink, who describes the periodical exhibitions just mentioned,
+adds: "The principal use of the accumulation of personal wealth is for
+periodically distributing it." He also mentions (loc. cit. p. 31) "the
+destruction of property for the same purpose," (of maintaining
+equality).
+
+31. See Appendix VIII.
+
+32. Veniaminoff, Memoirs relative to the District of Unalashka
+(Russian), 3 vols. St. Petersburg, 1840. Extracts, in English, from the
+above are given in Dall's Alaska. A like description of the Australians'
+morality is given in Nature, xlii. p. 639.
+
+33. It is most remarkable that several writers (Middendorff, Schrenk, O.
+Finsch) described the Ostyaks and Samoyedes in almost the same words.
+Even when drunken, their quarrels are insignificant. "For a hundred
+years one single murder has been committed in the tundra;" "their
+children never fight;" "anything may be left for years in the tundra,
+even food and gin, and nobody will touch it;" and so on. Gilbert Sproat
+"never witnessed a fight between two sober natives" of the Aht Indians
+of Vancouver Island. "Quarrelling is also rare among their children."
+(Rink, loc. cit.) And so on.
+
+34. Gill, quoted in Gerland and Waitz's Anthropologie, v. 641. See also
+pp. 636-640, where many facts of parental and filial love are quoted.
+
+35. Primitive Folk, London, 1891.
+
+36. Gerland, loc. cit. v. 636.
+
+37. Erskine, quoted in Gerland and Waitz's Anthropologie, v. 640.
+
+38. W.T. Pritchard, Polynesian Reminiscences, London, 1866, p. 363.
+
+39. It is remarkable, however, that in case of a sentence of death,
+nobody will take upon himself to be the executioner. Every one throws
+his stone, or gives his blow with the hatchet, carefully avoiding to
+give a mortal blow. At a later epoch, the priest will stab the victim
+with a sacred knife. Still later, it will be the king, until
+civilization invents the hired hangman. See Bastian's deep remarks upon
+this subject in Der Mensch in der Geschichte, iii. Die Blutrache, pp.
+1-36. A remainder of this tribal habit, I am told by Professor E. Nys,
+has survived in military executions till our own times. In the middle
+portion of the nineteenth century it was the habit to load the rifles of
+the twelve soldiers called out for shooting the condemned victim, with
+eleven ball-cartridges and one blank cartridge. As the soldiers never
+knew who of them had the latter, each one could console his disturbed
+conscience by thinking that he was not one of the murderers.
+
+40. In Africa, and elsewhere too, it is a widely-spread habit, that if a
+theft has been committed, the next clan has to restore the equivalent of
+the stolen thing, and then look itself for the thief. A. H. Post,
+Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Leipzig, 1887, vol. i. p. 77.
+
+41. See Prof. M. Kovalevsky's Modern Customs and Ancient Law (Russian),
+Moscow, 1886, vol. ii., which contains many important considerations
+upon this subject.
+
+42. See Carl Bock, The Head Hunters of Borneo, London, 1881. I am told,
+however, by Sir Hugh Law, who was for a long time Governor of Borneo,
+that the "head-hunting" described in this book is grossly exaggerated.
+Altogether, my informant speaks of the Dayaks in exactly the same
+sympathetic terms as Ida Pfeiffer. Let me add that Mary Kingsley speaks
+in her book on West Africa in the same sympathetic terms of the Fans,
+who had been represented formerly as the most "terrible cannibals."
+
+43. Ida Pfeiffer, Meine zweite Weltriese, Wien, 1856, vol. i. pp. 116
+seq. See also Muller and Temminch's Dutch Possessions in Archipelagic
+India, quoted by Elisee Reclus, in Geographie Universelle, xiii.
+
+44. Descent of Man, second ed., pp. 63, 64.
+
+45. See Bastian's Mensch in der Geschichte, iii. p. 7. Also Grey, loc.
+cit. ii. p. 238.
+
+46. Miklukho-Maclay, loc. cit. Same habit with the Hottentots.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+MUTUAL AID AMONG THE BARBARIANS
+
+The great migrations. New organization rendered necessary. The village
+community. Communal work. Judicial procedure. Inter-tribal law.
+Illustrations from the life of our contemporaries. Buryates. Kabyles.
+Caucasian mountaineers. African stems.
+
+
+It is not possible to study primitive mankind without being deeply
+impressed by the sociability it has displayed since its very first steps
+in life. Traces of human societies are found in the relics of both the
+oldest and the later stone age; and, when we come to observe the savages
+whose manners of life are still those of neolithic man, we find them
+closely bound together by an extremely ancient clan organization which
+enables them to combine their individually weak forces, to enjoy life in
+common, and to progress. Man is no exception in nature. He also is
+subject to the great principle of Mutual Aid which grants the best
+chances of survival to those who best support each other in the struggle
+for life. These were the conclusions arrived at in the previous
+chapters.
+
+However, as soon as we come to a higher stage of civilization, and refer
+to history which already has something to say about that stage, we are
+bewildered by the struggles and conflicts which it reveals. The old
+bonds seem entirely to be broken. Stems are seen to fight against stems,
+tribes against tribes, individuals against individuals; and out of this
+chaotic contest of hostile forces, mankind issues divided into castes,
+enslaved to despots, separated into States always ready to wage war
+against each other. And, with this history of mankind in his hands, the
+pessimist philosopher triumphantly concludes that warfare and oppression
+are the very essence of human nature; that the warlike and predatory
+instincts of man can only be restrained within certain limits by a
+strong authority which enforces peace and thus gives an opportunity to
+the few and nobler ones to prepare a better life for humanity in times
+to come.
+
+And yet, as soon as the every-day life of man during the historical
+period is submitted to a closer analysis and so it has been, of late, by
+many patient students of very early institutions--it appears at once
+under quite a different aspect. Leaving aside the preconceived ideas of
+most historians and their pronounced predilection for the dramatic
+aspects of history, we see that the very documents they habitually
+peruse are such as to exaggerate the part of human life given to
+struggles and to underrate its peaceful moods. The bright and sunny days
+are lost sight of in the gales and storms. Even in our own time, the
+cumbersome records which we prepare for the future historian, in our
+Press, our law courts, our Government offices, and even in our fiction
+and poetry, suffer from the same one-sidedness. They hand down to
+posterity the most minute descriptions of every war, every battle and
+skirmish, every contest and act of violence, every kind of individual
+suffering; but they hardly bear any trace of the countless acts of
+mutual support and devotion which every one of us knows from his own
+experience; they hardly take notice of what makes the very essence of
+our daily life--our social instincts and manners. No wonder, then, if
+the records of the past were so imperfect. The annalists of old never
+failed to chronicle the petty wars and calamities which harassed their
+contemporaries; but they paid no attention whatever to the life of the
+masses, although the masses chiefly used to toil peacefully while the
+few indulged in fighting. The epic poems, the inscriptions on monuments,
+the treaties of peace--nearly all historical documents bear the same
+character; they deal with breaches of peace, not with peace itself. So
+that the best-intentioned historian unconsciously draws a distorted
+picture of the times he endeavours to depict; and, to restore the real
+proportion between conflict and union, we are now bound to enter into a
+minute analysis of thousands of small facts and faint indications
+accidentally preserved in the relics of the past; to interpret them with
+the aid of comparative ethnology; and, after having heard so much about
+what used to divide men, to reconstruct stone by stone the institutions
+which used to unite them.
+
+Ere long history will have to be re-written on new lines, so as to take
+into account these two currents of human life and to appreciate the part
+played by each of them in evolution. But in the meantime we may avail
+ourselves of the immense preparatory work recently done towards
+restoring the leading features of the second current, so much neglected.
+From the better-known periods of history we may take some illustrations
+of the life of the masses, in order to indicate the part played by
+mutual support during those periods; and, in so doing, we may dispense
+(for the sake of brevity) from going as far back as the Egyptian, or
+even the Greek and Roman antiquity. For, in fact, the evolution of
+mankind has not had the character of one unbroken series. Several times
+civilization came to an end in one given region, with one given race,
+and began anew elsewhere, among other races. But at each fresh start it
+began again with the same clan institutions which we have seen among the
+savages. So that if we take the last start of our own civilization, when
+it began afresh in the first centuries of our era, among those whom the
+Romans called the "barbarians," we shall have the whole scale of
+evolution, beginning with the gentes and ending in the institutions of
+our own time. To these illustrations the following pages will be
+devoted.
+
+Men of science have not yet settled upon the causes which some two
+thousand years ago drove whole nations from Asia into Europe and
+resulted in the great migrations of barbarians which put an end to the
+West Roman Empire. One cause, however, is naturally suggested to the
+geographer as he contemplates the ruins of populous cities in the
+deserts of Central Asia, or follows the old beds of rivers now
+disappeared and the wide outlines of lakes now reduced to the size of
+mere ponds. It is desiccation: a quite recent desiccation, continued
+still at a speed which we formerly were not prepared to admit.(1)
+Against it man was powerless. When the inhabitants of North-West
+Mongolia and East Turkestan saw that water was abandoning them, they had
+no course open to them but to move down the broad valleys leading to the
+lowlands, and to thrust westwards the inhabitants of the plains.(2)
+Stems after stems were thus thrown into Europe, compelling other stems
+to move and to remove for centuries in succession, westwards and
+eastwards, in search of new and more or less permanent abodes. Races
+were mixing with races during those migrations, aborigines with
+immigrants, Aryans with Ural-Altayans; and it would have been no wonder
+if the social institutions which had kept them together in their mother
+countries had been totally wrecked during the stratification of races
+which took place in Europe and Asia. But they were not wrecked; they
+simply underwent the modification which was required by the new
+conditions of life.
+
+The Teutons, the Celts, the Scandinavians, the Slavonians, and others,
+when they first came in contact with the Romans, were in a transitional
+state of social organization. The clan unions, based upon a real or
+supposed common origin, had kept them together for many thousands of
+years in succession. But these unions could answer their purpose so long
+only as there were no separate families within the gens or clan itself.
+However, for causes already mentioned, the separate patriarchal family
+had slowly but steadily developed within the clans, and in the long run
+it evidently meant the individual accumulation of wealth and power, and
+the hereditary transmission of both. The frequent migrations of the
+barbarians and the ensuing wars only hastened the division of the gentes
+into separate families, while the dispersing of stems and their mingling
+with strangers offered singular facilities for the ultimate
+disintegration of those unions which were based upon kinship. The
+barbarians thus stood in a position of either seeing their clans
+dissolved into loose aggregations of families, of which the wealthiest,
+especially if combining sacerdotal functions or military repute with
+wealth, would have succeeded in imposing their authority upon the
+others; or of finding out some new form of organization based upon some
+new principle.
+
+Many stems had no force to resist disintegration: they broke up and were
+lost for history. But the more vigorous ones did not disintegrate. They
+came out of the ordeal with a new organization--the village
+community--which kept them together for the next fifteen centuries or
+more. The conception of a common territory, appropriated or protected by
+common efforts, was elaborated, and it took the place of the vanishing
+conceptions of common descent. The common gods gradually lost their
+character of ancestors and were endowed with a local territorial
+character. They became the gods or saints of a given locality; "the
+land" was identified with its inhabitants. Territorial unions grew up
+instead of the consanguine unions of old, and this new organization
+evidently offered many advantages under the given circumstances. It
+recognized the independence of the family and even emphasized it, the
+village community disclaiming all rights of interference in what was
+going on within the family enclosure; it gave much more freedom to
+personal initiative; it was not hostile in principle to union between
+men of different descent, and it maintained at the same time the
+necessary cohesion of action and thought, while it was strong enough to
+oppose the dominative tendencies of the minorities of wizards, priests,
+and professional or distinguished warriors. Consequently it became the
+primary cell of future organization, and with many nations the village
+community has retained this character until now.
+
+It is now known, and scarcely contested, that the village community was
+not a specific feature of the Slavonians, nor even of the ancient
+Teutons. It prevailed in England during both the Saxon and Norman times,
+and partially survived till the last century;(3) it was at the bottom of
+the social organization of old Scotland, old Ireland, and old Wales. In
+France, the communal possession and the communal allotment of arable
+land by the village folkmote persisted from the first centuries of our
+era till the times of Turgot, who found the folkmotes "too noisy" and
+therefore abolished them. It survived Roman rule in Italy, and revived
+after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was the rule with the
+Scandinavians, the Slavonians, the Finns (in the pittaya, as also,
+probably, the kihla-kunta), the Coures, and the lives. The village
+community in India--past and present, Aryan and non-Aryan--is well known
+through the epoch-making works of Sir Henry Maine; and Elphinstone has
+described it among the Afghans. We also find it in the Mongolian oulous,
+the Kabyle thaddart, the Javanese dessa, the Malayan kota or tofa, and
+under a variety of names in Abyssinia, the Soudan, in the interior of
+Africa, with natives of both Americas, with all the small and large
+tribes of the Pacific archipelagoes. In short, we do not know one single
+human race or one single nation which has not had its period of village
+communities. This fact alone disposes of the theory according to which
+the village community in Europe would have been a servile growth. It is
+anterior to serfdom, and even servile submission was powerless to break
+it. It was a universal phase of evolution, a natural outcome of the clan
+organization, with all those stems, at least, which have played, or play
+still, some part in history.(4)
+
+It was a natural growth, and an absolute uniformity in its structure was
+therefore not possible. As a rule, it was a union between families
+considered as of common descent and owning a certain territory in
+common. But with some stems, and under certain circumstances, the
+families used to grow very numerous before they threw off new buds in
+the shape of new families; five, six, or seven generations continued to
+live under the same roof, or within the same enclosure, owning their
+joint household and cattle in common, and taking their meals at the
+common hearth. They kept in such case to what ethnology knows as the
+"joint family," or the "undivided household," which we still see all
+over China, in India, in the South Slavonian zadruga, and occasionally
+find in Africa, in America, in Denmark, in North Russia, and West
+France.(5) With other stems, or in other circumstances, not yet well
+specified, the families did not attain the same proportions; the
+grandsons, and occasionally the sons, left the household as soon as they
+were married, and each of them started a new cell of his own. But, joint
+or not, clustered together or scattered in the woods, the families
+remained united into village communities; several villages were grouped
+into tribes; and the tribes joined into confederations. Such was the
+social organization which developed among the so-called "barbarians,"
+when they began to settle more or less permanently in Europe.
+
+A very long evolution was required before the gentes, or clans,
+recognized the separate existence of a patriarchal family in a separate
+hut; but even after that had been recognized, the clan, as a rule, knew
+no personal inheritance of property. The few things which might have
+belonged personally to the individual were either destroyed on his grave
+or buried with him. The village community, on the contrary, fully
+recognized the private accumulation of wealth within the family and its
+hereditary transmission. But wealth was conceived exclusively in the
+shape of movable property, including cattle, implements, arms, and the
+dwelling house which--"like all things that can be destroyed by
+fire"--belonged to the same category(6). As to private property in land,
+the village community did not, and could not, recognize anything of the
+kind, and, as a rule, it does not recognize it now. The land was the
+common property of the tribe, or of the whole stem, and the village
+community itself owned its part of the tribal territory so long only as
+the tribe did not claim a re-distribution of the village allotments. The
+clearing of the woods and the breaking of the prairies being mostly done
+by the communities or, at least, by the joint work of several
+families--always with the consent of the community--the cleared plots
+were held by each family for a term of four, twelve, or twenty years,
+after which term they were treated as parts of the arable land owned in
+common. Private property, or possession "for ever" was as incompatible,
+with the very principles and the religious conceptions of the village
+community as it was with the principles of the gens; so that a long
+influence of the Roman law and the Christian Church, which soon accepted
+the Roman principles, were required to accustom the barbarians to the
+idea of private property in land being possible.(7) And yet, even when
+such property, or possession for an unlimited time, was recognized, the
+owner of a separate estate remained a co-proprietor in the waste lands,
+forests, and grazing-grounds. Moreover, we continually see, especially
+in the history of Russia, that when a few families, acting separately,
+had taken possession of some land belonging to tribes which were treated
+as strangers, they very soon united together, and constituted a village
+community which in the third or fourth generation began to profess a
+community of origin.
+
+A whole series of institutions, partly inherited from the clan period,
+have developed from that basis of common ownership of land during the
+long succession of centuries which was required to bring the barbarians
+under the dominion of States organized upon the Roman or Byzantine
+pattern. The village community was not only a union for guaranteeing to
+each one his fair share in the common land, but also a union for common
+culture, for mutual support in all possible forms, for protection from
+violence, and for a further development of knowledge, national bonds,
+and moral conceptions; and every change in the judicial, military,
+educational, or economical manners had to be decided at the folkmotes of
+the village, the tribe, or the confederation. The community being a
+continuation of the gens, it inherited all its functions. It was the
+universitas, the mir--a world in itself.
+
+Common hunting, common fishing, and common culture of the orchards or
+the plantations of fruit trees was the rule with the old gentes. Common
+agriculture became the rule in the barbarian village communities. True,
+that direct testimony to this effect is scarce, and in the literature of
+antiquity we only have the passages of Diodorus and Julius Caesar
+relating to the inhabitants of the Lipari Islands, one of the
+Celt-Iberian tribes, and the Sueves. But there is no lack of evidence to
+prove that common agriculture was practised among some Teuton tribes,
+the Franks, and the old Scotch, Irish, and Welsh.(8) As to the later
+survivals of the same practice, they simply are countless. Even in
+perfectly Romanized France, common culture was habitual some five and
+twenty years ago in the Morbihan (Brittany).(9) The old Welsh cyvar, or
+joint team, as well as the common culture of the land allotted to the
+use of the village sanctuary are quite common among the tribes of
+Caucasus the least touched by civilization,(10) and like facts are of
+daily occurrence among the Russian peasants. Moreover, it is well known
+that many tribes of Brazil, Central America, and Mexico used to
+cultivate their fields in common, and that the same habit is widely
+spread among some Malayans, in New Caledonia, with several Negro stems,
+and so on.(11) In short, communal culture is so habitual with many
+Aryan, Ural-Altayan, Mongolian, Negro, Red Indian, Malayan, and
+Melanesian stems that we must consider it as a universal--though not as
+the only possible--form of primitive agriculture.(12)
+
+Communal cultivation does not, however, imply by necessity communal
+consumption. Already under the clan organization we often see that when
+the boats laden with fruits or fish return to the village, the food they
+bring in is divided among the huts and the "long houses" inhabited by
+either several families or the youth, and is cooked separately at each
+separate hearth. The habit of taking meals in a narrower circle of
+relatives or associates thus prevails at an early period of clan life.
+It became the rule in the village community. Even the food grown in
+common was usually divided between the households after part of it had
+been laid in store for communal use. However, the tradition of communal
+meals was piously kept alive; every available opportunity, such as the
+commemoration of the ancestors, the religious festivals, the beginning
+and the end of field work, the births, the marriages, and the funerals,
+being seized upon to bring the community to a common meal. Even now this
+habit, well known in this country as the "harvest supper," is the last
+to disappear. On the other hand, even when the fields had long since
+ceased to be tilled and sown in common, a variety of agricultural work
+continued, and continues still, to be performed by the community. Some
+part of the communal land is still cultivated in many cases in common,
+either for the use of the destitute, or for refilling the communal
+stores, or for using the produce at the religious festivals. The
+irrigation canals are digged and repaired in common. The communal
+meadows are mown by the community; and the sight of a Russian commune
+mowing a meadow--the men rivalling each other in their advance with the
+scythe, while the women turn the grass over and throw it up into
+heaps--is one of the most inspiring sights; it shows what human work
+might be and ought to be. The hay, in such case, is divided among the
+separate households, and it is evident that no one has the right of
+taking hay from a neighbour's stack without his permission; but the
+limitation of this last rule among the Caucasian Ossetes is most
+noteworthy. When the cuckoo cries and announces that spring is coming,
+and that the meadows will soon be clothed again with grass, every one in
+need has the right of taking from a neighbour's stack the hay he wants
+for his cattle.(13) The old communal rights are thus re-asserted, as if
+to prove how contrary unbridled individualism is to human nature.
+
+When the European traveller lands in some small island of the Pacific,
+and, seeing at a distance a grove of palm trees, walks in that
+direction, he is astonished to discover that the little villages are
+connected by roads paved with big stones, quite comfortable for the
+unshod natives, and very similar to the "old roads" of the Swiss
+mountains. Such roads were traced by the "barbarians" all over Europe,
+and one must have travelled in wild, thinly-peopled countries, far away
+from the chief lines of communication, to realize in full the immense
+work that must have been performed by the barbarian communities in order
+to conquer the woody and marshy wilderness which Europe was some two
+thousand years ago. Isolated families, having no tools, and weak as they
+were, could not have conquered it; the wilderness would have overpowered
+them. Village communities alone, working in common, could master the
+wild forests, the sinking marshes, and the endless steppes. The rough
+roads, the ferries, the wooden bridges taken away in the winter and
+rebuilt after the spring flood was over, the fences and the palisaded
+walls of the villages, the earthen forts and the small towers with which
+the territory was dottedall these were the work of the barbarian
+communities. And when a community grew numerous it used to throw off a
+new bud. A new community arose at a distance, thus step by step bringing
+the woods and the steppes under the dominion of man. The whole making of
+European nations was such a budding of the village communities. Even
+now-a-days the Russian peasants, if they are not quite broken down by
+misery, migrate in communities, and they till the soil and build the
+houses in com mon when they settle on the banks of the Amur, or in
+Manitoba. And even the English, when they first began to colonize
+America, used to return to the old system; they grouped into village
+communities.(14)
+
+The village community was the chief arm of the barbarians in their hard
+struggle against a hostile nature. It also was the bond they opposed to
+oppression by the cunningest and the strongest which so easily might
+have developed during those disturbed times. The imaginary
+barbarian--the man who fights and kills at his mere caprice--existed no
+more than the "bloodthirsty" savage. The real barbarian was living, on
+the contrary, under a wide series of institutions, imbued with
+considerations as to what may be useful or noxious to his tribe or
+confederation, and these institutions were piously handed down from
+generation to generation in verses and songs, in proverbs or triads, in
+sentences and instructions. The more we study them the more we recognize
+the narrow bonds which united men in their villages. Every quarrel
+arising between two individuals was treated as a communal affair--even
+the offensive words that might have been uttered during a quarrel being
+considered as an offence to the community and its ancestors. They had to
+be repaired by amends made both to the individual and the community;(15)
+and if a quarrel ended in a fight and wounds, the man who stood by and
+did not interpose was treated as if he himself had inflicted the
+wounds.(16) The judicial procedure was imbued with the same spirit.
+Every dispute was brought first before mediators or arbiters, and it
+mostly ended with them, the arbiters playing a very important part in
+barbarian society. But if the case was too grave to be settled in this
+way, it came before the folkmote, which was bound "to find the
+sentence," and pronounced it in a conditional form; that is, "such
+compensation was due, if the wrong be proved," and the wrong had to be
+proved or disclaimed by six or twelve persons confirming or denying the
+fact by oath; ordeal being resorted to in case of contradiction between
+the two sets of jurors. Such procedure, which remained in force for more
+than two thousand years in succession, speaks volumes for itself; it
+shows how close were the bonds between all members of the community.
+Moreover, there was no other authority to enforce the decisions of the
+folkmote besides its own moral authority. The only possible menace was
+that the community might declare the rebel an outlaw, but even this
+menace was reciprocal. A man discontented with the folkmote could
+declare that he would abandon the tribe and go over to another tribe--a
+most dreadful menace, as it was sure to bring all kinds of misfortunes
+upon a tribe that might have been unfair to one of its members.(17) A
+rebellion against a right decision of the customary law was simply
+"inconceivable," as Henry Maine has so well said, because "law,
+morality, and fact" could not be separated from each other in those
+times.(18) The moral authority of the commune was so great that even at
+a much later epoch, when the village communities fell into submission to
+the feudal lord, they maintained their judicial powers; they only
+permitted the lord, or his deputy, to "find" the above conditional
+sentence in accordance with the customary law he had sworn to follow,
+and to levy for himself the fine (the fred) due to the commune. But for
+a long time, the lord himself, if he remained a co-proprietor in the
+waste land of the commune, submitted in communal affairs to its
+decisions. Noble or ecclesiastic, he had to submit to the folkmote--Wer
+daselbst Wasser und Weid genusst, muss gehorsam sein--"Who enjoys here
+the right of water and pasture must obey"--was the old saying. Even when
+the peasants became serfs under the lord, he was bound to appear before
+the folkmote when they summoned him.(19)
+
+In their conceptions of justice the barbarians evidently did not much
+differ from the savages. They also maintained the idea that a murder
+must be followed by putting the murderer to death; that wounds had to be
+punished by equal wounds, and that the wronged family was bound to
+fulfil the sentence of the customary law. This was a holy duty, a duty
+towards the ancestors, which had to be accomplished in broad daylight,
+never in secrecy, and rendered widely known. Therefore the most inspired
+passages of the sagas and epic poetry altogether are those which glorify
+what was supposed to be justice. The gods themselves joined in aiding
+it. However, the predominant feature of barbarian justice is, on the one
+hand, to limit the numbers of persons who may be involved in a feud,
+and, on the other hand, to extirpate the brutal idea of blood for blood
+and wounds for wounds, by substituting for it the system of
+compensation. The barbarian codes which were collections of common law
+rules written down for the use of judges--"first permitted, then
+encouraged, and at last enforced," compensation instead of revenge.(20)
+The compensation has, however, been totally misunderstood by those who
+represented it as a fine, and as a sort of carte blanche given to the
+rich man to do whatever he liked. The compensation money (wergeld),
+which was quite different from the fine or fred,(21) was habitually so
+high for all kinds of active offences that it certainly was no
+encouragement for such offences. In case of a murder it usually exceeded
+all the possible fortune of the murderer "Eighteen times eighteen cows"
+is the compensation with the Ossetes who do not know how to reckon above
+eighteen, while with the African tribes it attains 800 cows or 100
+camels with their young, or 416 sheep in the poorer tribes.(22) In the
+great majority of cases, the compensation money could not be paid at
+all, so that the murderer had no issue but to induce the wronged family,
+by repentance, to adopt him. Even now, in the Caucasus, when feuds come
+to an end, the offender touches with his lips the breast of the oldest
+woman of the tribe, and becomes a "milk-brother" to all men of the
+wronged family.(23) With several African tribes he must give his
+daughter, or sister, in marriage to some one of the family; with other
+tribes he is bound to marry the woman whom he has made a widow; and in
+all cases he becomes a member of the family, whose opinion is taken in
+all important family matters.(24)
+
+Far from acting with disregard to human life, the barbarians, moreover,
+knew nothing of the horrid punishments introduced at a later epoch by
+the laic and canonic laws under Roman and Byzantine influence. For, if
+the Saxon code admitted the death penalty rather freely even in cases of
+incendiarism and armed robbery, the other barbarian codes pronounced it
+exclusively in cases of betrayal of one's kin, and sacrilege against the
+community's gods, as the only means to appease the gods.
+
+All this, as seen is very far from the supposed "moral dissoluteness" of
+the barbarians. On the contrary, we cannot but admire the deeply moral
+principles elaborated within the early village communities which found
+their expression in Welsh triads, in legends about King Arthur, in
+Brehon commentaries,(25) in old German legends and so on, or find still
+their expression in the sayings of the modern barbarians. In his
+introduction to The Story of Burnt Njal, George Dasent very justly sums
+up as follows the qualities of a Northman, as they appear in the
+sagas:--
+
+     To do what lay before him openly and like a man, without fear of
+     either foes, fiends, or fate; ... to be free and daring in all his
+     deeds; to be gentle and generous to his friends and kinsmen; to be
+     stern and grim to his foes [those who are under the lex talionis],
+     but even towards them to fulfil all bounden duties.... To be no
+     truce-breaker, nor tale-bearer, nor backbiter. To utter nothing
+     against any man that he would not dare to tell him to his face. To
+     turn no man from his door who sought food or shelter, even though
+     he were a foe.(26)
+
+The same or still better principles permeate the Welsh epic poetry and
+triads. To act "according to the nature of mildness and the principles
+of equity," without regard to the foes or to the friends, and "to repair
+the wrong," are the highest duties of man; "evil is death, good is
+life," exclaims the poet legislator.(27) "The World would be fool, if
+agreements made on lips were not honourable"--the Brehon law says. And
+the humble Shamanist Mordovian, after having praised the same qualities,
+will add, moreover, in his principles of customary law, that "among
+neighbours the cow and the milking-jar are in common;" that, "the cow
+must be milked for yourself and him who may ask milk;" that "the body of
+a child reddens from the stroke, but the face of him who strikes reddens
+from shame;"(28) and so on. Many pages might be filled with like
+principles expressed and followed by the "barbarians."
+
+One feature more of the old village communities deserves a special
+mention. It is the gradual extension of the circle of men embraced by
+the feelings of solidarity. Not only the tribes federated into stems,
+but the stems as well, even though of different origin, joined together
+in confederations. Some unions were so close that, for instance, the
+Vandals, after part of their confederation had left for the Rhine, and
+thence went over to Spain and Africa, respected for forty consecutive
+years the landmarks and the abandoned villages of their confederates,
+and did not take possession of them until they had ascertained through
+envoys that their confederates did not intend to return. With other
+barbarians, the soil was cultivated by one part of the stem, while the
+other part fought on or beyond the frontiers of the common territory. As
+to the leagues between several stems, they were quite habitual. The
+Sicambers united with the Cherusques and the Sueves, the Quades with the
+Sarmates; the Sarmates with the Alans, the Carpes, and the Huns. Later
+on, we also see the conception of nations gradually developing in
+Europe, long before anything like a State had grown in any part of the
+continent occupied by the barbarians. These nations--for it is
+impossible to refuse the name of a nation to the Merovingian France, or
+to the Russia of the eleventh and twelfth century--were nevertheless
+kept together by nothing else but a community of language, and a tacit
+agreement of the small republics to take their dukes from none but one
+special family.
+
+Wars were certainly unavoidable; migration means war; but Sir Henry
+Maine has already fully proved in his remarkable study of the tribal
+origin of International Law, that "Man has never been so ferocious or so
+stupid as to submit to such an evil as war without some kind of effort
+to prevent it," and he has shown how exceedingly great is "the number of
+ancient institutions which bear the marks of a design to stand in the
+way of war, or to provide an alternative to it."(29) In reality, man is
+so far from the warlike being he is supposed to be, that when the
+barbarians had once settled they so rapidly lost the very habits of
+warfare that very soon they were compelled to keep special dukes
+followed by special scholae or bands of warriors, in order to protect
+them from possible intruders. They preferred peaceful toil to war, the
+very peacefulness of man being the cause of the specialization of the
+warrior's trade, which specialization resulted later on in serfdom and
+in all the wars of the "States period" of human history.
+
+History finds great difficulties in restoring to life the institutions
+of the barbarians. At every step the historian meets with some faint
+indication which he is unable to explain with the aid of his own
+documents only. But a broad light is thrown on the past as soon as we
+refer to the institutions of the very numerous tribes which are still
+living under a social organization almost identical with that of our
+barbarian ancestors. Here we simply have the difficulty of choice,
+because the islands of the Pacific, the steppes of Asia, and the
+tablelands of Africa are real historical museums containing specimens of
+all possible intermediate stages which mankind has lived through, when
+passing from the savage gentes up to the States' organization. Let us,
+then, examine a few of those specimens.
+
+If we take the village communities of the Mongol Buryates, especially
+those of the Kudinsk Steppe on the upper Lena which have better escaped
+Russian influence, we have fair representatives of barbarians in a
+transitional state, between cattle-breeding and agriculture.(30) These
+Buryates are still living in "joint families"; that is, although each
+son, when he is married, goes to live in a separate hut, the huts of at
+least three generations remain within the same enclosure, and the joint
+family work in common in their fields, and own in common their joint
+households and their cattle, as well as their "calves' grounds" (small
+fenced patches of soil kept under soft grass for the rearing of calves).
+As a rule, the meals are taken separately in each hut; but when meat is
+roasted, all the twenty to sixty members of the joint household feast
+together. Several joint households which live in a cluster, as well as
+several smaller families settled in the same village--mostly debris of
+joint households accidentally broken up--make the oulous, or the village
+community; several oulouses make a tribe; and the forty-six tribes, or
+clans, of the Kudinsk Steppe are united into one confederation. Smaller
+and closer confederations are entered into, as necessity arises for
+special wants, by several tribes. They know no private property in
+land--the land being held in common by the oulous, or rather by the
+confederation, and if it becomes necessary, the territory is re-allotted
+between the different oulouses at a folkmote of the tribe, and between
+the forty-six tribes at a folkmote of the confederation. It is worthy of
+note that the same organization prevails among all the 250,000 Buryates
+of East Siberia, although they have been for three centuries under
+Russian rule, and are well acquainted with Russian institutions.
+
+With all that, inequalities of fortune rapidly develop among the
+Buryates, especially since the Russian Government is giving an
+exaggerated importance to their elected taishas (princes), whom it
+considers as responsible tax-collectors and representatives of the
+confederations in their administrative and even commercial relations
+with the Russians. The channels for the enrichment of the few are thus
+many, while the impoverishment of the great number goes hand in hand,
+through the appropriation of the Buryate lands by the Russians. But it
+is a habit with the Buryates, especially those of Kudinsk--and habit is
+more than law--that if a family has lost its cattle, the richer families
+give it some cows and horses that it may recover. As to the destitute
+man who has no family, he takes his meals in the huts of his congeners;
+he enters a hut, takes--by right, not for charity--his seat by the fire,
+and shares the meal which always is scrupulously divided into equal
+parts; he sleeps where he has taken his evening meal. Altogether, the
+Russian conquerors of Siberia were so much struck by the communistic
+practices of the Buryates, that they gave them the name of
+Bratskiye--"the Brotherly Ones"--and reported to Moscow. "With them
+everything is in common; whatever they have is shared in common." Even
+now, when the Lena Buryates sell their wheat, or send some of their
+cattle to be sold to a Russian butcher, the families of the oulous, or
+the tribe, put their wheat and cattle together, and sell it as a whole.
+Each oulous has, moreover, its grain store for loans in case of need,
+its communal baking oven (the four banal of the old French communities),
+and its blacksmith, who, like the blacksmith of the Indian
+communities,(31) being a member of the community, is never paid for his
+work within the community. He must make it for nothing, and if he
+utilizes his spare time for fabricating the small plates of chiselled
+and silvered iron which are used in Buryate land for the decoration of
+dress, he may occasionally sell them to a woman from another clan, but
+to the women of his own clan the attire is presented as a gift. Selling
+and buying cannot take place within the community, and the rule is so
+severe that when a richer family hires a labourer the labourer must be
+taken from another clan or from among the Russians. This habit is
+evidently not specific to the Buryates; it is so widely spread among the
+modern barbarians, Aryan and Ural-Altayan, that it must have been
+universal among our ancestors.
+
+The feeling of union within the confederation is kept alive by the
+common interests of the tribes, their folkmotes, and the festivities
+which are usually kept in connection with the folkmotes. The same
+feeling is, however, maintained by another institution, the aba, or
+common hunt, which is a reminiscence of a very remote past. Every
+autumn, the forty-six clans of Kudinsk come together for such a hunt,
+the produce of which is divided among all the families. Moreover,
+national abas, to assert the unity of the whole Buryate nation, are
+convoked from time to time. In such cases, all Buryate clans which are
+scattered for hundreds of miles west and east of Lake Baikal, are bound
+to send their delegate hunters. Thousands of men come together, each one
+bringing provisions for a whole month. Every one's share must be equal
+to all the others, and therefore, before being put together, they are
+weighed by an elected elder (always "with the hand": scales would be a
+profanation of the old custom). After that the hunters divide into bands
+of twenty, and the parties go hunting according to a well-settled plan.
+In such abas the entire Buryate nation revives its epic traditions of a
+time when it was united in a powerful league. Let me add that such
+communal hunts are quite usual with the Red Indians and the Chinese on
+the banks of the Usuri (the kada).(32)
+
+With the Kabyles, whose manners of life have been so well described by
+two French explorers,(33) we have barbarians still more advanced in
+agriculture. Their fields, irrigated and manured, are well attended to,
+and in the hilly tracts every available plot of land is cultivated by
+the spade. The Kabyles have known many vicissitudes in their history;
+they have followed for sometime the Mussulman law of inheritance, but,
+being adverse to it, they have returned, 150 years ago, to the tribal
+customary law of old. Accordingly, their land-tenure is of a mixed
+character, and private property in land exists side by side with
+communal possession. Still, the basis of their present organization is
+the village community, the thaddart, which usually consists of several
+joint families (kharoubas), claiming a community of origin, as well as
+of smaller families of strangers. Several villages are grouped into
+clans or tribes (arch); several tribes make the confederation
+(thak'ebilt); and several confederations may occasionally enter into a
+league, chiefly for purposes of armed defence.
+
+The Kabyles know no authority whatever besides that of the djemmaa, or
+folkmote of the village community. All men of age take part in it, in
+the open air, or in a special building provided with stone seats. And
+the decisions of the djemmaa are evidently taken at unanimity: that is,
+the discussions continue until all present agree to accept, or to submit
+to, some decision. There being no authority in a village community to
+impose a decision, this system has been practised by mankind wherever
+there have been village communities, and it is practised still wherever
+they continue to exist, i.e. by several hundred million men all over the
+world. The djemmaa nominates its executive--the elder, the scribe, and
+the treasurer; it assesses its own taxes; and it manages the repartition
+of the common lands, as well as all kinds of works of public utility. A
+great deal of work is done in common: the roads, the mosques, the
+fountains, the irrigation canals, the towers erected for protection from
+robbers, the fences, and so on, are built by the village community;
+while the high-roads, the larger mosques, and the great market-places
+are the work of the tribe. Many traces of common culture continue to
+exist, and the houses continue to be built by, or with the aid of, all
+men and women of the village. Altogether, the "aids" are of daily
+occurrence, and are continually called in for the cultivation of the
+fields, for harvesting, and so on. As to the skilled work, each
+community has its blacksmith, who enjoys his part of the communal land,
+and works for the community; when the tilling season approaches he
+visits every house, and repairs the tools and the ploughs, without
+expecting any pay, while the making of new ploughs is considered as a
+pious work which can by no means be recompensed in money, or by any
+other form of salary.
+
+As the Kabyles already have private property, they evidently have both
+rich and poor among them. But like all people who closely live together,
+and know how poverty begins, they consider it as an accident which may
+visit every one. "Don't say that you will never wear the beggar's bag,
+nor go to prison," is a proverb of the Russian peasants; the Kabyles
+practise it, and no difference can be detected in the external behaviour
+between rich and poor; when the poor convokes an "aid," the rich man
+works in his field, just as the poor man does it reciprocally in his
+turn.(34) Moreover, the djemmaas set aside certain gardens and fields,
+sometimes cultivated in common, for the use of the poorest members. Many
+like customs continue to exist. As the poorer families would not be able
+to buy meat, meat is regularly bought with the money of the fines, or
+the gifts to the djemmaa, or the payments for the use of the communal
+olive-oil basins, and it is distributed in equal parts among those who
+cannot afford buying meat themselves. And when a sheep or a bullock is
+killed by a family for its own use on a day which is not a market day,
+the fact is announced in the streets by the village crier, in order that
+sick people and pregnant women may take of it what they want. Mutual
+support permeates the life of the Kabyles, and if one of them, during a
+journey abroad, meets with another Kabyle in need, he is bound to come
+to his aid, even at the risk of his own fortune and life; if this has
+not been done, the djemmaa of the man who has suffered from such neglect
+may lodge a complaint, and the djemmaa of the selfish man will at once
+make good the loss. We thus come across a custom which is familiar to
+the students of the mediaeval merchant guilds. Every stranger who enters
+a Kabyle village has right to housing in the winter, and his horses can
+always graze on the communal lands for twenty-four hours. But in case of
+need he can reckon upon an almost unlimited support. Thus, during the
+famine of 1867-68, the Kabyles received and fed every one who sought
+refuge in their villages, without distinction of origin. In the district
+of Dellys, no less than 12,000 people who came from all parts of
+Algeria, and even from Morocco, were fed in this way. While people died
+from starvation all over Algeria, there was not one single case of death
+due to this cause on Kabylian soil. The djemmaas, depriving themselves
+of necessaries, organized relief, without ever asking any aid from the
+Government, or uttering the slightest complaint; they considered it as a
+natural duty. And while among the European settlers all kind of police
+measures were taken to prevent thefts and disorder resulting from such
+an influx of strangers, nothing of the kind was required on the Kabyles'
+territory: the djemmaas needed neither aid nor protection from
+without.(35)
+
+I can only cursorily mention two other most interesting features of
+Kabyle life; namely, the anaya, or protection granted to wells, canals,
+mosques, marketplaces, some roads, and so on, in case of war, and the
+cofs. In the anaya we have a series of institutions both for diminishing
+the evils of war and for preventing conflicts. Thus the market-place is
+anaya, especially if it stands on a frontier and brings Kabyles and
+strangers together; no one dares disturb peace in the market, and if a
+disturbance arises, it is quelled at once by the strangers who have
+gathered in the market town. The road upon which the women go from the
+village to the fountain also is anaya in case of war; and so on. As to
+the cof it is a widely spread form of association, having some
+characters of the mediaeval Burgschaften or Gegilden, as well as of
+societies both for mutual protection and for various
+purposes--intellectual, political, and emotional--which cannot be
+satisfied by the territorial organization of the village, the clan, and
+the con federation. The cof knows no territorial limits; it recruits its
+members in various villages, even among strangers; and it protects them
+in all possible eventualities of life. Altogether, it is an attempt at
+supplementing the territorial grouping by an extra-territorial grouping
+intended to give an expression to mutual affinities of all kinds across
+the frontiers. The free international association of individual tastes
+and ideas, which we consider as one of the best features of our own
+life, has thus its origin in barbarian antiquity.
+
+The mountaineers of Caucasia offer another extremely instructive field
+for illustrations of the same kind. In studying the present customs of
+the Ossetes--their joint families and communes and their judiciary
+conceptions--Professor Kovalevsky, in a remarkable work on Modern Custom
+and Ancient Law was enabled step by step to trace the similar
+dispositions of the old barbarian codes and even to study the origins of
+feudalism. With other Caucasian stems we occasionally catch a glimpse
+into the origin of the village community in those cases where it was not
+tribal but originated from a voluntary union between families of
+distinct origin. Such was recently the case with some Khevsoure
+villages, the inhabitants of which took the oath of "community and
+fraternity."(36) In another part of Caucasus, Daghestan, we see the
+growth of feudal relations between two tribes, both maintaining at the
+same time their village communities (and even traces of the gentile
+"classes"), and thus giving a living illustration of the forms taken by
+the conquest of Italy and Gaul by the barbarians. The victorious race,
+the Lezghines, who have conquered several Georgian and Tartar villages
+in the Zakataly district, did not bring them under the dominion of
+separate families; they constituted a feudal clan which now includes
+12,000 households in three villages, and owns in common no less than
+twenty Georgian and Tartar villages. The conquerors divided their own
+land among their clans, and the clans divided it in equal parts among
+the families; but they did not interfere with the djemmaas of their
+tributaries which still practise the habit mentioned by Julius Caesar;
+namely, the djemmaa decides each year which part of the communal
+territory must be cultivated, and this land is divided into as many
+parts as there are families, and the parts are distributed by lot. It is
+worthy of note that although proletarians are of common occurrence among
+the Lezghines (who live under a system of private property in land, and
+common ownership of serfs(37)) they are rare among their Georgian serfs,
+who continue to hold their land in common. As to the customary law of
+the Caucasian mountaineers, it is much the same as that of the
+Longobards or Salic Franks, and several of its dispositions explain a
+good deal the judicial procedure of the barbarians of old. Being of a
+very impressionable character, they do their best to prevent quarrels
+from taking a fatal issue; so, with the Khevsoures, the swords are very
+soon drawn when a quarrel breaks out; but if a woman rushes out and
+throws among them the piece of linen which she wears on her head, the
+swords are at once returned to their sheaths, and the quarrel is
+appeased. The head-dress of the women is anaya. If a quarrel has not
+been stopped in time and has ended in murder, the compensation money is
+so considerable that the aggressor is entirely ruined for his life,
+unless he is adopted by the wronged family; and if he has resorted to
+his sword in a trifling quarrel and has inflicted wounds, he loses for
+ever the consideration of his kin. In all disputes, mediators take the
+matter in hand; they select from among the members of the clan the
+judges--six in smaller affairs, and from ten to fifteen in more serious
+matters--and Russian observers testify to the absolute incorruptibility
+of the judges. An oath has such a significance that men enjoying general
+esteem are dispensed from taking it: a simple affirmation is quite
+sufficient, the more so as in grave affairs the Khevsoure never
+hesitates to recognize his guilt (I mean, of course, the Khevsoure
+untouched yet by civilization). The oath is chiefly reserved for such
+cases, like disputes about property, which require some sort of
+appreciation in addition to a simple statement of facts; and in such
+cases the men whose affirmation will decide in the dispute, act with the
+greatest circumspection. Altogether it is certainly not a want of
+honesty or of respect to the rights of the congeners which characterizes
+the barbarian societies of Caucasus.
+
+The stems of Africa offer such an immense variety of extremely
+interesting societies standing at all intermediate stages from the early
+village community to the despotic barbarian monarchies that I must
+abandon the idea of giving here even the chief results of a comparative
+study of their institutions.(38) Suffice it to say, that, even under the
+most horrid despotism of kings, the folkmotes of the village communities
+and their customary law remain sovereign in a wide circle of affairs.
+The law of the State allows the king to take any one's life for a simple
+caprice, or even for simply satisfying his gluttony; but the customary
+law of the people continues to maintain the same network of institutions
+for mutual support which exist among other barbarians or have existed
+among our ancestors. And with some better-favoured stems (in Bornu,
+Uganda, Abyssinia), and especially the Bogos, some of the dispositions
+of the customary law are inspired with really graceful and delicate
+feelings.
+
+The village communities of the natives of both Americas have the same
+character. The Tupi of Brazil were found living in "long houses"
+occupied by whole clans which used to cultivate their corn and manioc
+fields in common. The Arani, much more advanced in civilization, used to
+cultivate their fields in common; so also the Oucagas, who had learned
+under their system of primitive communism and "long houses" to build
+good roads and to carry on a variety of domestic industries,(39) not
+inferior to those of the early medieval times in Europe. All of them
+were also living under the same customary law of which we have given
+specimens on the preceding pages. At another extremity of the world we
+find the Malayan feudalism, but this feudalism has been powerless to
+unroot the negaria, or village community, with its common ownership of
+at least part of the land, and the redistribution of land among the
+several negarias of the tribe.(40) With the Alfurus of Minahasa we find
+the communal rotation of the crops; with the Indian stem of the Wyandots
+we have the periodical redistribution of land within the tribe, and the
+clan-culture of the soil; and in all those parts of Sumatra where Moslem
+institutions have not yet totally destroyed the old organization we find
+the joint family (suka) and the village community (kota) which maintains
+its right upon the land, even if part of it has been cleared without its
+authorization.(41) But to say this, is to say that all customs for
+mutual protection and prevention of feuds and wars, which have been
+briefly indicated in the preceding pages as characteristic of the
+village community, exist as well. More than that: the more fully the
+communal possession of land has been maintained, the better and the
+gentler are the habits. De Stuers positively affirms that wherever the
+institution of the village community has been less encroached upon by
+the conquerors, the inequalities of fortunes are smaller, and the very
+prescriptions of the lex talionis are less cruel; while, on the
+contrary, wherever the village community has been totally broken up,
+"the inhabitants suffer the most unbearable oppression from their
+despotic rulers."(42) This is quite natural. And when Waitz made the
+remark that those stems which have maintained their tribal
+confederations stand on a higher level of development and have a richer
+literature than those stems which have forfeited the old bonds of union,
+he only pointed out what might have been foretold in advance.
+
+More illustrations would simply involve me in tedious repetitions--so
+strikingly similar are the barbarian societies under all climates and
+amidst all races. The same process of evolution has been going on in
+mankind with a wonderful similarity. When the clan organization,
+assailed as it was from within by the separate family, and from without
+by the dismemberment of the migrating clans and the necessity of taking
+in strangers of different descent--the village community, based upon a
+territorial conception, came into existence. This new institution, which
+had naturally grown out of the preceding one--the clan--permitted the
+barbarians to pass through a most disturbed period of history without
+being broken into isolated families which would have succumbed in the
+struggle for life. New forms of culture developed under the new
+organization; agriculture attained the stage which it hardly has
+surpassed until now with the great number; the domestic industries
+reached a high degree of perfection. The wilderness was conquered, it
+was intersected by roads, dotted with swarms thrown off by the
+mother-communities. Markets and fortified centres, as well as places of
+public worship, were erected. The conceptions of a wider union, extended
+to whole stems and to several stems of various origin, were slowly
+elaborated. The old conceptions of justice which were conceptions of
+mere revenge, slowly underwent a deep modification--the idea of amends
+for the wrong done taking the place of revenge. The customary law which
+still makes the law of the daily life for two-thirds or more of mankind,
+was elaborated under that organization, as well as a system of habits
+intended to prevent the oppression of the masses by the minorities whose
+powers grew in proportion to the growing facilities for private
+accumulation of wealth. This was the new form taken by the tendencies of
+the masses for mutual support. And the progress--economical,
+intellectual, and moral--which mankind accomplished under this new
+popular form of organization, was so great that the States, when they
+were called later on into existence, simply took possession, in the
+interest of the minorities, of all the judicial, economical, and
+administrative functions which the village community already had
+exercised in the interest of all.
+
+NOTES:
+
+1. Numberless traces of post-pliocene lakes, now disappeared, are found
+over Central, West, and North Asia. Shells of the same species as those
+now found in the Caspian Sea are scattered over the surface of the soil
+as far East as half-way to Lake Aral, and are found in recent deposits
+as far north as Kazan. Traces of Caspian Gulfs, formerly taken for old
+beds of the Amu, intersect the Turcoman territory. Deduction must surely
+be made for temporary, periodical oscillations. But with all that,
+desiccation is evident, and it progresses at a formerly unexpected
+speed. Even in the relatively wet parts of South-West Siberia, the
+succession of reliable surveys, recently published by Yadrintseff, shows
+that villages have grown up on what was, eighty years ago, the bottom of
+one of the lakes of the Tchany group; while the other lakes of the same
+group, which covered hundreds of square miles some fifty years ago, are
+now mere ponds. In short, the desiccation of North-West Asia goes on at
+a rate which must be measured by centuries, instead of by the geological
+units of time of which we formerly used to speak.
+
+2. Whole civilizations had thus disappeared, as is proved now by the
+remarkable discoveries in Mongolia on the Orkhon and in the Lukchun
+depression (by Dmitri Clements).
+
+3. If I follow the opinions of (to name modern specialists only) Nasse,
+Kovalevsky, and Vinogradov, and not those of Mr. Seebohm (Mr. Denman
+Ross can only be named for the sake of completeness), it is not only
+because of the deep knowledge and concordance of views of these three
+writers, but also on account of their perfect knowledge of the village
+community altogether--a knowledge the want of which is much felt in the
+otherwise remarkable work of Mr. Seebohm. The same remark applies, in a
+still higher degree, to the most elegant writings of Fustel de
+Coulanges, whose opinions and passionate interpretations of old texts
+are confined to himself.
+
+4. The literature of the village community is so vast that but a few
+works can be named. Those of Sir Henry Maine, Mr. Seebohm, and Walter's
+Das alte Wallis (Bonn, 1859), are well-known popular sources of
+information about Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. For France, P. Viollet,
+Precis de l'histoire du droit francais. Droit prive, 1886, and several
+of his monographs in Bibl. de l'Ecole des Chartes; Babeau, Le Village
+sous l'ancien regime (the mir in the eighteenth century), third edition,
+1887; Bonnemere, Doniol, etc. For Italy and Scandinavia, the chief works
+are named in Laveleye's Primitive Property, German version by K. Bucher.
+For the Finns, Rein's Forelasningar, i. 16; Koskinen, Finnische
+Geschichte, 1874, and various monographs. For the Lives and Coures,
+Prof. Lutchitzky in Severnyi Vestnil, 1891. For the Teutons, besides the
+well-known works of Maurer, Sohm (Altdeutsche Reichs-und
+Gerichts-Verfassung), also Dahn (Urzeit, Volkerwanderung, Langobardische
+Studien), Janssen, Wilh. Arnold, etc. For India, besides H. Maine and
+the works he names, Sir John Phear's Aryan Village. For Russia and South
+Slavonians, see Kavelin, Posnikoff, Sokolovsky, Kovalevsky, Efimenko,
+Ivanisheff, Klaus, etc. (copious bibliographical index up to 1880 in the
+Sbornik svedeniy ob obschinye of the Russ. Geog. Soc.). For general
+conclusions, besides Laveleye's Propriete, Morgan's Ancient Society,
+Lippert's Kulturgeschichte, Post, Dargun, etc., also the lectures of M.
+Kovalevsky (Tableau des origines et de l'evolution de la famille et de
+la propriete, Stockholm, 1890). Many special monographs ought to be
+mentioned; their titles may be found in the excellent lists given by P.
+Viollet in Droit prive and Droit public. For other races, see subsequent
+notes.
+
+5. Several authorities are inclined to consider the joint household as
+an intermediate stage between the clan and the village community; and
+there is no doubt that in very many cases village communities have grown
+up out of undivided families. Nevertheless, I consider the joint
+household as a fact of a different order. We find it within the gentes;
+on the other hand, we cannot affirm that joint families have existed at
+any period without belonging either to a gens or to a village community,
+or to a Gau. I conceive the early village communities as slowly
+originating directly from the gentes, and consisting, according to
+racial and local circumstances, either of several joint families, or of
+both joint and simple families, or (especially in the case of new
+settlements) of simple families only. If this view be correct, we should
+not have the right of establishing the series: gens, compound family,
+village community--the second member of the series having not the same
+ethnological value as the two others. See Appendix IX.
+
+6. Stobbe, Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Rechtes, p. 62.
+
+7. The few traces of private property in land which are met with in the
+early barbarian period are found with such stems (the Batavians, the
+Franks in Gaul) as have been for a time under the influence of Imperial
+Rome. See Inama-Sternegg's Die Ausbildung der grossen Grundherrschaften
+in Deutschland, Bd. i. 1878. Also, Besseler, Neubruch nach dem alteren
+deutschen Recht, pp. 11-12, quoted by Kovalevsky, Modern Custom and
+Ancient Law, Moscow, 1886, i. 134.
+
+8. Maurer's Markgenossenschaft; Lamprecht's "Wirthschaft und Recht der
+Franken zur Zeit der Volksrechte," in Histor. Taschenbuch, 1883;
+Seebohm's The English Village Community, ch. vi, vii, and ix.
+
+9. Letourneau, in Bulletin de la Soc. d'Anthropologie, 1888, vol. xi. p.
+476.
+
+10. Walter, Das alte Wallis, p. 323; Dm. Bakradze and N. Khoudadoff in
+Russian Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Society, xiv. Part I.
+
+11. Bancroft's Native Races; Waitz, Anthropologie, iii. 423; Montrozier,
+in Bull. Soc. d'Anthropologie, 1870; Post's Studien, etc.
+
+12. A number of works, by Ory, Luro, Laudes, and Sylvestre, on the
+village community in Annam, proving that it has had there the same forms
+as in Germany or Russia, is mentioned in a review of these works by
+Jobbe-Duval, in Nouvelle Revue historique de droit francais et etranger,
+October and December, 1896. A good study of the village community of
+Peru, before the establishment of the power of the Incas, has been
+brought out by Heinrich Cunow (Die Soziale Verfassung des Inka-Reichs,
+Stuttgart, 1896.) The communal possession of land and communal culture
+are described in that work.
+
+13. Kovalevsky, Modern Custom and Ancient Law, i. 115.
+
+14. Palfrey, History of New England, ii. 13; quoted in Maine's Village
+Communities, New York, 1876, p. 201.
+
+15. Konigswarter, Etudes sur le developpement des societes humaines,
+Paris, 1850.
+
+16. This is, at least, the law of the Kalmucks, whose customary law
+bears the closest resemblance to the laws of the Teutons, the old
+Slavonians, etc.
+
+17. The habit is in force still with many African and other tribes.
+
+18. Village Communities, pp. 65-68 and 199.
+
+19. Maurer (Gesch. der Markverfassung, sections 29, 97) is quite
+decisive upon this subject. He maintains that "All members of the
+community ... the laic and clerical lords as well, often also the
+partial co-possessors (Markberechtigte), and even strangers to the Mark,
+were submitted to its jurisdiction" (p. 312). This conception remained
+locally in force up to the fifteenth century.
+
+20. Konigswarter, loc. cit. p. 50; J. Thrupp, Historical Law Tracts,
+London, 1843, p. 106.
+
+21. Konigswarter has shown that the fred originated from an offering
+which had to be made to appease the ancestors. Later on, it was paid to
+the community, for the breach of peace; and still later to the judge, or
+king, or lord, when they had appropriated to themselves the rights of
+the community.
+
+22. Post's Bausteine and Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Oldenburg, 1887,
+vol. i. pp. 64 seq.; Kovalevsky, loc. cit. ii. 164-189.
+
+23. O. Miller and M. Kovalevsky, "In the Mountaineer Communities of
+Kabardia," in Vestnik Evropy, April, 1884. With the Shakhsevens of the
+Mugan Steppe, blood feuds always end by marriage between the two hostile
+sides (Markoff, in appendix to the Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Soc.
+xiv. 1, 21).
+
+24. Post, in Afrik. Jurisprudenz, gives a series of facts illustrating
+the conceptions of equity inrooted among the African barbarians. The
+same may be said of all serious examinations into barbarian common law.
+
+25. See the excellent chapter, "Le droit de La Vieille Irlande," (also
+"Le Haut Nord") in Etudes de droit international et de droit politique,
+by Prof. E. Nys, Bruxelles, 1896.
+
+26. Introduction, p. xxxv.
+
+27. Das alte Wallis, pp. 343-350.
+
+28. Maynoff, "Sketches of the Judicial Practices of the Mordovians," in
+the ethnographical Zapiski of the Russian Geographical Society, 1885,
+pp. 236, 257.
+
+29. Henry Maine, International Law, London, 1888, pp. 11-13. E. Nys, Les
+origines du droit international, Bruxelles, 1894.
+
+30. A Russian historian, the Kazan Professor Schapoff, who was exiled in
+1862 to Siberia, has given a good description of their institutions in
+the Izvestia of the East-Siberian Geographical Society, vol. v. 1874.
+
+31. Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities, New York, 1876, pp. 193-196.
+
+32. Nazaroff, The North Usuri Territory (Russian), St. Petersburg, 1887,
+p. 65.
+
+33. Hanoteau et Letourneux, La Kabylie, 3 vols. Paris, 1883.
+
+34. To convoke an "aid" or "bee," some kind of meal must be offered to
+the community. I am told by a Caucasian friend that in Georgia, when the
+poor man wants an "aid," he borrows from the rich man a sheep or two to
+prepare the meal, and the community bring, in addition to their work, so
+many provisions that he may repay the debt. A similar habit exists with
+the Mordovians.
+
+35. Hanoteau et Letourneux, La kabylie, ii. 58. The same respect to
+strangers is the rule with the Mongols. The Mongol who has refused his
+roof to a stranger pays the full blood-compensation if the stranger has
+suffered therefrom (Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, iii. 231).
+
+36. N. Khoudadoff, "Notes on the Khevsoures," in Zapiski of the
+Caucasian Geogr. Society, xiv. 1, Tiflis, 1890, p. 68. They also took
+the oath of not marrying girls from their own union, thus displaying a
+remarkable return to the old gentile rules.
+
+37. Dm. Bakradze, "Notes on the Zakataly District," in same Zapiski,
+xiv. 1, p. 264. The "joint team" is as common among the Lezghines as it
+is among the Ossetes.
+
+38. See Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Oldenburg, 1887. Munzinger,
+Ueber das Recht und Sitten der Bogos, Winterthur 1859; Casalis, Les
+Bassoutos, Paris, 1859; Maclean, Kafir Laws and Customs, Mount Coke,
+1858, etc.
+
+39. Waitz, iii. 423 seq.
+
+40. Post's Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Familien Rechts
+Oldenburg, 1889, pp. 270 seq.
+
+41. Powell, Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnography, Washington,
+1881, quoted in Post's Studien, p. 290; Bastian's Inselgruppen in
+Oceanien, 1883, p. 88.
+
+42. De Stuers, quoted by Waitz, v. 141.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+MUTUAL AID IN THE MEDIAEVAL CITY
+
+Growth of authority in Barbarian Society. Serfdom in the villages.
+Revolt of fortified towns: their liberation; their charts. The guild.
+Double origin of the free medieval city. Self-jurisdiction,
+self-administration. Honourable position of labour. Trade by the guild
+and by the city.
+
+
+Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts
+of human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in
+small isolated families, fighting each other for the means of
+subsistence. On the contrary, modern research, as we saw it in the two
+preceding chapters, proves that since the very beginning of their
+prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes,
+maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common
+ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has
+kept men together, even though there was no authority whatever to impose
+it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of mankind; and
+when the bonds of common descent had been loosened by migrations on a
+grand scale, while the development of the separated family within the
+clan itself had destroyed the old unity of the clan, a new form of
+union, territorial in its principle--the village community--was called
+into existence by the social genius of man. This institution, again,
+kept men together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further
+develop their social institutions and to pass through some of the
+darkest periods of history, without being dissolved into loose
+aggregations of families and individuals, to make a further step in
+their evolution, and to work out a number of secondary social
+institutions, several of which have survived down to the present time.
+We have now to follow the further developments of the same ever-living
+tendency for mutual aid. Taking the village communities of the so-called
+barbarians at a time when they were making a new start of civilization
+after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have to study the new aspects
+taken by the sociable wants of the masses in the middle ages, and
+especially in the medieval guilds and the medieval city.
+
+Far from being the fighting animals they have often been compared to,
+the barbarians of the first centuries of our era (like so many
+Mongolians, Africans, Arabs, and so on, who still continue in the same
+barbarian stage) invariably preferred peace to war. With the exception
+of a few tribes which had been driven during the great migrations into
+unproductive deserts or highlands, and were thus compelled periodically
+to prey upon their better-favoured neighbours--apart from these, the
+great bulk of the Teutons, the Saxons, the Celts, the Slavonians, and so
+on, very soon after they had settled in their newly-conquered abodes,
+reverted to the spade or to their herds. The earliest barbarian codes
+already represent to us societies composed of peaceful agricultural
+communities, not hordes of men at war with each other. These barbarians
+covered the country with villages and farmhouses;(1) they cleared the
+forests, bridged the torrents, and colonized the formerly quite
+uninhabited wilderness; and they left the uncertain warlike pursuits to
+brotherhoods, scholae, or "trusts" of unruly men, gathered round
+temporary chieftains, who wandered about, offering their adventurous
+spirit, their arms, and their knowledge of warfare for the protection of
+populations, only too anxious to be left in peace. The warrior bands
+came and went, prosecuting their family feuds; but the great mass
+continued to till the soil, taking but little notice of their would-be
+rulers, so long as they did not interfere with the independence of their
+village communities.(2) The new occupiers of Europe evolved the systems
+of land tenure and soil culture which are still in force with hundreds
+of millions of men; they worked out their systems of compensation for
+wrongs, instead of the old tribal blood-revenge; they learned the first
+rudiments of industry; and while they fortified their villages with
+palisaded walls, or erected towers and earthen forts whereto to repair
+in case of a new invasion, they soon abandoned the task of defending
+these towers and forts to those who made of war a speciality.
+
+The very peacefulness of the barbarians, certainly not their supposed
+warlike instincts, thus became the source of their subsequent subjection
+to the military chieftains. It is evident that the very mode of life of
+the armed brotherhoods offered them more facilities for enrichment than
+the tillers of the soil could find in their agricultural communities.
+Even now we see that armed men occasionally come together to shoot down
+Matabeles and to rob them of their droves of cattle, though the
+Matabeles only want peace and are ready to buy it at a high price. The
+scholae of old certainly were not more scrupulous than the scholae of
+our own time. Droves of cattle, iron (which was extremely costly at that
+time(3)), and slaves were appropriated in this way; and although most
+acquisitions were wasted on the spot in those glorious feasts of which
+epic poetry has so much to say--still some part of the robbed riches was
+used for further enrichment. There was plenty of waste land, and no lack
+of men ready to till it, if only they could obtain the necessary cattle
+and implements. Whole villages, ruined by murrains, pests, fires, or
+raids of new immigrants, were often abandoned by their inhabitants, who
+went anywhere in search of new abodes. They still do so in Russia in
+similar circumstances. And if one of the hirdmen of the armed
+brotherhoods offered the peasants some cattle for a fresh start, some
+iron to make a plough, if not the plough itself, his protection from
+further raids, and a number of years free from all obligations, before
+they should begin to repay the contracted debt, they settled upon the
+land. And when, after a hard fight with bad crops, inundations and
+pestilences, those pioneers began to repay their debts, they fell into
+servile obligations towards the protector of the territory. Wealth
+undoubtedly did accumulate in this way, and power always follows
+wealth.(4) And yet, the more we penetrate into the life of those times,
+the sixth and seventh centuries of our era, the more we see that another
+element, besides wealth and military force, was required to constitute
+the authority of the few. It was an element of law and tight, a desire
+of the masses to maintain peace, and to establish what they considered
+to be justice, which gave to the chieftains of the scholae--kings,
+dukes, knyazes, and the like--the force they acquired two or three
+hundred years later. That same idea of justice, conceived as an adequate
+revenge for the wrong done, which had grown in the tribal stage, now
+passed as a red thread through the history of subsequent institutions,
+and, much more even than military or economic causes, it became the
+basis upon which the authority of the kings and the feudal lords was
+founded.
+
+In fact, one of the chief preoccupations of the barbarian village
+community always was, as it still is with our barbarian contemporaries,
+to put a speedy end to the feuds which arose from the then current
+conception of justice. When a quarrel took place, the community at once
+interfered, and after the folkmote had heard the case, it settled the
+amount of composition (wergeld) to be paid to the wronged person, or to
+his family, as well as the fred, or fine for breach of peace, which had
+to be paid to the community. Interior quarrels were easily appeased in
+this way. But when feuds broke out between two different tribes, or two
+confederations of tribes, notwithstanding all measures taken to prevent
+them,(5) the difficulty was to find an arbiter or sentence-finder whose
+decision should be accepted by both parties alike, both for his
+impartiality and for his knowledge of the oldest law. The difficulty was
+the greater as the customary laws of different tribes and confederations
+were at variance as to the compensation due in different cases. It
+therefore became habitual to take the sentence-finder from among such
+families, or such tribes, as were reputed for keeping the law of old in
+its purity; of being versed in the songs, triads, sagas, etc., by means
+of which law was perpetuated in memory; and to retain law in this way
+became a sort of art, a "mystery," carefully transmitted in certain
+families from generation to generation. Thus in Iceland, and in other
+Scandinavian lands, at every A11thing, or national folkmote, a
+lövsögmathr used to recite the whole law from memory for the
+enlightening of the assembly; and in Ireland there was, as is known, a
+special class of men reputed for the knowledge of the old traditions,
+and therefore enjoying a great authority as judges.(6) Again, when we
+are told by the Russian annals that some stems of North-West Russia,
+moved by the growing disorder which resulted from "clans rising against
+clans," appealed to Norman varingiar to be their judges and commanders
+of warrior scholae; and when we see the knyazes, or dukes, elected for
+the next two hundred years always from the same Norman family, we cannot
+but recognize that the Slavonians trusted to the Normans for a better
+knowledge of the law which would be equally recognized as good by
+different Slavonian kins. In this case the possession of runes, used for
+the transmission of old customs, was a decided advantage in favour of
+the Normans; but in other cases there are faint indications that the
+"eldest" branch of the stem, the supposed motherbranch, was appealed to
+to supply the judges, and its decisions were relied upon as just;(7)
+while at a later epoch we see a distinct tendency towards taking the
+sentence-finders from the Christian clergy, which, at that time, kept
+still to the fundamental, now forgotten, principle of Christianity, that
+retaliation is no act of justice. At that time the Christian clergy
+opened the churches as places of asylum for those who fled from blood
+revenge, and they willingly acted as arbiters in criminal cases, always
+opposing the old tribal principle of life for life and wound for wound.
+In short, the deeper we penetrate into the history of early
+institutions, the less we find grounds for the military theory of origin
+of authority. Even that power which later on became such a source of
+oppression seems, on the contrary, to have found its origin in the
+peaceful inclinations of the masses.
+
+In all these cases the fred, which often amounted to half the
+compensation, went to the folkmote, and from times immemorial it used to
+be applied to works of common utility and defence. It has still the same
+destination (the erection of towers) among the Kabyles and certain
+Mongolian stems; and we have direct evidence that even several centuries
+later the judicial fines, in Pskov and several French and German cities,
+continued to be used for the repair of the city walls.(8) It was thus
+quite natural that the fines should be handed over to the
+sentence-finder, who was bound, in return, both to maintain the schola
+of armed men to whom the defence of the territory was trusted, and to
+execute the sentences. This became a universal custom in the eighth and
+ninth centuries, even when the sentence-finder was an elected bishop.
+The germ of a combination of what we should now call the judicial power
+and the executive thus made its appearance. But to these two functions
+the attributions of the duke or king were strictly limited. He was no
+ruler of the people--the supreme power still belonging to the
+folkmote--not even a commander of the popular militia; when the folk
+took to arms, it marched under a separate, also elected, commander, who
+was not a subordinate, but an equal to the king.(9) The king was a lord
+on his personal domain only. In fact, in barbarian language, the word
+konung, koning, or cyning synonymous with the Latin rex, had no other
+meaning than that of a temporary leader or chieftain of a band of men.
+The commander of a flotilla of boats, or even of a single pirate boat,
+was also a konung, and till the present day the commander of fishing in
+Norway is named Not-kong--"the king of the nets."(10) The veneration
+attached later on to the personality of a king did not yet exist, and
+while treason to the kin was punished by death, the slaying of a king
+could be recouped by the payment of compensation: a king simply was
+valued so much more than a freeman.(11) And when King Knu (or Canute)
+had killed one man of his own schola, the saga represents him convoking
+his comrades to a thing where he stood on his knees imploring pardon. He
+was pardoned, but not till he had agreed to pay nine times the regular
+composition, of which one-third went to himself for the loss of one of
+his men, one-third to the relatives of the slain man, and one-third (the
+fred) to the schola.(12) In reality, a complete change had to be
+accomplished in the current conceptions, under the double influence of
+the Church and the students of Roman law, before an idea of sanctity
+began to be attached to the personality of the king.
+
+However, it lies beyond the scope of these essays to follow the gradual
+development of authority out of the elements just indicated. Historians,
+such as Mr. and Mrs. Green for this country, Augustin Thierry, Michelet,
+and Luchaire for France, Kaufmann, Janssen, W. Arnold, and even Nitzsch,
+for Germany, Leo and Botta for Italy, Byelaeff, Kostomaroff, and their
+followers for Russia, and many others, have fully told that tale. They
+have shown how populations, once free, and simply agreeing "to feed" a
+certain portion of their military defenders, gradually became the serfs
+of these protectors; how "commendation" to the Church, or to a lord,
+became a hard necessity for the freeman; how each lord's and bishop's
+castle became a robber's nest--how feudalism was imposed, in a word--and
+how the crusades, by freeing the serfs who wore the cross, gave the
+first impulse to popular emancipation. All this need not be retold in
+this place, our chief aim being to follow the constructive genius of the
+masses in their mutual-aid institutions.
+
+At a time when the last vestiges of barbarian freedom seemed to
+disappear, and Europe, fallen under the dominion of thousands of petty
+rulers, was marching towards the constitution of such theocracies and
+despotic States as had followed the barbarian stage during the previous
+starts of civilization, or of barbarian monarchies, such as we see now
+in Africa, life in Europe took another direction. It went on on lines
+similar to those it had once taken in the cities of antique Greece. With
+a unanimity which seems almost incomprehensible, and for a long time was
+not understood by historians, the urban agglomerations, down to the
+smallest burgs, began to shake off the yoke of their worldly and
+clerical lords. The fortified village rose against the lord's castle,
+defied it first, attacked it next, and finally destroyed it. The
+movement spread from spot to spot, involving every town on the surface
+of Europe, and in less than a hundred years free cities had been called
+into existence on the coasts of the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the
+Baltic, the Atlantic Ocean, down to the fjords of Scandinavia; at the
+feet of the Apennines, the Alps, the Black Forest, the Grampians, and
+the Carpathians; in the plains of Russia, Hungary, France and Spain.
+Everywhere the same revolt took place, with the same features, passing
+through the same phases, leading to the same results. Wherever men had
+found, or expected to find, some protection behind their town walls,
+they instituted their "co-jurations," their "fraternities," their
+"friendships," united in one common idea, and boldly marching towards a
+new life of mutual support and liberty. And they succeeded so well that
+in three or four hundred years they had changed the very face of Europe.
+They had covered the country with beautiful sumptuous buildings,
+expressing the genius of free unions of free men, unrivalled since for
+their beauty and expressiveness; and they bequeathed to the following
+generations all the arts, all the industries, of which our present
+civilization, with all its achievements and promises for the future, is
+only a further development. And when we now look to the forces which
+have produced these grand results, we find them--not in the genius of
+individual heroes, not in the mighty organization of huge States or the
+political capacities of their rulers, but in the very same current of
+mutual aid and support which we saw at work in the village community,
+and which was vivified and reinforced in the Middle Ages by a new form
+of unions, inspired by the very same spirit but shaped on a new
+model--the guilds.
+
+It is well known by this time that feudalism did not imply a dissolution
+of the village community. Although the lord had succeeded in imposing
+servile labour upon the peasants, and had appropriated for himself such
+rights as were formerly vested in the village community alone (taxes,
+mortmain, duties on inheritances and marriages), the peasants had,
+nevertheless, maintained the two fundamental rights of their
+communities: the common possession of the land, and self-jurisdiction.
+In olden times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants
+received him with flowers in one hand and arms in the other, and asked
+him--which law he intended to apply: the one he found in the village, or
+the one he brought with him? And, in the first case, they handed him the
+flowers and accepted him; while in the second case they fought him.(13)
+Now, they accepted the king's or the lord's official whom they could not
+refuse; but they maintained the folkmote's jurisdiction, and themselves
+nominated six, seven, or twelve judges, who acted with the lord's judge,
+in the presence of the folkmote, as arbiters and sentence-finders. In
+most cases the official had nothing left to him but to confirm the
+sentence and to levy the customary fred. This precious right of
+self-jurisdiction, which, at that time, meant self-administration and
+self-legislation, had been maintained through all the struggles; and
+even the lawyers by whom Karl the Great was surrounded could not abolish
+it; they were bound to confirm it. At the same time, in all matters
+concerning the community's domain, the folkmote retained its supremacy
+and (as shown by Maurer) often claimed submission from the lord himself
+in land tenure matters. No growth of feudalism could break this
+resistance; the village community kept its ground; and when, in the
+ninth and tenth centuries, the invasions of the Normans, the Arabs, and
+the Ugrians had demonstrated that military scholae were of little value
+for protecting the land, a general movement began all over Europe for
+fortifying the villages with stone walls and citadels. Thousands of
+fortified centres were then built by the energies of the village
+communities; and, once they had built their walls, once a common
+interest had been created in this new sanctuary--the town walls--they
+soon understood that they could henceforward resist the encroachments of
+the inner enemies, the lords, as well as the invasions of foreigners. A
+new life of freedom began to develop within the fortified enclosures.
+The medieval city was born.(14)
+
+No period of history could better illustrate the constructive powers of
+the popular masses than the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the
+fortified villages and market-places, representing so many "oases amidst
+the feudal forest," began to free themselves from their lord's yoke, and
+slowly elaborated the future city organization; but, unhappily, this is
+a period about which historical information is especially scarce: we
+know the results, but little has reached us about the means by which
+they were achieved. Under the protection of their walls the cities'
+folkmotes--either quite independent, or led by the chief noble or
+merchant families--conquered and maintained the right of electing the
+military defensor and supreme judge of the town, or at least of choosing
+between those who pretended to occupy this position. In Italy the young
+communes were continually sending away their defensors or domini,
+fighting those who refused to go. The same went on in the East. In
+Bohemia, rich and poor alike (Bohemicae gentis magni et parvi, nobiles
+et ignobiles) took part in the election;(15) while, the vyeches
+(folkmotes) of the Russian cities regularly elected their dukes--always
+from the same Rurik family--covenanted with them, and sent the knyaz
+away if he had provoked discontent.(16) At the same time in most cities
+of Western and Southern Europe, the tendency was to take for defensor a
+bishop whom the city had elected itself; and so many bishops took the
+lead in protecting the "immunities" of the towns and in defending their
+liberties, that numbers of them were considered, after their death, as
+saints and special patrons of different cities. St. Uthelred of
+Winchester, St. Ulrik of Augsburg, St. Wolfgang of Ratisbon, St.
+Heribert of Cologne, St. Adalbert of Prague, and so on, as well as many
+abbots and monks, became so many cities' saints for having acted in
+defence of popular rights.(17) And under the new defensors, whether laic
+or clerical, the citizens conquered full self-jurisdiction and
+self-administration for their folkmotes.(18)
+
+The whole process of liberation progressed by a series of imperceptible
+acts of devotion to the common cause, accomplished by men who came out
+of the masses--by unknown heroes whose very names have not been
+preserved by history. The wonderful movement of the God's peace (treuga
+Dei) by which the popular masses endeavoured to put a limit to the
+endless family feuds of the noble families, was born in the young towns,
+the bishops and the citizens trying to extend to the nobles the peace
+they had established within their town walls.(19) Already at that
+period, the commercial cities of Italy, and especially Amalfi (which had
+its elected consuls since 844, and frequently changed its doges in the
+tenth century)(20) worked out the customary maritime and commercial law
+which later on became a model for all Europe; Ravenna elaborated its
+craft organization, and Milan, which had made its first revolution in
+980, became a great centre of commerce, its trades enjoying a full
+independence since the eleventh century.(21) So also Brugge and Ghent;
+so also several cities of France in which the Mahl or forum had become a
+quite independent institution.(22) And already during that period began
+the work of artistic decoration of the towns by works of architecture,
+which we still admire and which loudly testify of the intellectual
+movement of the times. "The basilicae were then renewed in almost all
+the universe," Raoul Glaber wrote in his chronicle, and some of the
+finest monuments of medieval architecture date from that period: the
+wonderful old church of Bremen was built in the ninth century, Saint
+Marc of Venice was finished in 1071, and the beautiful dome of Pisa in
+1063. In fact, the intellectual movement which has been described as the
+Twelfth Century Renaissance(23) and the Twelfth Century Rationalism--the
+precursor of the Reform(24) date from that period, when most cities were
+still simple agglomerations of small village communities enclosed by
+walls.
+
+However, another element, besides the village-community principle, was
+required to give to these growing centres of liberty and enlightenment
+the unity of thought and action, and the powers of initiative, which
+made their force in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. With the
+growing diversity of occupations, crafts and arts, and with the growing
+commerce in distant lands, some new form of union was required, and this
+necessary new element was supplied by the guilds. Volumes and volumes
+have been written about these unions which, under the name of guilds,
+brotherhoods, friendships and druzhestva, minne, artels in Russia,
+esnaifs in Servia and Turkey, amkari in Georgia, and so on, took such a
+formidable development in medieval times and played such an important
+part in the emancipation of the cities. But it took historians more than
+sixty years before the universality of this institution and its true
+characters were understood. Only now, when hundreds of guild statutes
+have been published and studied, and their relationship to the Roman
+collegiae, and the earlier unions in Greece and in India,(25) is known,
+can we maintain with full confidence that these brotherhoods were but a
+further development of the same principles which we saw at work in the
+gens and the village community.
+
+Nothing illustrates better these medieval brother hoods than those
+temporary guilds which were formed on board ships. When a ship of the
+Hansa had accomplished her first half-day passage after having left the
+port, the captain (Schiffer) gathered all crew and passengers on the
+deck, and held the following language, as reported by a contemporary:--
+
+"'As we are now at the mercy of God and the waves,' he said, 'each one
+must be equal to each other. And as we are surrounded by storms, high
+waves, pirates and other dangers, we must keep a strict order that we
+may bring our voyage to a good end. That is why we shall pronounce the
+prayer for a good wind and good success, and, according to marine law,
+we shall name the occupiers of the judges' seats (Schoffenstellen).'
+Thereupon the crew elected a Vogt and four scabini, to act as their
+judges. At the end of the voyage the Vogt and the scabini abdicated
+their functions and addressed the crew as follows:--'What has happened on board ship, we
+must pardon to each other and consider as dead (todt
+und ab sein lassen). What we have judged right, was for the sake of
+justice. This is why we beg you all, in the name of honest justice, to
+forget all the animosity one may nourish against another, and to swear
+on bread and salt that he will not think of it in a bad spirit. If any
+one, however, considers himself wronged, he must appeal to the land Vogt
+and ask justice from him before sunset.' On landing, the Stock with the
+fredfines was handed over to the Vogt of the sea-port for distribution
+among the poor."(26)
+
+This simple narrative, perhaps better than anything else, depicts the
+spirit of the medieval guilds. Like organizations came into existence
+wherever a group of men--fishermen, hunters, travelling merchants,
+builders, or settled craftsmen--came together for a common pursuit.
+Thus, there was on board ship the naval authority of the captain; but,
+for the very success of the common enterprise, all men on board, rich
+and poor, masters and crew, captain and sailors, agreed to be equals in
+their mutual relations, to be simply men, bound to aid each other and to
+settle their possible disputes before judges elected by all of them. So
+also when a number of craftsmen--masons, carpenters, stone-cutters,
+etc.--came together for building, say, a cathedral, they all belonged to
+a city which had its political organization, and each of them belonged
+moreover to his own craft; but they were united besides by their common
+enterprise, which they knew better than any one else, and they joined
+into a body united by closer, although temporary, bonds; they founded
+the guild for the building of the cathedral.(27) We may see the same
+till now in the Kabylian. cof:(28) the Kabyles have their village
+community; but this union is not sufficient for all political,
+commercial, and personal needs of union, and the closer brotherhood of
+the cof is constituted.
+
+As to the social characters of the medieval guild, any guild-statute may
+illustrate them. Taking, for instance, the skraa of some early Danish
+guild, we read in it, first, a statement of the general brotherly
+feelings which must reign in the guild; next come the regulations
+relative to self-jurisdiction in cases of quarrels arising between two
+brothers, or a brother and a stranger; and then, the social duties of
+the brethren are enumerated. If a brother's house is burned, or he has
+lost his ship, or has suffered on a pilgrim's voyage, all the brethren
+must come to his aid. If a brother falls dangerously ill, two brethren
+must keep watch by his bed till he is out of danger, and if he dies, the
+brethren must bury him--a great affair in those times of
+pestilences--and follow him to the church and the grave. After his death
+they must provide for his children, if necessary; very often the widow
+becomes a sister to the guild.(29)
+
+These two leading features appeared in every brotherhood formed for any
+possible purpose. In each case the members treated each other as, and
+named each other, brother and sister;(30) all were equals before the
+guild. They owned some "chattel" (cattle, land, buildings, places of
+worship, or "stock") in common. All brothers took the oath of abandoning
+all feuds of old; and, without imposing upon each other the obligation
+of never quarrelling again, they agreed that no quarrel should
+degenerate into a feud, or into a law-suit before another court than the
+tribunal of the brothers themselves. And if a brother was involved in a
+quarrel with a stranger to the guild, they agreed to support him for bad
+and for good; that is, whether he was unjustly accused of aggression, or
+really was the aggressor, they had to support him, and to bring things
+to a peaceful end. So long as his was not a secret aggression--in which
+case he would have been treated as an outlaw--the brotherhood stood by
+him.(31) If the relatives of the wronged man wanted to revenge the
+offence at once by a new aggression, the brother-hood supplied him with
+a horse to run away, or with a boat, a pair of oars, a knife and a steel
+for striking light; if he remained in town, twelve brothers accompanied
+him to protect him; and in the meantime they arranged the composition.
+They went to court to support by oath the truthfulness of his
+statements, and if he was found guilty they did not let him go to full
+ruin and become a slave through not paying the due compensation: they
+all paid it, just as the gens did in olden times. Only when a brother
+had broken the faith towards his guild-brethren, or other people, he was
+excluded from the brotherhood "with a Nothing's name" (tha scal han
+maeles af brodrescap met nidings nafn).(32)
+
+Such were the leading ideas of those brotherhoods which gradually
+covered the whole of medieval life. In fact, we know of guilds among all
+possible professions: guilds of serfs,(33) guilds of freemen, and guilds
+of both serfs and freemen; guilds called into life for the special
+purpose of hunting, fishing, or a trading expedition, and dissolved when
+the special purpose had been achieved; and guilds lasting for centuries
+in a given craft or trade. And, in proportion as life took an always
+greater variety of pursuits, the variety in the guilds grew in
+proportion. So we see not only merchants, craftsmen, hunters, and
+peasants united in guilds; we also see guilds of priests, painters,
+teachers of primary schools and universities, guilds for performing the
+passion play, for building a church, for developing the "mystery" of a
+given school of art or craft, or for a special recreation--even guilds
+among beggars, executioners, and lost women, all organized on the same
+double principle of self-jurisdiction and mutual support.(34) For Russia
+we have positive evidence showing that the very "making of Russia" was
+as much the work of its hunters', fishermen's, and traders' artels as of
+the budding village communities, and up to the present day the country
+is covered with artels.(35)
+
+These few remarks show how incorrect was the view taken by some early
+explorers of the guilds when they wanted to see the essence of the
+institution in its yearly festival. In reality, the day of the common
+meal was always the day, or the morrow of the day, of election of
+aldermen, of discussion of alterations in the statutes, and very often
+the day of judgment of quarrels that had risen among the brethren,(36)
+or of renewed allegiance to the guild. The common meal, like the
+festival at the old tribal folkmote--the mahl or malum--or the Buryate
+aba, or the parish feast and the harvest supper, was simply an
+affirmation of brotherhood. It symbolized the times when everything was
+kept in common by the clan. This day, at least, all belonged to all; all
+sate at the same table and partook of the same meal. Even at a much
+later time the inmate of the almshouse of a London guild sat this day by
+the side of the rich alderman. As to the distinction which several
+explorers have tried to establish between the old Saxon "frith guild"
+and the so-called "social" or "religious" guilds--all were frith guilds
+in the sense above mentioned,(37) and all were religious in the sense in
+which a village community or a city placed under the protection of a
+special saint is social and religious. If the institution of the guild
+has taken such an immense extension in Asia, Africa, and Europe, if it
+has lived thousands of years, reappearing again and again when similar
+conditions called it into existence, it is because it was much more than
+an eating association, or an association for going to church on a
+certain day, or a burial club. It answered to a deeply inrooted want of
+human nature; and it embodied all the attributes which the State
+appropriated later on for its bureaucracy and police, and much more than
+that. It was an association for mutual support in all circumstances and
+in all accidents of life, "by deed and advise," and it was an
+organization for maintaining justice--with this difference from the
+State, that on all these occasions a humane, a brotherly element was
+introduced instead of the formal element which is the essential
+characteristic of State interference. Even when appearing before the
+guild tribunal, the guild-brother answered before men who knew him well
+and had stood by him before in their daily work, at the common meal, in
+the performance of their brotherly duties: men who were his equals and
+brethren indeed, not theorists of law nor defenders of some one else's
+interests.(38)
+
+It is evident that an institution so well suited to serve the need of
+union, without depriving the individual of his initiative, could but
+spread, grow, and fortify. The difficulty was only to find such form as
+would permit to federate the unions of the guilds without interfering
+with the unions of the village communities, and to federate all these
+into one harmonious whole. And when this form of combination had been
+found, and a series of favourable circumstances permitted the cities to
+affirm their independence, they did so with a unity of thought which can
+but excite our admiration, even in our century of railways, telegraphs,
+and printing. Hundreds of charters in which the cities inscribed their
+liberation have reached us, and through all of them--notwithstanding the
+infinite variety of details, which depended upon the more or less
+greater fulness of emancipation--the same leading ideas run. The city
+organized itself as a federation of both small village communities and
+guilds.
+
+"All those who belong to the friendship of the town"--so runs a charter
+given in 1188 to the burghesses of Aire by Philip, Count of
+Flanders--"have promised and confirmed by faith and oath that they will
+aid each other as brethren, in whatever is useful and honest. That if
+one commits against another an offence in words or in deeds, the one who
+has suffered there from will not take revenge, either himself or his
+people ... he will lodge a complaint and the offender will make good for
+his offence, according to what will be pronounced by twelve elected
+judges acting as arbiters, And if the offender or the offended, after
+having been warned thrice, does not submit to the decision of the
+arbiters, he will be excluded from the friendship as a wicked man and a
+perjuror.(39)
+
+"Each one of the men of the commune will be faithful to his con-juror,
+and will give him aid and advice, according to what justice will dictate
+him"--the Amiens and Abbeville charters say. "All will aid each other,
+according to their powers, within the boundaries of the Commune, and
+will not suffer that any one takes anything from any one of them, or
+makes one pay contributions"--do we read in the charters of Soissons,
+Compiegne, Senlis, and many others of the same type.(40) And so on with
+countless variations on the same theme.
+
+"The Commune," Guilbert de Nogent wrote, "is an oath of mutual aid
+(mutui adjutorii conjuratio) ... A new and detestable word. Through it
+the serfs (capite sensi) are freed from all serfdom; through it, they
+can only be condemned to a legally determined fine for breaches of the
+law; through it, they cease to be liable to payments which the serfs
+always used to pay."(41)
+
+The same wave of emancipation ran, in the twelfth century, through all
+parts of the continent, involving both rich cities and the poorest
+towns. And if we may say that, as a rule, the Italian cities were the
+first to free themselves, we can assign no centre from which the
+movement would have spread. Very often a small burg in central Europe
+took the lead for its region, and big agglomerations accepted the little
+town's charter as a model for their own. Thus, the charter of a small
+town, Lorris, was adopted by eighty-three towns in south-west France,
+and that of Beaumont became the model for over five hundred towns and
+cities in Belgium and France. Special deputies were dispatched by the
+cities to their neighbours to obtain a copy from their charter, and the
+constitution was framed upon that model. However, they did not simply
+copy each other: they framed their own charters in accordance with the
+concessions they had obtained from their lords; and the result was that,
+as remarked by an historian, the charters of the medieval communes offer
+the same variety as the Gothic architecture of their churches and
+cathedrals. The same leading ideas in all of them--the cathedral
+symbolizing the union of parish and guild in the, city--and the same
+infinitely rich variety of detail.
+
+Self-jurisdiction was the essential point, and self-jurisdiction meant
+self-administration. But the commune was not simply an "autonomous" part
+of the State--such ambiguous words had not yet been invented by that
+time--it was a State in itself. It had the right of war and peace, of
+federation and alliance with its neighbours. It was sovereign in its own
+affairs, and mixed with no others. The supreme political power could be
+vested entirely in a democratic forum, as was the case in Pskov, whose
+vyeche sent and received ambassadors, concluded treaties, accepted and
+sent away princes, or went on without them for dozens of years; or it
+was vested in, or usurped by, an aristocracy of merchants or even
+nobles, as was the case in hundreds of Italian and middle European
+cities. The principle, nevertheless, remained the same: the city was a
+State and--what was perhaps still more remarkable--when the power in the
+city was usurped by an aristocracy of merchants or even nobles, the
+inner life of the city and the democratism of its daily life did not
+disappear: they depended but little upon what may be called the
+political form of the State.
+
+The secret of this seeming anomaly lies in the fact that a medieval city
+was not a centralized State. During the first centuries of its
+existence, the city hardly could be named a State as regards its
+interior organization, because the middle ages knew no more of the
+present centralization of functions than of the present territorial
+centralization. Each group had its share of sovereignty. The city was
+usually divided into four quarters, or into five to seven sections
+radiating from a centre, each quarter or section roughly corresponding
+to a certain trade or profession which prevailed in it, but nevertheless
+containing inhabitants of different social positions and
+occupations--nobles, merchants, artisans, or even half-serfs; and each
+section or quarter constituted a quite independent agglomeration. In
+Venice, each island was an independent political community. It had its
+own organized trades, its own commerce in salt, its own jurisdiction and
+administration, its own forum; and the nomination of a doge by the city
+changed nothing in the inner independence of the units.(42) In Cologne,
+we see the inhabitants divided into Geburschaften and Heimschaften
+(viciniae), i.e. neighbour guilds, which dated from the Franconian
+period. Each of them had its judge (Burrichter) and the usual twelve
+elected sentence-finders (Schoffen), its Vogt, and its greve or
+commander of the local militia.(43) The story of early London before the
+Conquest--Mr. Green says--is that "of a number of little groups
+scattered here and there over the area within the walls, each growing up
+with its own life and institutions, guilds, sokes, religious houses and
+the like, and only slowly drawing together into a municipal union."(44)
+And if we refer to the annals of the Russian cities, Novgorod and Pskov,
+both of which are relatively rich in local details, we find the section
+(konets) consisting of independent streets (ulitsa), each of which,
+though chiefly peopled with artisans of a certain craft, had also
+merchants and landowners among its inhabitants, and was a separate
+community. It had the communal responsibility of all members in case of
+crime, its own jurisdiction and administration by street aldermen
+(ulichanskiye starosty), its own seal and, in case of need, its own
+forum; its own militia, as also its self-elected priests and its, own
+collective life and collective enterprise.(45)
+
+The medieval city thus appears as a double federation: of all
+householders united into small territorial unions--the street, the
+parish, the section--and of individuals united by oath into guilds
+according to their professions; the former being a produce of the
+village-community origin of the city, while the second is a subsequent
+growth called to life by new conditions.
+
+To guarantee liberty, self-administration, and peace was the chief aim
+of the medieval city; and labour, as we shall presently see when
+speaking of the craft guilds, was its chief foundation. But "production"
+did not absorb the whole attention of the medieval economist. With his
+practical mind, he understood that "consumption" must be guaranteed in
+order to obtain production; and therefore, to provide for "the common
+first food and lodging of poor and rich alike" (gemeine notdurft und
+gemach armer und richer(46)) was the fundamental principle in each city.
+The purchase of food supplies and other first necessaries (coal, wood,
+etc.) before they had reached the market, or altogether in especially
+favourable conditions from which others would be excluded--the
+preempcio, in a word--was entirely prohibited. Everything had to go to
+the market and be offered there for every one's purchase, till the
+ringing of the bell had closed the market. Then only could the retailer
+buy the remainder, and even then his profit should be an "honest profit"
+only.(47) Moreover, when corn was bought by a baker wholesale after the
+close of the market, every citizen had the right to claim part of the
+corn (about half-a-quarter) for his own use, at wholesale price, if he
+did so before the final conclusion of the bargain; and reciprocally,
+every baker could claim the same if the citizen purchased corn for
+re-selling it. In the first case, the corn had only to be brought to the
+town mill to be ground in its proper turn for a settled price, and the
+bread could be baked in the four banal, or communal oven.(48) In short,
+if a scarcity visited the city, all had to suffer from it more or less;
+but apart from the calamities, so long as the free cities existed no one
+could die in their midst from starvation, as is unhappily too often the
+case in our own times.
+
+However, all such regulations belong to later periods of the cities'
+life, while at an earlier period it was the city itself which used to
+buy all food supplies for the use of the citizens. The documents
+recently published by Mr. Gross are quite positive on this point and
+fully support his conclusion to the effect that the cargoes of
+subsistences "were purchased by certain civic officials in the name of
+the town, and then distributed in shares among the merchant burgesses,
+no one being allowed to buy wares landed in the port unless the
+municipal authorities refused to purchase them. This seem--she adds--to
+have been quite a common practice in England, Ireland, Wales and
+Scotland."(49) Even in the sixteenth century we find that common
+purchases of corn were made for the "comoditie and profitt in all things
+of this.... Citie and Chamber of London, and of all the Citizens and
+Inhabitants of the same as moche as in us lieth"--as the Mayor wrote in
+1565.(50) In Venice, the whole of the trade in corn is well known to
+have been in the hands of the city; the "quarters," on receiving the
+cereals from the board which administrated the imports, being bound to
+send to every citizen's house the quantity allotted to him.(51) In
+France, the city of Amiens used to purchase salt and to distribute it to
+all citizens at cost price;(52) and even now one sees in many French
+towns the halles which formerly were municipal depots for corn and
+salt.(53) In Russia it was a regular custom in Novgorod and Pskov.
+
+The whole matter relative to the communal purchases for the use of the
+citizens, and the manner in which they used to be made, seems not to
+have yet received proper attention from the historians of the period;
+but there are here and there some very interesting facts which throw a
+new light upon it. Thus there is, among Mr. Gross's documents, a
+Kilkenny ordinance of the year 1367, from which we learn how the prices
+of the goods were established. "The merchants and the sailors," Mr.
+Gross writes, "were to state on oath the first cost of the goods and the
+expenses of transportation. Then the mayor of the town and two discreet
+men were to name the price at which the wares were to be sold." The same
+rule held good in Thurso for merchandise coming "by sea or land." This
+way of "naming the price" so well answers to the very conceptions of
+trade which were current in medieval times that it must have been all
+but universal. To have the price established by a third person was a
+very old custom; and for all interchange within the city it certainly
+was a widely-spread habit to leave the establishment of prices to
+"discreet men"--to a third party--and not to the vendor or the buyer.
+But this order of things takes us still further back in the history of
+trade--namely, to a time when trade in staple produce was carried on by
+the whole city, and the merchants were only the commissioners, the
+trustees, of the city for selling the goods which it exported. A
+Waterford ordinance, published also by Mr. Gross, says "that all manere
+of marchandis what so ever kynde thei be of ... shal be bought by the
+Maire and balives which bene commene biers [common buyers, for the town]
+for the time being, and to distribute the same on freemen of the citie
+(the propre goods of free citisains and inhabitants only excepted)."
+This ordinance can hardly be explained otherwise than by admitting that
+all the exterior trade of the town was carried on by its agents.
+Moreover, we have direct evidence of such having been the case for
+Novgorod and Pskov. It was the Sovereign Novgorod and the Sovereign
+Pskov who sent their caravans of merchants to distant lands.
+
+We know also that in nearly all medieval cities of Middle and Western
+Europe, the craft guilds used to buy, as a body, all necessary raw
+produce, and to sell the produce of their work through their officials,
+and it is hardly possible that the same should not have been done for
+exterior trade--the more so as it is well known that up to the
+thirteenth century, not only all merchants of a given city were
+considered abroad as responsible in a body for debts contracted by any
+one of them, but the whole city as well was responsible for the debts of
+each one of its merchants. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth century
+the towns on the Rhine entered into special treaties abolishing this
+responsibility.(54) And finally we have the remarkable Ipswich document
+published by Mr. Gross, from which document we learn that the merchant
+guild of this town was constituted by all who had the freedom of the
+city, and who wished to pay their contribution ("their hanse") to the
+guild, the whole community discussing all together how better to
+maintain the merchant guild, and giving it certain privileges. The
+merchant guild of Ipswich thus appears rather as a body of trustees of
+the town than as a common private guild.
+
+In short, the more we begin to know the mediaeval city the more we see
+that it was not simply a political organization for the protection of
+certain political liberties. It was an attempt at organizing, on a much
+grander scale than in a village community, a close union for mutual aid
+and support, for consumption and production, and for social life
+altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but
+giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each
+separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and
+political organization. How far this attempt has been successful will be
+best seen when we have analyzed in the next chapter the organization of
+labour in the medieval city and the relations of the cities with the
+surrounding peasant population.
+
+NOTES:
+
+1. W. Arnold, in his Wanderungen und Ansiedelungen der deutschen Stamme,
+p. 431, even maintains that one-half of the now arable area in middle
+Germany must have been reclaimed from the sixth to the ninth century.
+Nitzsch (Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, Leipzig, 1883, vol. i.) shares
+the same opinion.
+
+2. Leo and Botta, Histoire d'Italie, French edition, 1844, t. i., p. 37.
+
+3. The composition for the stealing of a simple knife was 15 solidii and
+of the iron parts of a mill, 45 solidii (See on this subject Lamprecht's
+Wirthschaft und Recht der Franken in Raumer's Historisches Taschenbuch,
+1883, p. 52.) According to the Riparian law, the sword, the spear, and
+the iron armour of a warrior attained the value of at least twenty-five
+cows, or two years of a freeman's labour. A cuirass alone was valued in
+the Salic law (Desmichels, quoted by Michelet) at as much as thirty-six
+bushels of wheat.
+
+4. The chief wealth of the chieftains, for a long time, was in their
+personal domains peopled partly with prisoner slaves, but chiefly in the
+above way. On the origin of property see Inama Sternegg's Die Ausbildung
+der grossen Grundherrschaften in Deutschland, in Schmoller's
+Forschungen, Bd. I., 1878; F. Dahn's Urgeschichte der germanischen und
+romanischen Volker, Berlin, 1881; Maurer's Dorfverfassung; Guizot's
+Essais sur l'histoire de France; Maine's Village Community; Botta's
+Histoire d'Italie; Seebohm, Vinogradov, J. R. Green, etc.
+
+5. See Sir Henry Maine's International Law, London, 1888.
+
+6. Ancient Laws of Ireland, Introduction; E. Nys, Etudes de droit
+international, t. i., 1896, pp. 86 seq. Among the Ossetes the arbiters
+from three oldest villages enjoy a special reputation (M. Kovalevsky's
+Modern Custom and Old Law, Moscow, 1886, ii. 217, Russian).
+
+7. It is permissible to think that this conception (related to the
+conception of tanistry) played an important part in the life of the
+period; but research has not yet been directed that way.
+
+8. It was distinctly stated in the charter of St. Quentin of the year
+1002 that the ransom for houses which had to be demolished for crimes
+went for the city walls. The same destination was given to the Ungeld in
+German cities. At Pskov the cathedral was the bank for the fines, and
+from this fund money was taken for the wails.
+
+9. Sohm, Frankische Rechts-und Gerichtsverfassung, p. 23; also Nitzsch,
+Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i. 78.
+
+10. See the excellent remarks on this subject in Augustin Thierry's
+Lettres sur l'histoire de France. 7th Letter. The barbarian translations
+of parts of the Bible are extremely instructive on this point.
+
+11. Thirty-six times more than a noble, according to the Anglo-Saxon
+law. In the code of Rothari the slaying of a king is, however, punished
+by death; but (apart from Roman influence) this new disposition was
+introduced (in 646) in the Lombardian law--as remarked by Leo and
+Botta--to cover the king from blood revenge. The king being at that time
+the executioner of his own sentences (as the tribe formerly was of its
+own sentences), he had to be protected by a special disposition, the
+more so as several Lombardian kings before Rothari had been slain in
+succession (Leo and Botta, l.c., i. 66-90).
+
+12. Kaufmann, Deutsche Geschichte, Bd. I. "Die Germanen der Urzeit," p.
+133.
+
+13. Dr. F. Dahn, Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Volker,
+Berlin, 1881, Bd. I. 96.
+
+14. If I thus follow the views long since advocated by Maurer
+(Geschichte der Stadteverfassung in Deutschland, Erlangen, 1869), it is
+because he has fully proved the uninterrupted evolution from the village
+community to the mediaeval city, and that his views alone can explain
+the universality of the communal movement. Savigny and Eichhorn and
+their followers have certainly proved that the traditions of the Roman
+municipia had never totally disappeared. But they took no account of the
+village community period which the barbarians lived through before they
+had any cities. The fact is, that whenever mankind made a new start in
+civilization, in Greece, Rome, or middle Europe, it passed through the
+same stages--the tribe, the village community, the free city, the
+state--each one naturally evolving out of the preceding stage. Of
+course, the experience of each preceding civilization was never lost.
+Greece (itself influenced by Eastern civilizations) influenced Rome, and
+Rome influenced our civilization; but each of them begin from the same
+beginning--the tribe. And just as we cannot say that our states are
+continuations of the Roman state, so also can we not say that the
+mediaeval cities of Europe (including Scandinavia and Russia) were a
+continuation of the Roman cities. They were a continuation of the
+barbarian village community, influenced to a certain extent by the
+traditions of the Roman towns.
+
+15. M. Kovalevsky, Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia (Ilchester
+Lectures, London, 1891, Lecture 4).
+
+16. A considerable amount of research had to be done before this
+character of the so-called udyelnyi period was properly established by
+the works of Byelaeff (Tales from Russian History), Kostomaroff (The
+Beginnings of Autocracy in Russia), and especially Professor Sergievich
+(The Vyeche and the Prince). The English reader may find some
+information about this period in the just-named work of M. Kovalevsky,
+in Rambaud's History of Russia, and, in a short summary, in the article
+"Russia" of the last edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia.
+
+17. Ferrari, Histoire des revolutions d'Italie, i. 257; Kallsen, Die
+deutschen Stadte im Mittelalter, Bd. I. (Halle, 1891).
+
+18. See the excellent remarks of Mr. G.L. Gomme as regards the folkmote
+of London (The Literature of Local Institutions, London, 1886, p. 76).
+It must, however, be remarked that in royal cities the folkmote never
+attained the independence which it assumed elsewhere. It is even certain
+that Moscow and Paris were chosen by the kings and the Church as the
+cradles of the future royal authority in the State, because they did not
+possess the tradition of folkmotes accustomed to act as sovereign in all
+matters.
+
+19. A. Luchaire, Les Communes francaises; also Kluckohn, Geschichte des
+Gottesfrieden, 1857. L. Semichon (La paix et la treve de Dieu, 2 vols.,
+Paris, 1869) has tried to represent the communal movement as issued from
+that institution. In reality, the treuga Dei, like the league started
+under Louis le Gros for the defence against both the robberies of the
+nobles and the Norman invasions, was a thoroughly popular movement. The
+only historian who mentions this last league--that is,
+Vitalis--describes it as a "popular community" ("Considerations sur
+l'histoire de France," in vol. iv. of Aug. Thierry's OEuvres, Paris,
+1868, p. 191 and note).
+
+20. Ferrari, i. 152, 263, etc.
+
+21. Perrens, Histoire de Florence, i. 188; Ferrari, l.c., i. 283.
+
+22. Aug. Thierry, Essai sur l'histoire du Tiers Etat, Paris, 1875, p.
+414, note.
+
+23. F. Rocquain, "La Renaissance au XIIe siecle," in Etudes sur
+l'histoire de France, Paris, 1875, pp. 55-117.
+
+24. N. Kostomaroff, "The Rationalists of the Twelfth Century," in his
+Monographies and Researches (Russian).
+
+25. Very interesting facts relative to the universality of guilds will
+be found in "Two Thousand Years of Guild Life," by Rev. J. M. Lambert,
+Hull, 1891. On the Georgian amkari, see S. Eghiazarov, Gorodskiye Tsekhi
+("Organization of Transcaucasian Amkari"), in Memoirs of the Caucasian
+Geographical Society, xiv. 2, 1891.
+
+26. J.D. Wunderer's "Reisebericht" in Fichard's Frankfurter Archiv, ii.
+245; quoted by Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i. 355.
+
+27. Dr. Leonard Ennen, Der Dom zu Koln, Historische Einleitung, Koln,
+1871, pp. 46, 50.
+
+28. See previous chapter.
+
+29. Kofod Ancher, Om gamle Danske Gilder og deres Undergang, Copenhagen,
+1785. Statutes of a Knu guild.
+
+30. Upon the position of women in guilds, see Miss Toulmin Smith's
+introductory remarks to the English Guilds of her father. One of the
+Cambridge statutes (p. 281) of the year 1503 is quite positive in the
+following sentence: "Thys statute is made by the comyne assent of all
+the bretherne and sisterne of alhallowe yelde."
+
+31. In medieval times, only secret aggression was treated as a murder.
+Blood-revenge in broad daylight was justice; and slaying in a quarrel
+was not murder, once the aggressor showed his willingness to repent and
+to repair the wrong he had done. Deep traces of this distinction still
+exist in modern criminal law, especially in Russia.
+
+32. Kofod Ancher, l.c. This old booklet contains much that has been lost
+sight of by later explorers.
+
+33. They played an important part in the revolts of the serfs, and were
+therefore prohibited several times in succession in the second half of
+the ninth century. Of course, the king's prohibitions remained a dead
+letter.
+
+34. The medieval Italian painters were also organized in guilds, which
+became at a later epoch Academies of art. If the Italian art of those
+times is impressed with so much individuality that we distinguish, even
+now, between the different schools of Padua, Bassano, Treviso, Verona,
+and so on, although all these cities were under the sway of Venice, this
+was due--J. Paul Richter remarks--to the fact that the painters of each
+city belonged to a separate guild, friendly with the guilds of other
+towns, but leading a separate existence. The oldest guild-statute known
+is that of Verona, dating from 1303, but evidently copied from some much
+older statute. "Fraternal assistance in necessity of whatever kind,"
+"hospitality towards strangers, when passing through the town, as thus
+information may be obtained about matters which one may like to learn,"
+and "obligation of offering comfort in case of debility" are among the
+obligations of the members (Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1890, and Aug.
+1892).
+
+35. The chief works on the artels are named in the article "Russia" of
+the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition, p. 84.
+
+36. See, for instance, the texts of the Cambridge guilds given by
+Toulmin Smith (English Guilds, London, 1870, pp. 274-276), from which it
+appears that the "generall and principall day" was the "eleccioun day;"
+or, Ch. M. Clode's The Early History of the Guild of the Merchant
+Taylors, London, 1888, i. 45; and so on. For the renewal of allegiance,
+see the Jomsviking saga, mentioned in Pappenheim's Altdanische
+Schutzgilden, Breslau, 1885, p. 67. It appears very probable that when
+the guilds began to be prosecuted, many of them inscribed in their
+statutes the meal day only, or their pious duties, and only alluded to
+the judicial function of the guild in vague words; but this function did
+not disappear till a very much later time. The question, "Who will be my
+judge?" has no meaning now, since the State has appropriated for its
+bureaucracy the organization of justice; but it was of primordial
+importance in medieval times, the more so as self-jurisdiction meant
+self-administration. It must also be remarked that the translation of
+the Saxon and Danish "guild-bretheren," or "brodre," by the Latin
+convivii must also have contributed to the above confusion.
+
+37. See the excellent remarks upon the frith guild by J.R. Green and
+Mrs. Green in The Conquest of England, London, 1883, pp. 229-230.
+
+38. None
+
+39. Recueil des ordonnances des rois de France, t. xii. 562; quoted by
+Aug. Thierry in Considerations sur l'histoire de France, p. 196, ed.
+12mo.
+
+40. A. Luchaire, Les Communes francaises, pp, 45-46.
+
+41. Guilbert de Nogent, De vita sua, quoted by Luchaire, l.c., p. 14.
+
+42. Lebret, Histoire de Venise, i. 393; also Marin, quoted by Leo and
+Botta in Histoire de l'Italie, French edition, 1844, t. i 500.
+
+43. Dr. W. Arnold, Verfassungsgeschichte der deutschen Freistadte, 1854,
+Bd. ii. 227 seq.; Ennen, Geschichte der Stadt Koeln, Bd. i. 228-229;
+also the documents published by Ennen and Eckert.
+
+44. Conquest of England, 1883, p. 453.
+
+45. Byelaeff, Russian History, vols. ii. and iii.
+
+46. W. Gramich, Verfassungs und Verwaltungsgeschichte der Stadt Wurzburg
+im 13. bis zum 15. Jahrhundert, Wurzburg, 1882, p. 34.
+
+47. When a boat brought a cargo of coal to Wurzburg, coal could only be
+sold in retail during the first eight days, each family being entitled
+to no more than fifty basketfuls. The remaining cargo could be sold
+wholesale, but the retailer was allowed to raise a zittlicher profit
+only, the unzittlicher, or dishonest profit, being strictly forbidden
+(Gramich, l.c.). Same in London (Liber albus, quoted by Ochenkowski, p.
+161), and, in fact, everywhere.
+
+48. See Fagniez, Etudes sur l'industrie et la classe industrielle a
+Paris au XIIIme et XIVme siecle, Paris, 1877, pp. 155 seq. It hardly
+need be added that the tax on bread, and on beer as well, was settled
+after careful experiments as to the quantity of bread and beer which
+could be obtained from a given amount of corn. The Amiens archives
+contain the minutes of such experiences (A. de Calonne, l.c. pp. 77,
+93). Also those of London (Ochenkowski, England's wirthschaftliche
+Entwickelung, etc., Jena, 1879, p. 165).
+
+49. Ch. Gross, The Guild Merchant, Oxford, 1890, i. 135. His documents
+prove that this practice existed in Liverpool (ii. 148-150), Waterford
+in Ireland, Neath in Wales, and Linlithgow and Thurso in Scotland. Mr.
+Gross's texts also show that the purchases were made for distribution,
+not only among the merchant burgesses, but "upon all citsains and
+commynalte" (p. 136, note), or, as the Thurso ordinance of the
+seventeenth century runs, to "make offer to the merchants, craftsmen,
+and inhabitants of the said burgh, that they may have their proportion
+of the same, according to their necessitys and ability."
+
+50. The Early History of the Guild of Merchant Taylors, by Charles M.
+Clode, London, 1888, i. 361, appendix 10; also the following appendix
+which shows that the same purchases were made in 1546.
+
+51. Cibrario, Les conditions economiques de l'Italie au temps de Dante,
+Paris, 1865, p. 44.
+
+52. A. de Calonne, La vie municipale au XVme siecle dans le Nord de la
+France, Paris, 1880, pp. 12-16. In 1485 the city permitted the export to
+Antwerp of a certain quantity of corn, "the inhabitants of Antwerp being
+always ready to be agreeable to the merchants and burgesses of Amiens"
+(ibid., pp. 75-77 and texts).
+
+53. A. Babeau, La ville sous l'ancien regime, Paris, 1880.
+
+54. Ennen, Geschichte der Stadt Koln, i. 491, 492, also texts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MUTUAL AID IN THE MEDIAEVAL CITY (continued)
+
+Likeness and diversity among the medieval cities. The craftguilds:
+State-attributes in each of them. Attitude of the city towards the
+peasants; attempts to free them. The lords. Results achieved by the
+medieval city: in arts, in learning. Causes of decay.
+
+
+The medieval cities were not organized upon some preconceived plan in
+obedience to the will of an outside legislator. Each of them was a
+natural growth in the full sense of the word--an always varying result
+of struggle between various forces which adjusted and re-adjusted
+themselves in conformity with their relative energies, the chances of
+their conflicts, and the support they found in their surroundings.
+Therefore, there are not two cities whose inner organization and
+destinies would have been identical. Each one, taken separately, varies
+from century to century. And yet, when we cast a broad glance upon all
+the cities of Europe, the local and national unlikenesses disappear, and
+we are struck to find among all of them a wonderful resemblance,
+although each has developed for itself, independently from the others,
+and in different conditions. A small town in the north of Scotland, with
+its population of coarse labourers and fishermen; a rich city of
+Flanders, with its world-wide commerce, luxury, love of amusement and
+animated life; an Italian city enriched by its intercourse with the
+East, and breeding within its walls a refined artistic taste and
+civilization; and a poor, chiefly agricultural, city in the marsh and
+lake district of Russia, seem to have little in common. And
+nevertheless, the leading lines of their organization, and the spirit
+which animates them, are imbued with a strong family likeness.
+Everywhere we see the same federations of small communities and guilds,
+the same "sub-towns" round the mother city, the same folkmote, and the
+same insigns of its independence. The defensor of the city, under
+different names and in different accoutrements, represents the same
+authority and interests; food supplies, labour and commerce, are
+organized on closely similar lines; inner and outer struggles are fought
+with like ambitions; nay, the very formulae used in the struggles, as
+also in the annals, the ordinances, and the rolls, are identical; and
+the architectural monuments, whether Gothic, Roman, or Byzantine in
+style, express the same aspirations and the same ideals; they are
+conceived and built in the same way. Many dissemblances are mere
+differences of age, and those disparities between sister cities which
+are real are repeated in different parts of Europe. The unity of the
+leading idea and the identity of origin make up for differences of
+climate, geographical situation, wealth, language and religion. This is
+why we can speak of the medieval city as of a well-defined phase of
+civilization; and while every research insisting upon local and
+individual differences is most welcome, we may still indicate the chief
+lines of development which are common to all cities.(1)
+
+There is no doubt that the protection which used to be accorded to the
+market-place from the earliest barbarian times has played an important,
+though not an exclusive, part in the emancipation of the medieval city.
+The early barbarians knew no trade within their village communities;
+they traded with strangers only, at certain definite spots, on certain
+determined days. And, in order that the stranger might come to the
+barter-place without risk of being slain for some feud which might be
+running between two kins, the market was always placed under the special
+protection of all kins. It was inviolable, like the place of worship
+under the shadow of which it was held. With the Kabyles it is still
+annaya, like the footpath along which women carry water from the well;
+neither must be trodden upon in arms, even during inter-tribal wars. In
+medieval times the market universally enjoyed the same protection.(2) No
+feud could be prosecuted on the place whereto people came to trade, nor
+within a certain radius from it; and if a quarrel arose in the motley
+crowd of buyers and sellers, it had to be brought before those under
+whose protection the market stood--the community's tribunal, or the
+bishop's, the lord's, or the king's judge. A stranger who came to trade
+was a guest, and he went on under this very name. Even the lord who had
+no scruples about robbing a merchant on the high road, respected the
+Weichbild, that is, the pole which stood in the market-place and bore
+either the king's arms, or a glove, or the image of the local saint, or
+simply a cross, according to whether the market was under the protection
+of the king, the lord, the local church, or the folkmote--the vyeche.(3)
+
+It is easy to understand how the self-jurisdiction of the city could
+develop out of the special jurisdiction in the market-place, when this
+last right was conceded, willingly or not, to the city itself. And such
+an origin of the city's liberties, which can be traced in very many
+cases, necessarily laid a special stamp upon their subsequent
+development. It gave a predominance to the trading part of the
+community. The burghers who possessed a house in the city at the time
+being, and were co-owners in the town-lands, constituted very often a
+merchant guild which held in its hands the city's trade; and although at
+the outset every burgher, rich and poor, could make part of the merchant
+guild, and the trade itself seems to have been carried on for the entire
+city by its trustees, the guild gradually became a sort of privileged
+body. It jealously prevented the outsiders who soon began to flock into
+the free cities from entering the guild, and kept the advantages
+resulting from trade for the few "families" which had been burghers at
+the time of the emancipation. There evidently was a danger of a merchant
+oligarchy being thus constituted. But already in the tenth, and still
+more during the two next centuries, the chief crafts, also organized in
+guilds, were powerful enough to check the oligarchic tendencies of the
+merchants.
+
+The craft guild was then a common seller of its produce and a common
+buyer of the raw materials, and its members were merchants and manual
+workers at the same time. Therefore, the predominance taken by the old
+craft guilds from the very beginnings of the free city life guaranteed
+to manual labour the high position which it afterwards occupied in the
+city.(4) In fact, in a medieval city manual labour was no token of
+inferiority; it bore, on the contrary, traces of the high respect it had
+been kept in in the village community. Manual labour in a "mystery" was
+considered as a pious duty towards the citizens: a public function
+(Amt), as honourable as any other. An idea of "justice" to the
+community, of "right" towards both producer and consumer, which would
+seem so extravagant now, penetrated production and exchange. The
+tanner's, the cooper's, or the shoemaker's work must be "just," fair,
+they wrote in those times. Wood, leather or thread which are used by the
+artisan must be "right"; bread must be baked "in justice," and so on.
+Transport this language into our present life, and it would seem
+affected and unnatural; but it was natural and unaffected then, because
+the medieval artisan did not produce for an unknown buyer, or to throw
+his goods into an unknown market. He produced for his guild first; for a
+brotherhood of men who knew each other, knew the technics of the craft,
+and, in naming the price of each product, could appreciate the skill
+displayed in its fabrication or the labour bestowed upon it. Then the
+guild, not the separate producer, offered the goods for sale in the
+community, and this last, in its turn, offered to the brotherhood of
+allied communities those goods which were exported, and assumed
+responsibility for their quality. With such an organization, it was the
+ambition of each craft not to offer goods of inferior quality, and
+technical defects or adulterations became a matter concerning the whole
+community, because, an ordinance says, "they would destroy public
+confidence."(5) Production being thus a social duty, placed under the
+control of the whole amitas, manual labour could not fall into the
+degraded condition which it occupies now, so long as the free city was
+living.
+
+A difference between master and apprentice, or between master and worker
+(compayne, Geselle), existed but in the medieval cities from their very
+beginnings; this was at the outset a mere difference of age and skill,
+not of wealth and power. After a seven years' apprenticeship, and after
+having proved his knowledge and capacities by a work of art, the
+apprentice became a master himself. And only much later, in the
+sixteenth century, after the royal power had destroyed the city and the
+craft organization, was it possible to become master in virtue of simple
+inheritance or wealth. But this was also the time of a general decay in
+medieval industries and art.
+
+There was not much room for hired work in the early flourishing periods
+of the medieval cities, still less for individual hirelings. The work of
+the weavers, the archers, the smiths, the bakers, and so on, was
+performed for the craft and the city; and when craftsmen were hired in
+the building trades, they worked as temporary corporations (as they
+still do in the Russian artels), whose work was paid en bloc. Work for a
+master began to multiply only later on; but even in this case the worker
+was paid better than he is paid now, even in this country, and very much
+better than he used to be paid all over Europe in the first half of this
+century. Thorold Rogers has familiarized English readers with this idea;
+but the same is true for the Continent as well, as is shown by the
+researches of Falke and Schonberg, and by many occasional indications.
+Even in the fifteenth century a mason, a carpenter, or a smith worker
+would be paid at Amiens four sols a day, which corresponded to
+forty-eight pounds of bread, or to the eighth part of a small ox
+(bouvard). In Saxony, the salary of the Geselle in the building trade
+was such that, to put it in Falke's words, he could buy with his six
+days' wages three sheep and one pair of shoes.(6) The donations of
+workers (Geselle) to cathedrals also bear testimony of their relative
+well-being, to say nothing of the glorious donations of certain craft
+guilds nor of what they used to spend in festivities and pageants.(7) In
+fact, the more we learn about the medieval city, the more we are
+convinced that at no time has labour enjoyed such conditions of
+prosperity and such respect as when city life stood at its highest.
+
+More than that; not only many aspirations of our modern radicals were
+already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now
+as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact. We are laughed at when
+we say that work must be pleasant, but--"every one must be pleased with
+his work," a medieval Kuttenberg ordinance says, "and no one shall,
+while doing nothing (mit nichts thun), appropriate for himself what
+others have produced by application and work, because laws must be a
+shield for application and work."(8) And amidst all present talk about
+an eight hours' day, it may be well to remember an ordinance of
+Ferdinand the First relative to the Imperial coal mines, which settled
+the miner's day at eight hours, "as it used to be of old" (wie vor
+Alters herkommen), and work on Saturday afternoon was prohibited. Longer
+hours were very rare, we are told by Janssen, while shorter hours were
+of common occurrence. In this country, in the fifteenth century, Rogers
+says, "the workmen worked only forty-eight hours a week."(9) The
+Saturday half-holiday, too, which we consider as a modern conquest, was
+in reality an old medieval institution; it was bathing-time for a great
+part of the community, while Wednesday afternoon was bathing-time for
+the Geselle.(10) And although school meals did not exist--probably
+because no children went hungry to school--a distribution of bath-money
+to the children whose parents found difficulty in providing it was
+habitual in several places. As to Labour Congresses, they also were a
+regular Feature of the middles ages. In some parts of Germany craftsmen
+of the same trade, belonging to different communes, used to come
+together every year to discuss questions relative to their trade, the
+years of apprenticeship, the wandering years, the wages, and so on; and
+in 1572, the Hanseatic towns formally recognized the right of the crafts
+to come together at periodical congresses, and to take any resolutions,
+so long as they were not contrary to the cities' rolls, relative to the
+quality of goods. Such Labour Congresses, partly international like the
+Hansa itself, are known to have been held by bakers, founders, smiths,
+tanners, sword-makers and cask-makers.(11)
+
+The craft organization required, of course, a close supervision of the
+craftsmen by the guild, and special jurates were always nominated for
+that purpose. But it is most remarkable that, so long as the cities
+lived their free life, no complaints were heard about the supervision;
+while, after the State had stepped in, confiscating the property of the
+guilds and destroying their independence in favour of its own
+bureaucracy, the complaints became simply countless.(12) On the other
+hand, the immensity of progress realized in all arts under the mediaeval
+guild system is the best proof that the system was no hindrance to
+individual initiative.(13) The fact is, that the medieval guild, like
+the medieval parish, "street," or "quarter," was not a body of citizens,
+placed under the control of State functionaries; it was a union of all
+men connected with a given trade: jurate buyers of raw produce, sellers
+of manufactured goods, and artisans--masters, "compaynes," and
+apprentices. For the inner organization of the trade its assembly was
+sovereign, so long as it did not hamper the other guilds, in which case
+the matter was brought before the guild of the guilds--the city. But
+there was in it something more than that. It had its own
+self-jurisdiction, its own military force, its own general assemblies,
+its own traditions of struggles, glory, and independence, its own
+relations with other guilds of the same trade in other cities: it had,
+in a word, a full organic life which could only result from the
+integrality of the vital functions. When the town was called to arms,
+the guild appeared as a separate company (Schaar), armed with its own
+arms (or its own guns, lovingly decorated by the guild, at a subsequent
+epoch), under its own self-elected commanders. It was, in a word, as
+independent a unit of the federation as the republic of Uri or Geneva
+was fifty years ago in the Swiss Confederation. So that, to compare it
+with a modern trade union, divested of all attributes of State
+sovereignty, and reduced to a couple of functions of secondary
+importance, is as unreasonable as to compare Florence or Brugge with a
+French commune vegetating under the Code Napoleon, or with a Russian
+town placed under Catherine the Second's municipal law. Both have
+elected mayors, and the latter has also its craft corporations; but the
+difference is--all the difference that exists between Florence and
+Fontenay-les-Oies or Tsarevokokshaisk, or between a Venetian doge and a
+modern mayor who lifts his hat before the sous-prefet's clerk.
+
+The medieval guilds were capable of maintaining their independence; and,
+later on, especially in the fourteenth century, when, in consequence of
+several causes which shall presently be indicated, the old municipal
+life underwent a deep modification, the younger crafts proved strong
+enough to conquer their due share in the management of the city affairs.
+The masses, organized in "minor" arts, rose to wrest the power out of
+the hands of a growing oligarchy, and mostly succeeded in this task,
+opening again a new era of prosperity. True, that in some cities the
+uprising was crushed in blood, and mass decapitations of workers
+followed, as was the case in Paris in 1306, and in Cologne in 1371. In
+such cases the city's liberties rapidly fell into decay, and the city
+was gradually subdued by the central authority. But the majority of the
+towns had preserved enough of vitality to come out of the turmoil with a
+new life and vigour.(14) A new period of rejuvenescence was their
+reward. New life was infused, and it found its expression in splendid
+architectural monuments, in a new period of prosperity, in a sudden
+progress of technics and invention, and in a new intellectual movement
+leading to the Renaissance and to the Reformation.
+
+The life of a mediaeval city was a succession of hard battles to conquer
+liberty and to maintain it. True, that a strong and tenacious race of
+burghers had developed during those fierce contests; true, that love and
+worship of the mother city had been bred by these struggles, and that
+the grand things achieved by the mediaeval communes were a direct
+outcome of that love. But the sacrifices which the communes had to
+sustain in the battle for freedom were, nevertheless, cruel, and left
+deep traces of division on their inner life as well. Very few cities had
+succeeded, under a concurrence of favourable circumstances, in obtaining
+liberty at one stroke, and these few mostly lost it equally easily;
+while the great number had to fight fifty or a hundred years in
+succession, often more, before their rights to free life had been
+recognized, and another hundred years to found their liberty on a firm
+basis--the twelfth century charters thus being but one of the
+stepping-stones to freedom.(15) In reality, the mediaeval city was a
+fortified oasis amidst a country plunged into feudal submission, and it
+had to make room for itself by the force of its arms. In consequence of
+the causes briefly alluded to in the preceding chapter, each village
+community had gradually fallen under the yoke of some lay or clerical
+lord. His house had grown to be a castle, and his brothers-in-arms were
+now the scum of adventurers, always ready to plunder the peasants. In
+addition to three days a week which the peasants had to work for the
+lord, they had also to bear all sorts of exactions for the right to sow
+and to crop, to be gay or sad, to live, to marry, or to die. And, worst
+of all, they were continually plundered by the armed robbers of some
+neighbouring lord, who chose to consider them as their master's kin, and
+to take upon them, and upon their cattle and crops, the revenge for a
+feud he was fighting against their owner. Every meadow, every field,
+every river, and road around the city, and every man upon the land was
+under some lord.
+
+The hatred of the burghers towards the feudal barons has found a most
+characteristic expression in the wording of the different charters which
+they compelled them to sign. Heinrich V. is made to sign in the charter
+granted to Speier in 1111, that he frees the burghers from "the horrible
+and execrable law of mortmain, through which the town has been sunk into
+deepest poverty" (von dem scheusslichen und nichtswurdigen Gesetze,
+welches gemein Budel genannt wird, Kallsen, i. 307). The coutume of
+Bayonne, written about 1273, contains such passages as these: "The
+people is anterior to the lords. It is the people, more numerous than
+all others, who, desirous of peace, has made the lords for bridling and
+knocking down the powerful ones," and so on (Giry, Etablissements de
+Rouen, i. 117, Quoted by Luchaire, p. 24). A charter submitted for King
+Robert's signature is equally characteristic. He is made to say in it:
+"I shall rob no oxen nor other animals. I shall seize no merchants, nor
+take their moneys, nor impose ransom. From Lady Day to the All Saints'
+Day I shall seize no horse, nor mare, nor foals, in the meadows. I shall
+not burn the mills, nor rob the flour ... I shall offer no protection to
+thieves," etc. (Pfister has published that document, reproduced by
+Luchaire). The charter "granted" by the Besancon Archbishop Hugues, in
+which he has been compelled to enumerate all the mischiefs due to his
+mortmain rights, is equally characteristic.(16) And so on.
+
+Freedom could not be maintained in such surroundings, and the cities
+were compelled to carry on the war outside their walls. The burghers
+sent out emissaries to lead revolt in the villages; they received
+villages into their corporations, and they waged direct war against the
+nobles. It Italy, where the land was thickly sprinkled with feudal
+castles, the war assumed heroic proportions, and was fought with a stern
+acrimony on both sides. Florence sustained for seventy-seven years a
+succession of bloody wars, in order to free its contado from the nobles;
+but when the conquest had been accomplished (in 1181) all had to begin
+anew. The nobles rallied; they constituted their own leagues in
+opposition to the leagues of the towns, and, receiving fresh support
+from either the Emperor or the Pope, they made the war last for another
+130 years. The same took place in Rome, in Lombardy, all over Italy.
+
+Prodigies of valour, audacity, and tenaciousness were displayed by the
+citizens in these wars. But the bows and the hatchets of the arts and
+crafts had not always the upper hand in their encounters with the
+armour-clad knights, and many castles withstood the ingenious
+siege-machinery and the perseverance of the citizens. Some cities, like
+Florence, Bologna, and many towns in France, Germany, and Bohemia,
+succeeded in emancipating the surrounding villages, and they were
+rewarded for their efforts by an extraordinary prosperity and
+tranquillity. But even here, and still more in the less strong or less
+impulsive towns, the merchants and artisans, exhausted by war, and
+misunderstanding their own interests, bargained over the peasants'
+heads. They compelled the lord to swear allegiance to the city; his
+country castle was dismantled, and he agreed to build a house and to
+reside in the city, of which he became a co-burgher (com-bourgeois,
+con-cittadino); but he maintained in return most of his rights upon the
+peasants, who only won a partial relief from their burdens. The burgher
+could not understand that equal rights of citizenship might be granted
+to the peasant upon whose food supplies he had to rely, and a deep rent
+was traced between town and village. In some cases the peasants simply
+changed owners, the city buying out the barons' rights and selling them
+in shares to her own citizens.(17) Serfdom was maintained, and only much
+later on, towards the end of the thirteenth century, it was the craft
+revolution which undertook to put an end to it, and abolished personal
+servitude, but dispossessed at the same time the serfs of the land.(18)
+It hardly need be added that the fatal results of such policy were soon
+felt by the cities themselves; the country became the city's enemy.
+
+The war against the castles had another bad effect. It involved the
+cities in a long succession of mutual wars, which have given origin to
+the theory, till lately in vogue, namely, that the towns lost their
+independence through their own jealousies and mutual fights. The
+imperialist historians have especially supported this theory, which,
+however, is very much undermined now by modern research. It is certain
+that in Italy cities fought each other with a stubborn animosity, but
+nowhere else did such contests attain the same proportions; and in Italy
+itself the city wars, especially those of the earlier period, had their
+special causes. They were (as was already shown by Sismondi and Ferrari)
+a mere continuation of the war against the castles--the free municipal
+and federative principle unavoidably entering into a fierce contest with
+feudalism, imperialism, and papacy. Many towns which had but partially
+shaken off the yoke of the bishop, the lord, or the Emperor, were simply
+driven against the free cities by the nobles, the Emperor, and Church,
+whose policy was to divide the cities and to arm them against each
+other. These special circumstances (partly reflected on to Germany also)
+explain why the Italian towns, some of which sought support with the
+Emperor to combat the Pope, while the others sought support from the
+Church to resist the Emperor, were soon divided into a Gibelin and a
+Guelf camp, and why the same division appeared in each separate
+city.(19)
+
+The immense economical progress realized by most italian cities just at
+the time when these wars were hottest,(20) and the alliances so easily
+concluded between towns, still better characterize those struggles and
+further undermine the above theory. Already in the years 1130-1150
+powerful leagues came into existence; and a few years later, when
+Frederick Barbarossa invaded Italy and, supported by the nobles and some
+retardatory cities, marched against Milan, popular enthusiasm was roused
+in many towns by popular preachers. Crema, Piacenza, Brescia, Tortona,
+etc., went to the rescue; the banners of the guilds of Verona, Padua,
+Vicenza, and Trevisa floated side by side in the cities' camp against
+the banners of the Emperor and the nobles. Next year the Lombardian
+League came into existence, and sixty years later we see it reinforced
+by many other cities, and forming a lasting organization which had half
+of its federal war-chest in Genoa and the other half in Venice.(21) In
+Tuscany, Florence headed another powerful league, to which Lucca,
+Bologna, Pistoia, etc., belonged, and which played an important part in
+crushing down the nobles in middle Italy, while smaller leagues were of
+common occurrence. It is thus certain that although petty jealousies
+undoubtedly existed, and discord could be easily sown, they did not
+prevent the towns from uniting together for the common defence of
+liberty. Only later on, when separate cities became little States, wars
+broke out between them, as always must be the case when States struggle
+for supremacy or colonies.
+
+Similar leagues were formed in Germany for the same purpose. When, under
+the successors of Conrad, the land was the prey of interminable feuds
+between the nobles, the Westphalian towns concluded a league against the
+knights, one of the clauses of which was never to lend money to a knight
+who would continue to conceal stolen goods.(22) When "the knights and
+the nobles lived on plunder, and murdered whom they chose to murder," as
+the Wormser Zorn complains, the cities on the Rhine (Mainz, Cologne,
+Speier, Strasburg, and Basel) took the initiative of a league which soon
+numbered sixty allied towns, repressed the robbers, and maintained
+peace. Later on, the league of the towns of Suabia, divided into three
+"peace districts" (Augsburg, Constance, and Ulm), had the same purpose.
+And even when such leagues were broken,(23) they lived long enough to
+show that while the supposed peacemakers--the kings, the emperors, and
+the Church-fomented discord, and were themselves helpless against the
+robber knights, it was from the cities that the impulse came for
+re-establishing peace and union. The cities--not the emperors--were the
+real makers of the national unity.(24)
+
+Similar federations were organized for the same purpose among small
+villages, and now that attention has been drawn to this subject by
+Luchaire we may expect soon to learn much more about them. Villages
+joined into small federations in the contado of Florence, so also in the
+dependencies of Novgorod and Pskov. As to France, there is positive
+evidence of a federation of seventeen peasant villages which has existed
+in the Laonnais for nearly a hundred years (till 1256), and has fought
+hard for its independence. Three more peasant republics, which had sworn
+charters similar to those of Laon and Soissons, existed in the
+neighbourhood of Laon, and, their territories being contiguous, they
+supported each other in their liberation wars. Altogether, Luchaire is
+of the opinion that many such federations must have come into existence
+in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but that documents
+relative to them are mostly lost. Of course, being unprotected by walls,
+they could easily be crushed down by the kings and the lords; but in
+certain favourable circumstances, when they found support in a league of
+towns and protection in their mountains, such peasant republics became
+independent units of the Swiss Confederation.(25)
+
+As to unions between cities for peaceful purposes, they were of quite
+common occurrence. The intercourse which had been established during the
+period of liberation was not interrupted afterwards. Sometimes, when the
+scabini of a German town, having to pronounce judgment in a new or
+complicated case, declared that they knew not the sentence (des
+Urtheiles nicht weise zu sein), they sent delegates to another city to
+get the sentence. The same happened also in France;(26) while Forli and
+Ravenna are known to have mutually naturalized their citizens and
+granted them full rights in both cities. To submit a contest arisen
+between two towns, or within a city, to another commune which was
+invited to act as arbiter, was also in the spirit of the times.(27) As
+to commercial treaties between cities, they were quite habitual.(28)
+Unions for regulating the production and the sizes of casks which were
+used for the commerce in wine, "herring unions," and so on, were mere
+precursors of the great commercial federations of the Flemish Hansa,
+and, later on, of the great North German Hansa, the history of which
+alone might contribute pages and pages to illustrate the federation
+spirit which permeated men at that time. It hardly need be added, that
+through the Hanseatic unions the medieval cities have contributed more
+to the development of international intercourse, navigation, and
+maritime discovery than all the States of the first seventeen centuries
+of our era.
+
+In a word, federations between small territorial units, as well as among
+men united by common pursuits within their respective guilds, and
+federations between cities and groups of cities constituted the very
+essence of life and thought during that period. The first five of the
+second decade of centuries of our era may thus be described as an
+immense attempt at securing mutual aid and support on a grand scale, by
+means of the principles of federation and association carried on through
+all manifestations of human life and to all possible degrees. This
+attempt was attended with success to a very great extent. It united men
+formerly divided; it secured them a very great deal of freedom, and it
+tenfolded their forces. At a time when particularism was bred by so many
+agencies, and the causes of discord and jealousy might have been so
+numerous, it is gratifying to see that cities scattered over a wide
+continent had so much in common, and were so ready to confederate for
+the prosecution of so many common aims. They succumbed in the long run
+before powerful enemies; not having understood the mutual-aid principle
+widely enough, they themselves committed fatal faults; but they did not
+perish through their own jealousies, and their errors were not a want of
+federation spirit among themselves.
+
+The results of that new move which mankind made in the medieval city
+were immense. At the beginning of the eleventh century the towns of
+Europe were small clusters of miserable huts, adorned but with low
+clumsy churches, the builders of which hardly knew how to make an arch;
+the arts, mostly consisting of some weaving and forging, were in their
+infancy; learning was found in but a few monasteries. Three hundred and
+fifty years later, the very face of Europe had been changed. The land
+was dotted with rich cities, surrounded by immense thick walls which
+were embellished by towers and gates, each of them a work of art in
+itself. The cathedrals, conceived in a grand style and profusely
+decorated, lifted their bell-towers to the skies, displaying a purity of
+form and a boldness of imagination which we now vainly strive to attain.
+The crafts and arts had risen to a degree of perfection which we can
+hardly boast of having superseded in many directions, if the inventive
+skill of the worker and the superior finish of his work be appreciated
+higher than rapidity of fabrication. The navies of the free cities
+furrowed in all directions the Northern and the Southern Mediterranean;
+one effort more, and they would cross the oceans. Over large tracts of
+land well-being had taken the place of misery; learning had grown and
+spread. The methods of science had been elaborated; the basis of natural
+philosophy had been laid down; and the way had been paved for all the
+mechanical inventions of which our own times are so proud. Such were the
+magic changes accomplished in Europe in less than four hundred years.
+And the losses which Europe sustained through the loss of its free
+cities can only be understood when we compare the seventeenth century
+with the fourteenth or the thirteenth. The prosperity which formerly
+characterized Scotland, Germany, the plains of Italy, was gone. The
+roads had fallen into an abject state, the cities were depopulated,
+labour was brought into slavery, art had vanished, commerce itself was
+decaying.(29)
+
+If the medieval cities had bequeathed to us no written documents to
+testify of their splendour, and left nothing behind but the monuments of
+building art which we see now all over Europe, from Scotland to Italy,
+and from Gerona in Spain to Breslau in Slavonian territory, we might yet
+conclude that the times of independent city life were times of the
+greatest development of human intellect during the Christian era down to
+the end of the eighteenth century. On looking, for instance, at a
+medieval picture representing Nuremberg with its scores of towers and
+lofty spires, each of which bore the stamp of free creative art, we can
+hardly conceive that three hundred years before the town was but a
+collection of miserable hovels. And our admiration grows when we go into
+the details of the architecture and decorations of each of the countless
+churches, bell-towers, gates, and communal houses which are scattered
+all over Europe as far east as Bohemia and the now dead towns of Polish
+Galicia. Not only Italy, that mother of art, but all Europe is full of
+such monuments. The very fact that of all arts architecture--a social
+art above all--had attained the highest development, is significant in
+itself. To be what it was, it must have originated from an eminently
+social life.
+
+Medieval architecture attained its grandeur--not only because it was a
+natural development of handicraft; not only because each building, each
+architectural decoration, had been devised by men who knew through the
+experience of their own hands what artistic effects can be obtained from
+stone, iron, bronze, or even from simple logs and mortar; not only
+because, each monument was a result of collective experience,
+accumulated in each "mystery" or craft(30)--it was grand because it was
+born out of a grand idea. Like Greek art, it sprang out of a conception
+of brotherhood and unity fostered by the city. It had an audacity which
+could only be won by audacious struggles and victories; it had that
+expression of vigour, because vigour permeated all the life of the city.
+A cathedral or a communal house symbolized the grandeur of an organism
+of which every mason and stone-cutter was the builder, and a medieval
+building appears--not as a solitary effort to which thousands of slaves
+would have contributed the share assigned them by one man's imagination;
+all the city contributed to it. The lofty bell-tower rose upon a
+structure, grand in itself, in which the life of the city was
+throbbing--not upon a meaningless scaffold like the Paris iron tower,
+not as a sham structure in stone intended to conceal the ugliness of an
+iron frame, as has been done in the Tower Bridge. Like the Acropolis of
+Athens, the cathedral of a medieval city was intended to glorify the
+grandeur of the victorious city, to symbolize the union of its crafts,
+to express the glory of each citizen in a city of his own creation.
+After having achieved its craft revolution, the city often began a new
+cathedral in order to express the new, wider, and broader union which
+had been called into life.
+
+The means at hand for these grand undertakings were disproportionately
+small. Cologne Cathedral was begun with a yearly outlay of but 500
+marks; a gift of 100 marks was inscribed as a grand donation;(31) and
+even when the work approached completion, and gifts poured in in
+proportion, the yearly outlay in money stood at about 5,000 marks, and
+never exceeded 14,000. The cathedral of Basel was built with equally
+small means. But each corporation contributed its part of stone, work,
+and decorative genius to their common monument. Each guild expressed in
+it its political conceptions, telling in stone or in bronze the history
+of the city, glorifying the principles of "Liberty, equality, and
+fraternity,"(32) praising the city's allies, and sending to eternal fire
+its enemies. And each guild bestowed its love upon the communal monument
+by richly decorating it with stained windows, paintings, "gates, worthy
+to be the gates of Paradise," as Michel Angelo said, or stone
+decorations of each minutest corner of the building.(33) Small cities,
+even small parishes,(34) vied with the big agglomerations in this work,
+and the cathedrals of Laon and St. Ouen hardly stand behind that of
+Rheims, or the Communal House of Bremen, or the folkmote's bell-tower of
+Breslau. "No works must be begun by the commune but such as are
+conceived in response to the grand heart of the commune, composed of the
+hearts of all citizens, united in one common will"--such were the words
+of the Council of Florence; and this spirit appears in all communal
+works of common utility, such as the canals, terraces, vineyards, and
+fruit gardens around Florence, or the irrigation canals which
+intersected the plains of Lombardy, or the port and aqueduct of Genoa,
+or, in fact, any works of the kind which were achieved by almost every
+city.(35)
+
+All arts had progressed in the same way in the medieval cities, those of
+our own days mostly being but a continuation of what had grown at that
+time. The prosperity of the Flemish cities was based upon the fine
+woollen cloth they fabricated. Florence, at the beginning of the
+fourteenth century, before the black death, fabricated from 70,000 to
+100,000 panni of woollen stuffs, which were valued at 1,200,000 golden
+florins.(36) The chiselling of precious metals, the art of casting, the
+fine forging of iron, were creations of the mediaeval "mysteries" which
+had succeeded in attaining in their own domains all that could be made
+by the hand, without the use of a powerful prime motor. By the hand and
+by invention, because, to use Whewell's words:
+
+"Parchment and paper, printing and engraving, improved glass and steel,
+gunpowder, clocks, telescopes, the mariner's compass, the reformed
+calendar, the decimal notation; algebra, trigonometry, chemistry,
+counterpoint (an invention equivalent to a new creation of music); these
+are all possessions which we inherit from that which has so
+disparagingly been termed the Stationary Period" (History of Inductive
+Sciences, i. 252).
+
+True that no new principle was illustrated by any of these discoveries,
+as Whewell said; but medieval science had done something more than the
+actual discovery of new principles. It had prepared the discovery of all
+the new principles which we know at the present time in mechanical
+sciences: it had accustomed the explorer to observe facts and to reason
+from them. It was inductive science, even though it had not yet fully
+grasped the importance and the powers of induction; and it laid the
+foundations of both mechanics and natural philosophy. Francis Bacon,
+Galileo, and Copernicus were the direct descendants of a Roger Bacon and
+a Michael Scot, as the steam engine was a direct product of the
+researches carried on in the Italian universities on the weight of the
+atmosphere, and of the mathematical and technical learning which
+characterized Nuremberg.
+
+But why should one take trouble to insist upon the advance of science
+and art in the medieval city? Is it not enough to point to the
+cathedrals in the domain of skill, and to the Italian language and the
+poem of Dante in the domain of thought, to give at once the measure of
+what the medieval city created during the four centuries it lived?
+
+The medieval cities have undoubtedly rendered an immense service to
+European civilization. They have prevented it from being drifted into
+the theocracies and despotical states of old; they have endowed it with
+the variety, the self-reliance, the force of initiative, and the immense
+intellectual and material energies it now possesses, which are the best
+pledge for its being able to resist any new invasion of the East. But
+why did these centres of civilization, which attempted to answer to
+deeply-seated needs of human nature, and were so full of life, not live
+further on? Why were they seized with senile debility in the sixteenth
+century? and, after having repulsed so many assaults from without, and
+only borrowed new vigour from their interior struggles, why did they
+finally succumb to both?
+
+Various causes contributed to this effect, some of them having their
+roots in the remote past, while others originated in the mistakes
+committed by the cities themselves. Towards the end of the fifteenth
+century, mighty States, reconstructed on the old Roman pattern, were
+already coming into existence. In each country and each region some
+feudal lord, more cunning, more given to hoarding, and often less
+scrupulous than his neighbours, had succeeded in appropriating to
+himself richer personal domains, more peasants on his lands, more
+knights in his following, more treasures in his chest. He had chosen for
+his seat a group of happily-situated villages, not yet trained into free
+municipal life--Paris, Madrid, or Moscow--and with the labour of his
+serfs he had made of them royal fortified cities, whereto he attracted
+war companions by a free distribution of villages, and merchants by the
+protection he offered to trade. The germ of a future State, which began
+gradually to absorb other similar centres, was thus laid. Lawyers,
+versed in the study of Roman law, flocked into such centres; a tenacious
+and ambitious race of men issued from among the burgesses, who equally
+hated the naughtiness of the lords and what they called the lawlessness
+of the peasants. The very forms of the village community, unknown to
+their code, the very principles of federalism were repulsive to them as
+"barbarian" inheritances. Caesarism, supported by the fiction of popular
+consent and by the force of arms, was their ideal, and they worked hard
+for those who promised to realize it.(37)
+
+The Christian Church, once a rebel against Roman law and now its ally,
+worked in the same direction. The attempt at constituting the theocratic
+Empire of Europe having proved a failure, the more intelligent and
+ambitious bishops now yielded support to those whom they reckoned upon
+for reconstituting the power of the Kings of Israel or of the Emperors
+of Constantinople. The Church bestowed upon the rising rulers her
+sanctity, she crowned them as God's representatives on earth, she
+brought to their service the learning and the statesmanship of her
+ministers, her blessings and maledictions, her riches, and the
+sympathies she had retained among the poor. The peasants, whom the
+cities had failed or refused to free, on seeing the burghers impotent to
+put an end to the interminable wars between the knights--which wars they
+had so dearly to pay for--now set their hopes upon the King, the
+Emperor, or the Great Prince; and while aiding them to crush down the
+mighty feudal owners, they aided them to constitute the centralized
+State. And finally, the invasions of the Mongols and the Turks, the holy
+war against the Maures in Spain, as well as the terrible wars which soon
+broke out between the growing centres of sovereignty--Ile de France and
+Burgundy, Scotland and England, England and France, Lithuania and
+Poland, Moscow and Tver, and so on--contributed to the same end. Mighty
+States made their appearance; and the cities had now to resist not only
+loose federations of lords, but strongly-organized centres, which had
+armies of serfs at their disposal.
+
+The worst was, that the growing autocracies found support in the
+divisions which had grown within the cities themselves. The fundamental
+idea of the medieval city was grand, but it was not wide enough. Mutual
+aid and support cannot be limited to a small association; they must
+spread to its surroundings, or else the surroundings will absorb the
+association. And in this respect the medieval citizen had committed a
+formidable mistake at the outset. Instead of looking upon the peasants
+and artisans who gathered under the protection of his walls as upon so
+many aids who would contribute their part to the making of the city--as
+they really did--a sharp division was traced between the "families" of
+old burghers and the newcomers. For the former, all benefits from
+communal trade and communal lands were reserved, and nothing was left
+for the latter but the right of freely using the skill of their own
+hands. The city thus became divided into "the burghers" or "the
+commonalty," and "the inhabitants."(38) The trade, which was formerly
+communal, now became the privilege of the merchant and artisan
+"families," and the next step--that of becoming individual, or the
+privilege of oppressive trusts--was unavoidable.
+
+The same division took place between the city proper and the surrounding
+villages. The commune had well tried to free the peasants, but her wars
+against the lords became, as already mentioned, wars for freeing the
+city itself from the lords, rather than for freeing the peasants. She
+left to the lord his rights over the villeins, on condition that he
+would molest the city no more and would become co-burgher. But the
+nobles "adopted" by the city, and now residing within its walls, simply
+carried on the old war within the very precincts of the city. They
+disliked to submit to a tribunal of simple artisans and merchants, and
+fought their old feuds in the streets. Each city had now its Colonnas
+and Orsinis, its Overstolzes and Wises. Drawing large incomes from the
+estates they had still retained, they surrounded themselves with
+numerous clients and feudalized the customs and habits of the city
+itself. And when discontent began to be felt in the artisan classes of
+the town, they offered their sword and their followers to settle the
+differences by a free fight, instead of letting the discontent find out
+the channels which it did not fail to secure itself in olden times.
+
+The greatest and the most fatal error of most cities was to base their
+wealth upon commerce and industry, to the neglect of agriculture. They
+thus repeated the error which had once been committed by the cities of
+antique Greece, and they fell through it into the same crimes.(39) The
+estrangement of so many cities from the land necessarily drew them into
+a policy hostile to the land, which became more and more evident in the
+times of Edward the Third,(40) the French Jacqueries, the Hussite wars,
+and the Peasant War in Germany. On the other hand, a commercial policy
+involved them in distant enterprises. Colonies were founded by the
+Italians in the south-east, by German cities in the east, by Slavonian
+cities in the far northeast. Mercenary armies began to be kept for
+colonial wars, and soon for local defence as well. Loans were contacted
+to such an extent as to totally demoralize the citizens; and internal
+contests grew worse and worse at each election, during which the
+colonial politics in the interest of a few families was at stake. The
+division into rich and poor grew deeper, and in the sixteenth century,
+in each city, the royal authority found ready allies and support among
+the poor.
+
+And there is yet another cause of the decay of communal institutions,
+which stands higher and lies deeper than all the above. The history of
+the medieval cities offers one of the most striking illustrations of the
+power of ideas and principles upon the destinies of mankind, and of the
+quite opposed results which are obtained when a deep modification of
+leading ideas has taken place. Self-reliance and federalism, the
+sovereignty of each group, and the construction of the political body
+from the simple to the composite, were the leading ideas in the eleventh
+century. But since that time the conceptions had entirely changed. The
+students of Roman law and the prelates of the Church, closely bound
+together since the time of Innocent the Third, had succeeded in
+paralyzing the idea--the antique Greek idea--which presided at the
+foundation of the cities. For two or three hundred years they taught
+from the pulpit, the University chair, and the judges' bench, that
+salvation must be sought for in a strongly-centralized State, placed
+under a semi-divine authority;(41) that one man can and must be the
+saviour of society, and that in the name of public salvation he can
+commit any violence: burn men and women at the stake, make them perish
+under indescribable tortures, plunge whole provinces into the most
+abject misery. Nor did they fail to give object lessons to this effect
+on a grand scale, and with an unheard-of cruelty, wherever the king's
+sword and the Church's fire, or both at once, could reach. By these
+teachings and examples, continually repeated and enforced upon public
+attention, the very minds of the citizens had been shaped into a new
+mould. They began to find no authority too extensive, no killing by
+degrees too cruel, once it was "for public safety." And, with this new
+direction of mind and this new belief in one man's power, the old
+federalist principle faded away, and the very creative genius of the
+masses died out. The Roman idea was victorious, and in such
+circumstances the centralized State had in the cities a ready prey.
+
+Florence in the fifteenth century is typical of this change. Formerly a
+popular revolution was the signal of a new departure. Now, when the
+people, brought to despair, insurged, it had constructive ideas no more;
+no fresh idea came out of the movement. A thousand representatives were
+put into the Communal Council instead of 400; 100 men entered the
+signoria instead of 80. But a revolution of figures could be of no
+avail. The people's discontent was growing up, and new revolts followed.
+A saviour--the "tyran"--was appealed to; he massacred the rebels, but
+the disintegration of the communal body continued worse than ever. And
+when, after a new revolt, the people of Florence appealed to their most
+popular man, Gieronimo Savonarola, for advice, the monk's answer
+was:--"Oh, people mine, thou knowest that I cannot go into State affairs
+... purify thy soul, and if in such a disposition of mind thou reformest
+thy city, then, people of Florence, thou shalt have inaugurated the
+reform in all Italy!" Carnival masks and vicious books were burned, a
+law of charity and another against usurers were passed--and the
+democracy of Florence remained where it was. The old spirit had gone. By
+too much trusting to government, they had ceased to trust to themselves;
+they were unable to open new issues. The State had only to step in and
+to crush down their last liberties.
+
+And yet, the current of mutual aid and support did not die out in the
+masses, it continued to flow even after that defeat. It rose up again
+with a formidable force, in answer to the communist appeals of the first
+propagandists of the reform, and it continued to exist even after the
+masses, having failed to realize the life which they hoped to inaugurate
+under the inspiration of a reformed religion, fell under the dominions
+of an autocratic power. It flows still even now, and it seeks its way to
+find out a new expression which would not be the State, nor the medieval
+city, nor the village community of the barbarians, nor the savage clan,
+but would proceed from all of them, and yet be superior to them in its
+wider and more deeply humane conceptions.
+
+NOTES:
+
+1. The literature of the subject is immense; but there is no work yet
+which treats of the medieval city as of a whole. For the French
+Communes, Augustin Thierry's Lettres and Considerations sur l'histoire
+de France still remain classical, and Luchaire's Communes francaises is
+an excellent addition on the same lines. For the cities of Italy, the
+great work of Sismondi (Histoire des republiques italiennes du moyen
+age, Paris, 1826, 16 vols.), Leo and Botta's History of Italy, Ferrari's
+Revolutions d'Italie, and Hegel's Geschichte der Stadteverfassung in
+Italien, are the chief sources of general information. For Germany we
+have Maurer's Stadteverfassung, Barthold's Geschichte der deutschen
+Stadte, and, of recent works, Hegel's Stadte und Gilden der germanischen
+Volker (2 vols. Leipzig, 1891), and Dr. Otto Kallsen's Die deutschen
+Stadte im Mittelalter (2 vols. Halle, 1891), as also Janssen's
+Geschichte des deutschen Volkes (5 vols. 1886), which, let us hope, will
+soon be translated into English (French translation in 1892). For
+Belgium, A. Wauters, Les Libertes communales (Bruxelles, 1869-78, 3
+vols.). For Russia, Byelaeff's, Kostomaroff's and Sergievich's works.
+And finally, for England, we posses one of the best works on cities of a
+wider region in Mrs. J.R. Green's Town Life in the Fifteenth Century (2
+vols. London, 1894). We have, moreover, a wealth of well-known local
+histories, and several excellent works of general or economical history
+which I have so often mentioned in this and the preceding chapter. The
+richness of literature consists, however, chiefly in separate, sometimes
+admirable, researches into the history of separate cities, especially
+Italian and German; the guilds; the land question; the economical
+principles of the time; the economical importance of guilds and crafts;
+the leagues between, cities (the Hansa); and communal art. An incredible
+wealth of information is contained in works of this second category, of
+which only some of the more important are named in these pages.
+
+2. Kulischer, in an excellent essay on primitive trade (Zeitschrift für
+Volkerpsychologie, Bd. x. 380), also points out that, according to
+Herodotus, the Argippaeans were considered inviolable, because the trade
+between the Scythians and the northern tribes took place on their
+territory. A fugitive was sacred on their territory, and they were often
+asked to act as arbiters for their neighbours. See Appendix XI.
+
+3. Some discussion has lately taken place upon the Weichbild and the
+Weichbild-law, which still remain obscure (see Zopfl, Alterthumer des
+deutschen Reichs und Rechts, iii. 29; Kallsen, i. 316). The above
+explanation seems to be the more probable, but, of course, it must be
+tested by further research. It is also evident that, to use a Scotch
+expression, the "mercet cross" could be considered as an emblem of
+Church jurisdiction, but we find it both in bishop cities and in those
+in which the folkmote was sovereign.
+
+4. For all concerning the merchant guild see Mr. Gross's exhaustive
+work, The Guild Merchant (Oxford, 1890, 2 vols.); also Mrs. Green's
+remarks in Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, vol. ii. chaps. v. viii.
+x; and A. Doren's review of the subject in Schmoller's Forschungen, vol.
+xii. If the considerations indicated in the previous chapter (according
+to which trade was communal at its beginnings) prove to be correct, it
+will be permissible to suggest as a probable hypothesis that the guild
+merchant was a body entrusted with commerce in the interest of the whole
+city, and only gradually became a guild of merchants trading for
+themselves; while the merchant adventurers of this country, the Novgorod
+povolniki (free colonizers and merchants) and the mercati personati,
+would be those to whom it was left to open new markets and new branches
+of commerce for themselves. Altogether, it must be remarked that the
+origin of the mediaeval city can be ascribed to no separate agency. It
+was a result of many agencies in different degrees.
+
+5. Janssen's Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i. 315; Gramich's
+Wurzburg; and, in fact, any collection of ordinances.
+
+6. Falke, Geschichtliche Statistik, i. 373-393, and ii. 66; quoted in
+Janssen's Geschichte, i. 339; J.D. Blavignac, in Comptes et depenses de
+la construction du clocher de Saint-Nicolas a Fribourg en Suisse, comes
+to a similar conclusion. For Amiens, De Calonne's Vie Municipale, p. 99
+and Appendix. For a thorough appreciation and graphical representation
+of the medieval wages in England and their value in bread and meat, see
+G. Steffen's excellent article and curves in The Nineteenth Century for
+1891, and Studier ofver lonsystemets historia i England, Stockholm,
+1895.
+
+7. To quote but one example out of many which may be found in
+Schonberg's and Falke's works, the sixteen shoemaker workers
+(Schusterknechte) of the town Xanten, on the Rhine, gave, for erecting a
+screen and an altar in the church, 75 guldens of subscriptions, and 12
+guldens out of their box, which money was worth, according to the best
+valuations, ten times its present value.
+
+8. Quoted by Janssen, l.c. i. 343.
+
+9. The Economical Interpretation of History, London, 1891, p. 303.
+
+10. Janssen, l.c. See also Dr. Alwin Schultz, Deutsches Leben im XIV und
+XV Jahrhundert, grosse Ausgabe, Wien, 1892, pp. 67 seq. At Paris, the
+day of labour varied from seven to eight hours in the winter to fourteen
+hours in summer in certain trades, while in others it was from eight to
+nine hours in winter, to from ten to twelve in Summer. All work was
+stopped on Saturdays and on about twenty-five other days (jours de
+commun de vile foire) at four o'clock, while on Sundays and thirty other
+holidays there was no work at all. The general conclusion is, that the
+medieval worker worked less hours, all taken, than the present-day
+worker (Dr. E. Martin Saint-Leon, Histoire des corporations, p. 121).
+
+11. W. Stieda, "Hansische Vereinbarungen uber stadtisches Gewerbe im XIV
+und XV Jahrhundert," in Hansische Geschichtsblatter, Jahrgang 1886, p.
+121. Schonberg's Wirthschaftliche Bedeutung der Zunfte; also, partly,
+Roscher.
+
+12. See Toulmin Smith's deeply-felt remarks about the royal spoliation
+of the guilds, in Miss Smith's Introduction to English Guilds. In France
+the same royal spoliation and abolition of the guilds' jurisdiction was
+begun from 1306, and the final blow was struck in 1382 (Fagniez, l.c.
+pp. 52-54).
+
+13. Adam Smith and his contemporaries knew well what they were
+condemning when they wrote against the State interference in trade and
+the trade monopolies of State creation. Unhappily, their followers, with
+their hopeless superficiality, flung medieval guilds and State
+interference into the same sack, making no distinction between a
+Versailles edict and a guild ordinance. It hardly need be said that the
+economists who have seriously studied the subject, like Schonberg (the
+editor of the well-known course of Political Economy), never fell into
+such an error. But, till lately, diffuse discussions of the above type
+went on for economical "science."
+
+14. In Florence the seven minor arts made their revolution in 1270-82,
+and its results are fully described by Perrens (Histoire de Florence,
+Paris, 1877, 3 vols.), and especially by Gino Capponi (Storia della
+repubblica di Firenze, 2da edizione, 1876, i. 58-80; translated into
+German). In Lyons, on the contrary, where the movement of the minor
+crafts took place in 1402, the latter were defeated and lost the right
+of themselves nominating their own judges. The two parties came
+apparently to a compromise. In Rostock the same movement took place in
+1313; in Zurich in 1336; in Bern in 1363; in Braunschweig in 1374, and
+next year in Hamburg; in Lubeck in 1376-84; and so on. See Schmoller's
+Strassburg zur Zeit der Zunftkampfe and Strassburg's Bluthe; Brentano's
+Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1871-72; Eb. Bain's
+Merchant and Craft Guilds, Aberdeen, 1887, pp. 26-47, 75, etc. As to Mr.
+Gross's opinion relative to the same struggles in England, see Mrs.
+Green's remarks in her Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, ii. 190-217;
+also the chapter on the Labour Question, and, in fact, the whole of this
+extremely interesting volume. Brentano's views on the crafts' struggles,
+expressed especially in iii. and iv. of his essay "On the History and
+Development of Guilds," in Toulmin Smith's English Guilds remain
+classical for the subject, and may be said to have been again and again
+confirmed by subsequent research.
+
+15. To give but one example--Cambrai made its first revolution in 907,
+and, after three or four more revolts, it obtained its charter in 1076.
+This charter was repealed twice (1107 and 1138), and twice obtained
+again (in 1127 and 1180). Total, 223 years of struggles before
+conquering the right to independence. Lyons--from 1195 to 1320.
+
+16. See Tuetey, "Etude sur Le droit municipal ... en Franche-Comte," in
+Memoires de la Societe d'emulation de Montbeliard, 2e serie, ii. 129
+seq.
+
+17. This seems to have been often the case in Italy. In Switzerland,
+Bern bought even the towns of Thun and Burgdorf.
+
+18. Such was, at least, the case in the cities of Tuscany (Florence,
+Lucca, Sienna, Bologna, etc.), for which the relations between city and
+peasants are best known. (Luchitzkiy, "Slavery and Russian Slaves in
+Florence," in Kieff University Izvestia for 1885, who has perused
+Rumohr's Ursprung der Besitzlosigkeit der Colonien in Toscana, 1830.)
+The whole matter concerning the relations between the cities and the
+peasants requires much more study than has hitherto been done.
+
+19. Ferrari's generalizations are often too theoretical to be always
+correct; but his views upon the part played by the nobles in the city
+wars are based upon a wide range of authenticated facts.
+
+20. Only such cities as stubbornly kept to the cause of the barons, like
+Pisa or Verona, lost through the wars. For many towns which fought on
+the barons' side, the defeat was also the beginning of liberation and
+progress.
+
+21. Ferrari, ii. 18, 104 seq.; Leo and Botta, i. 432.
+
+22. Joh. Falke, Die Hansa Als Deutsche See-und Handelsmacht, Berlin,
+1863, pp. 31, 55.
+
+23. For Aachen and Cologne we have direct testimony that the bishops of
+these two cities--one of them bought by the enemy opened to him the
+gates.
+
+24. See the facts, though not always the conclusions, of Nitzsch, iii.
+133 seq.; also Kallsen, i. 458, etc.
+
+25. On the Commune of the Laonnais, which, until Melleville's researches
+(Histoire de la Commune du Laonnais, Paris, 1853), was confounded with
+the Commune of Laon, see Luchaire, pp. 75 seq. For the early peasants'
+guilds and subsequent unions see R. Wilman's "Die landlichen
+Schutzgilden Westphaliens," in Zeitschrift für Kulturgeschichte, neue
+Folge, Bd. iii., quoted in Henne-am-Rhyn's Kulturgeschichte, iii. 249.
+
+26. Luchaire, p. 149.
+
+27. Two important cities, like Mainz and Worms, would settle a political
+contest by means of arbitration. After a civil war broken out in
+Abbeville, Amiens would act, in 1231, as arbiter (Luchaire, 149); and so
+on.
+
+28. See, for instance, W. Stieda, Hansische Vereinbarungen, l.c., p.
+114.
+
+29. Cosmo Innes's Early Scottish History and Scotland in Middle Ages,
+quoted by Rev. Denton, l.c., pp. 68, 69; Lamprecht's Deutsches
+wirthschaftliche Leben im Mittelalter, review by Schmoller in his
+Jahrbuch, Bd. xii.; Sismondi's Tableau de l'agriculture toscane, pp. 226
+seq. The dominions of Florence could be recognized at a glance through
+their prosperity.
+
+30. Mr. John J. Ennett (Six Essays, London, 1891) has excellent pages on
+this aspect of medieval architecture. Mr. Willis, in his appendix to
+Whewell's History of Inductive Sciences (i. 261-262), has pointed out
+the beauty of the mechanical relations in medieval buildings. "A new
+decorative construction was matured," he writes, "not thwarting and
+controlling, but assisting and harmonizing with the mechanical
+construction. Every member, every moulding, becomes a sustainer of
+weight; and by the multiplicity of props assisting each other, and the
+consequent subdivision of weight, the eye was satisfied of the stability
+of the structure, notwithstanding curiously slender aspects of the
+separate parts." An art which sprang out of the social life of the city
+could not be better characterized.
+
+31. Dr. L. Ennen, Der Dom zu Koln, seine Construction und Anstaltung,
+Koln, 1871.
+
+32. The three statues are among the outer decorations of Notre Dame de
+Paris.
+
+33. Mediaeval art, like Greek art, did not know those curiosity shops
+which we call a National Gallery or a Museum. A picture was painted, a
+statue was carved, a bronze decoration was cast to stand in its proper
+place in a monument of communal art. It lived there, it was part of a
+whole, and it contributed to give unity to the impression produced by
+the whole.
+
+34. Cf. J. T. Ennett's "Second Essay," p. 36.
+
+35. Sismondi, iv. 172; xvi. 356. The great canal, Naviglio Grande, which
+brings the water from the Tessino, was begun in 1179, i.e. after the
+conquest of independence, and it was ended in the thirteenth century. On
+the subsequent decay, see xvi. 355.
+
+36. In 1336 it had 8,000 to 10,000 boys and girls in its primary
+schools, 1,000 to 1,200 boys in its seven middle schools, and from 550
+to 600 students in its four universities. The thirty communal hospitals
+contained over 1,000 beds for a population of 90,000 inhabitants
+(Capponi, ii. 249 seq.). It has more than once been suggested by
+authoritative writers that education stood, as a rule, at a much higher
+level than is generally supposed. Certainly so in democratic Nuremberg.
+
+37. Cf. L. Ranke's excellent considerations upon the essence of Roman
+Law in his Weltgeschichte, Bd. iv. Abth. 2, pp. 20-31. Also Sismondi's
+remarks upon the part played by the legistes in the constitution of
+royal authority, Histoire des Francais, Paris, 1826, viii. 85-99. The
+popular hatred against these "weise Doktoren und Beutelschneider des
+Volks" broke out with full force in the first years of the sixteenth
+century in the sermons of the early Reform movement.
+
+38. Brentano fully understood the fatal effects of the struggle between
+the "old burghers" and the new-comers. Miaskowski, in his work on the
+village communities of Switzerland, has indicated the same for village
+communities.
+
+39. The trade in slaves kidnapped in the East was never discontinued in
+the Italian republics till the fifteenth century. Feeble traces of it
+are found also in Germany and elsewhere. See Cibrario. Della schiavitu e
+del servaggio, 2 vols. Milan, 1868; Professor Luchitzkiy, "Slavery and
+Russian Slaves in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,"
+in Izvestia of the Kieff University, 1885.
+
+40. J.R. Green's History of the English People, London, 1878, i. 455.
+
+41. See the theories expressed by the Bologna lawyers, already at the
+Congress of Roncaglia in 1158.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MUTUAL AID AMONGST OURSELVES
+
+Popular revolts at the beginning of the State-period. Mutual Aid
+institutions of the present time. The village community; its struggles
+for resisting its abolition by the State. Habits derived from the
+village-community life, retained in our modern villages. Switzerland,
+France, Germany, Russia.
+
+
+The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply
+interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has
+been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all
+vicissitudes of history. It was chiefly evolved during periods of peace
+and prosperity; but when even the greatest calamities befell men--when
+whole countries were laid waste by wars, and whole populations were
+decimated by misery, or groaned under the yoke of tyranny--the same
+tendency continued to live in the villages and among the poorer classes
+in the towns; it still kept them together, and in the long run it
+reacted even upon those ruling, fighting, and devastating minorities
+which dismissed it as sentimental nonsense. And whenever mankind had to
+work out a new social organization, adapted to a new phasis of
+development, its constructive genius always drew the elements and the
+inspiration for the new departure from that same ever-living tendency.
+New economical and social institutions, in so far as they were a
+creation of the masses, new ethical systems, and new religions, all have
+originated from the same source, and the ethical progress of our race,
+viewed in its broad lines, appears as a gradual extension of the
+mutual-aid principles from the tribe to always larger and larger
+agglomerations, so as to finally embrace one day the whole of mankind,
+without respect to its divers creeds, languages, and races.
+
+After having passed through the savage tribe, and next through the
+village community, the Europeans came to work out in medieval times a
+new form of organization, which had the advantage of allowing great
+latitude for individual initiative, while it largely responded at the
+same time to man's need of mutual support. A federation of village
+communities, covered by a network of guilds and fraternities, was called
+into existence in the medieval cities. The immense results achieved
+under this new form of union--in well-being for all, in industries, art,
+science, and commerce--were discussed at some length in two preceding
+chapters, and an attempt was also made to show why, towards the end of
+the fifteenth century, the medieval republics--surrounded by domains of
+hostile feudal lords, unable to free the peasants from servitude, and
+gradually corrupted by ideas of Roman Caesarism--were doomed to become a
+prey to the growing military States.
+
+However, before submitting for three centuries to come, to the
+all-absorbing authority of the State, the masses of the people made a
+formidable attempt at reconstructing society on the old basis of mutual
+aid and support. It is well known by this time that the great movement
+of the reform was not a mere revolt against the abuses of the Catholic
+Church. It had its constructive ideal as well, and that ideal was life
+in free, brotherly communities. Those of the early writings and sermons
+of the period which found most response with the masses were imbued with
+ideas of the economical and social brotherhood of mankind. The "Twelve
+Articles" and similar professions of faith, which were circulated among
+the German and Swiss peasants and artisans, maintained not only every
+one's right to interpret the Bible according to his own understanding,
+but also included the demand of communal lands being restored to the
+village communities and feudal servitudes being abolished, and they
+always alluded to the "true" faith--a faith of brotherhood. At the same
+time scores of thousands of men and women joined the communist
+fraternities of Moravia, giving them all their fortune and living in
+numerous and prosperous settlements constructed upon the principles of
+communism.(1) Only wholesale massacres by the thousand could put a stop
+to this widely-spread popular movement, and it was by the sword, the
+fire, and the rack that the young States secured their first and
+decisive victory over the masses of the people.(2)
+
+For the next three centuries the States, both on the Continent and in
+these islands, systematically weeded out all institutions in which the
+mutual-aid tendency had formerly found its expression. The village
+communities were bereft of their folkmotes, their courts and independent
+administration; their lands were confiscated. The guilds were spoliated
+of their possessions and liberties, and placed under the control, the
+fancy, and the bribery of the State's official. The cities were divested
+of their sovereignty, and the very springs of their inner life--the
+folkmote, the elected justices and administration, the sovereign parish
+and the sovereign guild--were annihilated; the State's functionary took
+possession of every link of what formerly was an organic whole. Under
+that fatal policy and the wars it engendered, whole regions, once
+populous and wealthy, were laid bare; rich cities became insignificant
+boroughs; the very roads which connected them with other cities became
+impracticable. Industry, art, and knowledge fell into decay. Political
+education, science, and law were rendered subservient to the idea of
+State centralization. It was taught in the Universities and from the
+pulpit that the institutions in which men formerly used to embody their
+needs of mutual support could not be tolerated in a properly organized
+State; that the State alone could represent the bonds of union between
+its subjects; that federalism and "particularism" were the enemies of
+progress, and the State was the only proper initiator of further
+development. By the end of the last century the kings on the Continent,
+the Parliament in these isles, and the revolutionary Convention in
+France, although they were at war with each other, agreed in asserting
+that no separate unions between citizens must exist within the State;
+that hard labour and death were the only suitable punishments to workers
+who dared to enter into "coalitions." "No state within the State!" The
+State alone, and the State's Church, must take care of matters of
+general interest, while the subjects must represent loose aggregations
+of individuals, connected by no particular bonds, bound to appeal to the
+Government each time that they feel a common need. Up to the middle of
+this century this was the theory and practice in Europe. Even commercial
+and industrial societies were looked at with suspicion. As to the
+workers, their unions were treated as unlawful almost within our own
+lifetime in this country and within the last twenty years on the
+Continent. The whole system of our State education was such that up to
+the present time, even in this country, a notable portion of society
+would treat as a revolutionary measure the concession of such rights as
+every one, freeman or serf, exercised five hundred years ago in the
+village folkmote, the guild, the parish, and the city.
+
+The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favoured
+the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded individualism. In
+proportion as the obligations towards the State grew in numbers the
+citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each
+other. In the guild--and in medieval times every man belonged to some
+guild or fraternity two "brothers" were bound to watch in turns a
+brother who had fallen ill; it would be sufficient now to give one's
+neighbour the address of the next paupers' hospital. In barbarian
+society, to assist at a fight between two men, arisen from a quarrel,
+and not to prevent it from taking a fatal issue, meant to be oneself
+treated as a murderer; but under the theory of the all-protecting State
+the bystander need not intrude: it is the policeman's business to
+interfere, or not. And while in a savage land, among the Hottentots, it
+would be scandalous to eat without having loudly called out thrice
+whether there is not somebody wanting to share the food, all that a
+respectable citizen has to do now is to pay the poor tax and to let the
+starving starve. The result is, that the theory which maintains that men
+can, and must, seek their own happiness in a disregard of other people's
+wants is now triumphant all round in law, in science, in religion. It is
+the religion of the day, and to doubt of its efficacy is to be a
+dangerous Utopian. Science loudly proclaims that the struggle of each
+against all is the leading principle of nature, and of human societies
+as well. To that struggle Biology ascribes the progressive evolution of
+the animal world. History takes the same line of argument; and political
+economists, in their naive ignorance, trace all progress of modern
+industry and machinery to the "wonderful" effects of the same principle.
+The very religion of the pulpit is a religion of individualism, slightly
+mitigated by more or less charitable relations to one's neighbours,
+chiefly on Sundays. "Practical" men and theorists, men of science and
+religious preachers, lawyers and politicians, all agree upon one
+thing--that individualism may be more or less softened in its harshest
+effects by charity, but that it is the only secure basis for the
+maintenance of society and its ulterior progress.
+
+It seems, therefore, hopeless to look for mutual-aid institutions and
+practices in modern society. What could remain of them? And yet, as soon
+as we try to ascertain how the millions of human beings live, and begin
+to study their everyday relations, we are struck with the immense part
+which the mutual-aid and mutual-support principles play even now-a-days
+in human life. Although the destruction of mutual-aid institutions has
+been going on in practice and theory, for full three or four hundred
+years, hundreds of millions of men continue to live under such
+institutions; they piously maintain them and endeavour to reconstitute
+them where they have ceased to exist. In our mutual relations every one
+of us has his moments of revolt against the fashionable individualistic
+creed of the day, and actions in which men are guided by their mutual
+aid inclinations constitute so great a part of our daily intercourse
+that if a stop to such actions could be put all further ethical progress
+would be stopped at once. Human society itself could not be maintained
+for even so much as the lifetime of one single generation. These facts,
+mostly neglected by sociologists and yet of the first importance for the
+life and further elevation of mankind, we are now going to analyze,
+beginning with the standing institutions of mutual support, and passing
+next to those acts of mutual aid which have their origin in personal or
+social sympathies.
+
+When we cast a broad glance on the present constitution of European
+society we are struck at once with the fact that, although so much has
+been done to get rid of the village community, this form of union
+continues to exist to the extent we shall presently see, and that many
+attempts are now made either to reconstitute it in some shape or another
+or to find some substitute for it. The current theory as regards the
+village community is, that in Western Europe it has died out by a
+natural death, because the communal possession of the soil was found
+inconsistent with the modern requirements of agriculture. But the truth
+is that nowhere did the village community disappear of its own accord;
+everywhere, on the contrary, it took the ruling classes several
+centuries of persistent but not always successful efforts to abolish it
+and to confiscate the communal lands.
+
+In France, the village communities began to be deprived of their
+independence, and their lands began to be plundered, as early as the
+sixteenth century. However, it was only in the next century, when the
+mass of the peasants was brought, by exactions and wars, to the state of
+subjection and misery which is vividly depicted by all historians, that
+the plundering of their lands became easy and attained scandalous
+proportions. "Every one has taken of them according to his powers ...
+imaginary debts have been claimed, in order to seize upon their lands;"
+so we read in an edict promulgated by Louis the Fourteenth in 1667.(3)
+Of course the State's remedy for such evils was to render the communes
+still more subservient to the State, and to plunder them itself. In
+fact, two years later all money revenue of the communes was confiscated
+by the King. As to the appropriation of communal lands, it grew worse
+and worse, and in the next century the nobles and the clergy had already
+taken possession of immense tracts of land--one-half of the cultivated
+area, according to certain estimates--mostly to let it go out of
+culture.(4) But the peasants still maintained their communal
+institutions, and until the year 1787 the village folkmotes, composed of
+all householders, used to come together in the shadow of the bell-tower
+or a tree, to allot and re-allot what they had retained of their fields,
+to assess the taxes, and to elect their executive, just as the Russian
+mir does at the present time. This is what Babeau's researches have
+proved to demonstration.(5)
+
+The Government found, however, the folkmotes "too noisy," too
+disobedient, and in 1787, elected councils, composed of a mayor and
+three to six syndics, chosen from among the wealthier peasants, were
+introduced instead. Two years later the Revolutionary Assemblee
+Constituante, which was on this point at one with the old regime, fully
+confirmed this law (on the 14th of December, 1789), and the bourgeois du
+village had now their turn for the plunder of communal lands, which
+continued all through the Revolutionary period. Only on the 16th of
+August, 1792, the Convention, under the pressure of the peasants'
+insurrections, decided to return the enclosed lands to the communes;(6)
+but it ordered at the same time that they should be divided in equal
+parts among the wealthier peasants only--a measure which provoked new
+insurrections and was abrogated next year, in 1793, when the order came
+to divide the communal lands among all commoners, rich and poor alike,
+"active" and "inactive."
+
+These two laws, however, ran so much against the conceptions of the
+peasants that they were not obeyed, and wherever the peasants had
+retaken possession of part of their lands they kept them undivided. But
+then came the long years of wars, and the communal lands were simply
+confiscated by the State (in 1794) as a mortgage for State loans, put up
+for sale, and plundered as such; then returned again to the communes and
+confiscated again (in 1813); and only in 1816 what remained of them,
+i.e. about 15,000,000 acres of the least productive land, was restored
+to the village communities.(7) Still this was not yet the end of the
+troubles of the communes. Every new regime saw in the communal lands a
+means for gratifying its supporters, and three laws (the first in 1837
+and the last under Napoleon the Third) were passed to induce the village
+communities to divide their estates. Three times these laws had to be
+repealed, in consequence of the opposition they met with in the
+villages; but something was snapped up each time, and Napoleon the
+Third, under the pretext of encouraging perfected methods of
+agriculture, granted large estates out of the communal lands to some of
+his favourites.
+
+As to the autonomy of the village communities, what could be retained of
+it after so many blows? The mayor and the syndics were simply looked
+upon as unpaid functionaries of the State machinery. Even now, under the
+Third Republic, very little can be done in a village community without
+the huge State machinery, up to the prefet and the ministries, being set
+in motion. It is hardly credible, and yet it is true, that when, for
+instance, a peasant intends to pay in money his share in the repair of a
+communal road, instead of himself breaking the necessary amount of
+stones, no fewer than twelve different functionaries of the State must
+give their approval, and an aggregate of fifty-two different acts must
+be performed by them, and exchanged between them, before the peasant is
+permitted to pay that money to the communal council. All the remainder
+bears the same character.(8)
+
+What took place in France took place everywhere in Western and Middle
+Europe. Even the chief dates of the great assaults upon the peasant
+lands are the same. For England the only difference is that the
+spoliation was accomplished by separate acts rather than by general
+sweeping measures--with less haste but more thoroughly than in France.
+The seizure of the communal lands by the lords also began in the
+fifteenth century, after the defeat of the peasant insurrection of
+1380--as seen from Rossus's Historia and from a statute of Henry the
+Seventh, in which these seizures are spoken of under the heading of
+"enormitees and myschefes as be hurtfull ... to the common wele."(9)
+Later on the Great Inquest, under Henry the Eighth, was begun, as is
+known, in order to put a stop to the enclosure of communal lands, but it
+ended in a sanction of what had been done.(10) The communal lands
+continued to be preyed upon, and the peasants were driven from the land.
+But it was especially since the middle of the eighteenth century that,
+in England as everywhere else, it became part of a systematic policy to
+simply weed out all traces of communal ownership; and the wonder is not
+that it has disappeared, but that it could be maintained, even in
+England, so as to be "generally prevalent so late as the grandfathers of
+this generation."(11) The very object of the Enclosure Acts, as shown by
+Mr. Seebohm, was to remove this system,(12) and it was so well removed
+by the nearly four thousand Acts passed between 1760 and 1844 that only
+faint traces of it remain now. The land of the village communities was
+taken by the lords, and the appropriation was sanctioned by Parliament
+in each separate case.
+
+In Germany, in Austria, in Belgium the village community was also
+destroyed by the State. Instances of commoners themselves dividing their
+lands were rare,(13) while everywhere the States coerced them to enforce
+the division, or simply favoured the private appropriation of their
+lands. The last blow to communal ownership in Middle Europe also dates
+from the middle of the eighteenth century. In Austria sheer force was
+used by the Government, in 1768, to compel the communes to divide their
+lands--a special commission being nominated two years later for that
+purpose. In Prussia Frederick the Second, in several of his ordinances
+(in 1752, 1763, 1765, and 1769), recommended to the Justizcollegien to
+enforce the division. In Silesia a special resolution was issued to
+serve that aim in 1771. The same took place in Belgium, and, as the
+communes did not obey, a law was issued in 1847 empowering the
+Government to buy communal meadows in order to sell them in retail, and
+to make a forced sale of the communal land when there was a would-be
+buyer for it.(14)
+
+In short, to speak of the natural death of the village communities in
+virtue of economical laws is as grim a joke as to speak of the natural
+death of soldiers slaughtered on a battlefield. The fact was simply
+this: The village communities had lived for over a thousand years; and
+where and when the peasants were not ruined by wars and exactions they
+steadily improved their methods of culture. But as the value of land was
+increasing, in consequence of the growth of industries, and the nobility
+had acquired, under the State organization, a power which it never had
+had under the feudal system, it took possession of the best parts of the
+communal lands, and did its best to destroy the communal institutions.
+
+However, the village-community institutions so well respond to the needs
+and conceptions of the tillers of the soil that, in spite of all, Europe
+is up to this date covered with living survivals of the village
+communities, and European country life is permeated with customs and
+habits dating from the community period. Even in England,
+notwithstanding all the drastic measures taken against the old order of
+things, it prevailed as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century.
+Mr. Gomme--one of the very few English scholars who have paid attention
+to the subject--shows in his work that many traces of the communal
+possession of the soil are found in Scotland, "runrig" tenancy having
+been maintained in Forfarshire up to 1813, while in certain villages of
+Inverness the custom was, up to 1801, to plough the land for the whole
+community, without leaving any boundaries, and to allot it after the
+ploughing was done. In Kilmorie the allotment and re-allotment of the
+fields was in full vigour "till the last twenty-five years," and the
+Crofters' Commission found it still in vigour in certain islands.(15) In
+Ireland the system prevailed up to the great famine; and as to England,
+Marshall's works, which passed unnoticed until Nasse and Sir Henry Maine
+drew attention to them, leave no doubt as to the village-community
+system having been widely spread, in nearly all English counties, at the
+beginning of the nineteenth century.(16) No more than twenty years ago
+Sir Henry Maine was "greatly surprised at the number of instances of
+abnormal property rights, necessarily implying the former existence of
+collective ownership and joint cultivation," which a comparatively brief
+inquiry brought under his notice.(17) And, communal institutions having
+persisted so late as that, a great number of mutual-aid habits and
+customs would undoubtedly be discovered in English villages if the
+writers of this country only paid attention to village life.(18)
+
+As to the Continent, we find the communal institutions fully alive in
+many parts of France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the Scandinavian
+lands, and Spain, to say nothing of Eastern Europe; the village life in
+these countries is permeated with communal habits and customs; and
+almost every year the Continental literature is enriched by serious
+works dealing with this and connected subjects. I must, therefore, limit
+my illustrations to the most typical instances. Switzerland is
+undoubtedly one of them. Not only the five republics of Uri, Schwytz,
+Appenzell, Glarus, and Unterwalden hold their lands as undivided
+estates, and are governed by their popular folkmotes, but in all other
+cantons too the village communities remain in possession of a wide
+self-government, and own large parts of the Federal territory.(19)
+Two-thirds of all the Alpine meadows and two-thirds of all the forests
+of Switzerland are until now communal land; and a considerable number of
+fields, orchards, vineyards, peat bogs, quarries, and so on, are owned
+in common. In the Vaud, where all the householders continue to take part
+in the deliberations of their elected communal councils, the communal
+spirit is especially alive. Towards the end of the winter all the young
+men of each village go to stay a few days in the woods, to fell timber
+and to bring it down the steep slopes tobogganing way, the timber and
+the fuel wood being divided among all households or sold for their
+benefit. These excursions are real fetes of manly labour. On the banks
+of Lake Leman part of the work required to keep up the terraces of the
+vineyards is still done in common; and in the spring, when the
+thermometer threatens to fall below zero before sunrise, the watchman
+wakes up all householders, who light fires of straw and dung and protect
+their vine-trees from the frost by an artificial cloud. In nearly all
+cantons the village communities possess so-called. Burgernutzen--that
+is, they hold in common a number of cows, in order to supply each family
+with butter; or they keep communal fields or vineyards, of which the
+produce is divided between the burghers, or they rent their land for the
+benefit of the community.(20)
+
+It may be taken as a rule that where the communes have retained a wide
+sphere of functions, so as to be living parts of the national organism,
+and where they have not been reduced to sheer misery, they never fail to
+take good care of their lands. Accordingly the communal estates in
+Switzerland strikingly contrast with the miserable state of "commons" in
+this country. The communal forests in the Vaud and the Valais are
+admirably managed, in conformity with the rules of modern forestry.
+Elsewhere the "strips" of communal fields, which change owners under the
+system of re-allotment, are very well manured, especially as there is no
+lack of meadows and cattle. The high level meadows are well kept as a
+rule, and the rural roads are excellent.(21) And when we admire the
+Swiss chalet, the mountain road, the peasants' cattle, the terraces of
+vineyards, or the school-house in Switzer land, we must keep in mind
+that without the timber for the chalet being taken from the communal
+woods and the stone from the communal quarries, without the cows being
+kept on the communal meadows, and the roads being made and the
+school-houses built by communal work, there would be little to admire.
+
+It hardly need be said that a great number of mutual-aid habits and
+customs continue to persist in the Swiss villages. The evening
+gatherings for shelling walnuts, which take place in turns in each
+household; the evening parties for sewing the dowry of the girl who is
+going to marry; the calling of "aids" for building the houses and taking
+in the crops, as well as for all sorts of work which may be required by
+one of the commoners; the custom of exchanging children from one canton
+to the other, in order to make them learn two languages, French and
+German; and so on--all these are quite habitual;(22) while, on the other
+side, divers modern requirements are met in the same spirit. Thus in
+Glarus most of the Alpine meadows have been sold during a time of
+calamity; but the communes still continue to buy field land, and after
+the newly-bought fields have been left in the possession of separate
+commoners for ten, twenty, or thirty years, as the case might be, they
+return to the common stock, which is re-allotted according to the needs
+of all. A great number of small associations are formed to produce some
+of the necessaries for life--bread, cheese, and wine--by common work, be
+it only on a limited scale; and agricultural co-operation altogether
+spreads in Switzerland with the greatest ease. Associations formed
+between ten to thirty peasants, who buy meadows and fields in common,
+and cultivate them as co-owners, are of common occurrence; while dairy
+associations for the sale of milk, butter, and cheese are organized
+everywhere. In fact, Switzerland was the birthplace of that form of
+co-operation. It offers, moreover, an immense field for the study of all
+sorts of small and large societies, formed for the satisfaction of all
+sorts of modern wants. In certain parts of Switzerland one finds in
+almost every village a number of associations--for protection from fire,
+for boating, for maintaining the quays on the shores of a lake, for the
+supply of water, and so on; and the country is covered with societies of
+archers, sharpshooters, topographers, footpath explorers, and the like,
+originated from modern militarism.
+
+Switzerland is, however, by no means an exception in Europe, because the
+same institutions and habits are found in the villages of France, of
+Italy, of Germany, of Denmark, and so on. We have just seen what has
+been done by the rulers of France in order to destroy the village
+community and to get hold of its lands; but notwithstanding all that
+one-tenth part of the whole territory available for culture, i.e.
+13,500,000 acres, including one-half of all the natural meadows and
+nearly a fifth part of all the forests of the country, remain in
+communal possession. The woods supply the communers with fuel, and the
+timber wood is cut, mostly by communal work, with all desirable
+regularity; the grazing lands are free for the commoners' cattle; and
+what remains of communal fields is allotted and re-allotted in certain
+parts Ardennes--in the usual of France--namely, in the way.(23)
+
+These additional sources of supply, which aid the poorer peasants to
+pass through a year of bad crops without parting with their small plots
+of land and without running into irredeemable debts, have certainly
+their importance for both the agricultural labourers and the nearly
+three millions of small peasant proprietors. It is even doubtful whether
+small peasant proprietorship could be maintained without these
+additional resources. But the ethical importance of the communal
+possessions, small as they are, is still greater than their economical
+value. They maintain in village life a nucleus of customs and habits of
+mutual aid which undoubtedly acts as a mighty check upon the development
+of reckless individualism and greediness, which small land-ownership is
+only too prone to develop. Mutual aid in all possible circumstances of
+village life is part of the routine life in all parts of the country.
+Everywhere we meet, under different names, with the charroi, i.e. the
+free aid of the neighbours for taking in a crop, for vintage, or for
+building a house; everywhere we find the same evening gatherings as have
+just been mentioned in Switzerland; and everywhere the commoners
+associate for all sorts of work. Such habits are mentioned by nearly all
+those who have written upon French village life. But it will perhaps be
+better to give in this place some abstracts from letters which I have
+just received from a friend of mine whom I have asked to communicate to
+me his observations on this subject. They come from an aged man who for
+years has been the mayor of his commune in South France (in Ariege); the
+facts he mentions are known to him from long years of personal
+observation, and they have the advantage of coming from one
+neighbourhood instead of being skimmed from a large area. Some of them
+may seem trifling, but as a whole they depict quite a little world of
+village life.
+
+"In several communes in our neighbourhood," my friend writes, "the old
+custom of l'emprount is in vigour. When many hands are required in a
+metairie for rapidly making some work--dig out potatoes or mow the
+grass--the youth of the neighbourhood is convoked; young men and girls
+come in numbers, make it gaily and for nothing; and in the evening,
+after a gay meal, they dance.
+
+"In the same communes, when a girl is going to marry, the girls of the
+neighbourhood come to aid in sewing the dowry. In several communes the
+women still continue to spin a good deal. When the winding off has to be
+done in a family it is done in one evening--all friends being convoked
+for that work. In many communes of the Ariege and other parts of the
+south-west the shelling of the Indian corn-sheaves is also done by all
+the neighbours. They are treated with chestnuts and wine, and the young
+people dance after the work has been done. The same custom is practised
+for making nut oil and crushing hemp. In the commune of L. the same is
+done for bringing in the corn crops. These days of hard work become fete
+days, as the owner stakes his honour on serving a good meal. No
+remuneration is given; all do it for each other.(24)
+
+"In the commune of S. the common grazing-land is every year increased,
+so that nearly the whole of the land of the commune is now kept in
+common. The shepherds are elected by all owners of the cattle, including
+women. The bulls are communal.
+
+"In the commune of M. the forty to fifty small sheep flocks of the
+commoners are brought together and divided into three or four flocks
+before being sent to the higher meadows. Each owner goes for a week to
+serve as shepherd.
+
+"In the hamlet of C. a threshing machine has been bought in common by
+several households; the fifteen to twenty persons required to serve the
+machine being supplied by all the families. Three other threshing
+machines have been bought and are rented out by their owners, but the
+work is performed by outside helpers, invited in the usual way.
+
+"In our commune of R. we had to raise the wall of the cemetery. Half of
+the money which was required for buying lime and for the wages of the
+skilled workers was supplied by the county council, and the other half
+by subscription. As to the work of carrying sand and water, making
+mortar, and serving the masons, it was done entirely by volunteers [just
+as in the Kabyle djemmaa]. The rural roads were repaired in the same
+way, by volunteer days of work given by the commoners. Other communes
+have built in the same way their fountains. The wine-press and other
+smaller appliances are frequently kept by the commune."
+
+Two residents of the same neighbourhood, questioned by my friend, add
+the following:--
+
+"At O. a few years ago there was no mill. The commune has built one,
+levying a tax upon the commoners. As to the miller, they decided, in
+order to avoid frauds and partiality, that he should be paid two francs
+for each bread-eater, and the corn be ground free.
+
+"At St. G. few peasants are insured against fire. When a conflagration
+has taken place--so it was lately--all give something to the family
+which has suffered from it--a chaldron, a bed-cloth, a chair, and so
+on--and a modest household is thus reconstituted. All the neighbours aid
+to build the house, and in the meantime the family is lodged free by the
+neighbours."
+
+Such habits of mutual support--of which many more examples could be
+given--undoubtedly account for the easiness with which the French
+peasants associate for using, in turn, the plough with its team of
+horses, the wine-press, and the threshing machine, when they are kept in
+the village by one of them only, as well as for the performance of all
+sorts of rural work in common. Canals were maintained, forests were
+cleared, trees were planted, and marshes were drained by the village
+communities from time immemorial; and the same continues still. Quite
+lately, in La Borne of Lozere barren hills were turned into rich gardens
+by communal work. "The soil was brought on men's backs; terraces were
+made and planted with chestnut trees, peach trees, and orchards, and
+water was brought for irrigation in canals two or three miles long."
+Just now they have dug a new canal, eleven miles in length.(25)
+
+To the same spirit is also due the remarkable success lately obtained by
+the syndicats agricoles, or peasants' and farmers' associations. It was
+not until 1884 that associations of more than nineteen persons were
+permitted in France, and I need not say that when this "dangerous
+experiment" was ventured upon--so it was styled in the Chambers--all due
+"precautions" which functionaries can invent were taken. Notwithstanding
+all that, France begins to be covered with syndicates. At the outset
+they were only formed for buying manures and seeds, falsification having
+attained colossal proportions in these two branches;(26) but gradually
+they extended their functions in various directions, including the sale
+of agricultural produce and permanent improvements of the land. In South
+France the ravages of the phylloxera have called into existence a great
+number of wine-growers' associations. Ten to thirty growers form a
+syndicate, buy a steam-engine for pumping water, and make the necessary
+arrangements for inundating their vineyards in turn.(27) New
+associations for protecting the land from inundations, for irrigation
+purposes, and for maintaining canals are continually formed, and the
+unanimity of all peasants of a neighbourhood, which is required by law,
+is no obstacle. Elsewhere we have the fruitieres, or dairy associations,
+in some of which all butter and cheese is divided in equal parts,
+irrespective of the yield of each cow. In the Ariege we find an
+association of eight separate communes for the common culture of their
+lands, which they have put together; syndicates for free medical aid
+have been formed in 172 communes out of 337 in the same department;
+associations of consumers arise in connection with the syndicates; and
+so on.(28) "Quite a revolution is going on in our villages," Alfred
+Baudrillart writes, "through these associations, which take in each
+region their own special characters."
+
+Very much the same must be said of Germany. Wherever the peasants could
+resist the plunder of their lands, they have retained them in communal
+ownership, which largely prevails in Wurttemberg, Baden, Hohenzollern,
+and in the Hessian province of Starkenberg.(29) The communal forests are
+kept, as a rule, in an excellent state, and in thousands of communes
+timber and fuel wood are divided every year among all inhabitants; even
+the old custom of the Lesholztag is widely spread: at the ringing of the
+village bell all go to the forest to take as much fuel wood as they can
+carry.(30) In Westphalia one finds communes in which all the land is
+cultivated as one common estate, in accordance with all requirements of
+modern agronomy. As to the old communal customs and habits, they are in
+vigour in most parts of Germany. The calling in of aids, which are real
+fetes of labour, is known to be quite habitual in Westphalia, Hesse, and
+Nassau. In well-timbered regions the timber for a new house is usually
+taken from the communal forest, and all the neighbours join in building
+the house. Even in the suburbs of Frankfort it is a regular custom among
+the gardeners that in case of one of them being ill all come on Sunday
+to cultivate his garden.(31)
+
+In Germany, as in France, as soon as the rulers of the people repealed
+their laws against the peasant associations--that was only in
+1884-1888--these unions began to develop with a wonderful rapidity,
+notwithstanding all legal obstacles which were put in their way(32) "It
+is a fact," Buchenberger says, "that in thousands of village
+communities, in which no sort of chemical manure or rational fodder was
+ever known, both have become of everyday use, to a quite unforeseen
+extent, owing to these associations" (vol. ii. p. 507). All sorts of
+labour-saving implements and agricultural machinery, and better breeds
+of cattle, are bought through the associations, and various arrangements
+for improving the quality of the produce begin to be introduced. Unions
+for the sale of agricultural produce are also formed, as well as for
+permanent improvements of the land.(33)
+
+From the point of view of social economics all these efforts of the
+peasants certainly are of little importance. They cannot substantially,
+and still less permanently, alleviate the misery to which the tillers of
+the soil are doomed all over Europe. But from the ethical point of view,
+which we are now considering, their importance cannot be overrated. They
+prove that even under the system of reckless individualism which now
+prevails the agricultural masses piously maintain their mutual-support
+inheritance; and as soon as the States relax the iron laws by means of
+which they have broken all bonds between men, these bonds are at once
+reconstituted, notwithstanding the difficulties, political, economical,
+and social, which are many, and in such forms as best answer to the
+modern requirements of production. They indicate in which direction and
+in which form further progress must be expected.
+
+I might easily multiply such illustrations, taking them from Italy,
+Spain, Denmark, and so on, and pointing out some interesting features
+which are proper to each of these countries. The Slavonian populations
+of Austria and the Balkan peninsula, among whom the "compound family,"
+or "undivided household," is found in existence, ought also to be
+mentioned.(34) But I hasten to pass on to Russia, where the same
+mutual-support tendency takes certain new and unforeseen forms.
+Moreover, in dealing with the village community in Russia we have the
+advantage: of possessing an immense mass of materials, collected during
+the colossal house-to-house inquest which was lately made by several
+zemstvos (county councils), and which embraces a population of nearly
+20,000,000 peasants in different parts of the country.(35)
+
+Two important conclusions may be drawn from the bulk of evidence
+collected by the Russian inquests. In Middle Russia, where fully
+one-third of the peasants have been brought to utter ruin (by heavy
+taxation, small allotments of unproductive land, rack rents, and very
+severe tax-collecting after total failures of crops), there was, during
+the first five-and-twenty years after the emancipation of the serfs, a
+decided tendency towards the constitution of individual property in land
+within the village communities. Many impoverished "horseless" peasants
+abandoned their allotments, and this land often became the property of
+those richer peasants, who borrow additional incomes from trade, or of
+outside traders, who buy land chiefly for exacting rack rents from the
+peasants. It must also be added that a flaw in the land redemption law
+of 1861 offered great facilities for buying peasants' lands at a very
+small expense,(36) and that the State officials mostly used their
+weighty influence in favour of individual as against communal ownership.
+However, for the last twenty years a strong wind of opposition to the
+individual appropriation of the land blows again through the Middle
+Russian villages, and strenuous efforts are being made by the bulk of
+those peasants who stand between the rich and the very poor to uphold
+the village community. As to the fertile steppes of the South, which are
+now the most populous and the richest part of European Russia, they were
+mostly colonized, during the present century, under the system of
+individual ownership or occupation, sanctioned in that form by the
+State. But since improved methods of agriculture with the aid of
+machinery have been introduced in the region, the peasant owners have
+gradually begun themselves to transform their individual ownership into
+communal possession, and one finds now, in that granary of Russia, a
+very great number of spontaneously formed village communities of recent
+origin.(37)
+
+The Crimea and the part of the mainland which lies to the north of it
+(the province of Taurida), for which we have detailed data, offer an
+excellent illustration of that movement. This territory began to be
+colonized, after its annexation in 1783, by Great, Little, and White
+Russians--Cossacks, freemen, and runaway serfs--who came individually or
+in small groups from all corners of Russia. They took first to
+cattle-breeding, and when they began later on to till the soil, each one
+tilled as much as he could afford to. But when--immigration continuing,
+and perfected ploughs being introduced--land stood in great demand,
+bitter disputes arose among the settlers. They lasted for years, until
+these men, previously tied by no mutual bonds, gradually came to the
+idea that an end must be put to disputes by introducing
+village-community ownership. They passed decisions to the effect that
+the land which they owned individually should henceforward be their
+common property, and they began to allot and to re-allot it in
+accordance with the usual village-community rules. The movement
+gradually took a great extension, and on a small territory, the Taurida
+statisticians found 161 villages in which communal ownership had been
+introduced by the peasant proprietors themselves, chiefly in the years
+1855-1885, in lieu of individual ownership. Quite a variety of
+village-community types has been freely worked out in this way by the
+settlers.(38) What adds to the interest of this transformation is that
+it took place, not only among the Great Russians, who are used to
+village-community life, but also among Little Russians, who have long
+since forgotten it under Polish rule, among Greeks and Bulgarians, and
+even among Germans, who have long since worked out in their prosperous
+and half-industrial Volga colonies their own type of village
+community.(39) It is evident that the Mussulman Tartars of Taurida hold
+their land under the Mussulman customary law, which is limited personal
+occupation; but even with them the European village community has been
+introduced in a few cases. As to other nationalities in Taurida,
+individual ownership has been abolished in six Esthonian, two Greek, two
+Bulgarian, one Czech, and one German village. This movement is
+characteristic for the whole of the fertile steppe region of the south.
+But separate instances of it are also found in Little Russia. Thus in a
+number of villages of the province of Chernigov the peasants were
+formerly individual owners of their plots; they had separate legal
+documents for their plots and used to rent and to sell their land at
+will. But in the fifties of the nineteenth century a movement began
+among them in favour of communal possession, the chief argument being
+the growing number of pauper families. The initiative of the reform was
+taken in one village, and the others followed suit, the last case on
+record dating from 1882. Of course there were struggles between the
+poor, who usually claim for communal possession, and the rich, who
+usually prefer individual ownership; and the struggles often lasted for
+years. In certain places the unanimity required then by the law being
+impossible to obtain, the village divided into two villages, one under
+individual ownership and the other under communal possession; and so
+they remained until the two coalesced into one community, or else they
+remained divided still. As to Middle Russia, its a fact that in many
+villages which were drifting towards individual ownership there began
+since 1880 a mass movement in favour of re-establishing the village
+community. Even peasant proprietors who had lived for years under the
+individualist system returned en masse to the communal institutions.
+Thus, there is a considerable number of ex-serfs who have received
+one-fourth part only of the regulation allotments, but they have
+received them free of redemption and in individual ownership. There was
+in 1890 a wide-spread movement among them (in Kursk, Ryazan, Tambov,
+Orel, etc.) towards putting their allotments together and introducing
+the village community. The "free agriculturists" (volnyie
+khlebopashtsy), who were liberated from serfdom under the law of 1803,
+and had bought their allotments--each family separately--are now nearly
+all under the village-community system, which they have introduced
+themselves. All these movements are of recent origin, and non-Russians
+too join them. Thus the Bulgares in the district of Tiraspol, after
+having remained for sixty years under the personal-property system,
+introduced the village community in the years 1876-1882. The German
+Mennonites of Berdyansk fought in 1890 for introducing the village
+community, and the small peasant proprietors (Kleinwirthschaftliche)
+among the German Baptists were agitating in their villages in the same
+direction. One instance more: In the province of Samara the Russian
+government created in the forties, by way of experiment, 103 villages on
+the system of individual ownership. Each household received a splendid
+property of 105 acres. In 1890, out of the 103 villages the peasants in
+72 had already notified the desire of introducing the village community.
+I take all these facts from the excellent work of V.V., who simply
+gives, in a classified form, the facts recorded in the above-mentioned
+house-to-house inquest.
+
+This movement in favour of communal possession runs badly against the
+current economical theories, according to which intensive culture is
+incompatible with the village community. But the most charitable thing
+that can be said of these theories is that they have never been
+submitted to the test of experiment: they belong to the domain of
+political metaphysics. The facts which we have before us show, on the
+contrary, that wherever the Russian peasants, owing to a concurrence of
+favourable circumstances, are less miserable than they are on the
+average, and wherever they find men of knowledge and initiative among
+their neighbours, the village community becomes the very means for
+introducing various improvements in agriculture and village life
+altogether. Here, as elsewhere, mutual aid is a better leader to
+progress than the war of each against all, as may be seen from the
+following facts.
+
+Under Nicholas the First's rule many Crown officials and serf-owners
+used to compel the peasants to introduce the communal culture of small
+plots of the village lands, in order to refill the communal storehouses
+after loans of grain had been granted to the poorest commoners. Such
+cultures, connected in the peasants' minds with the worst reminiscences
+of serfdom, were abandoned as soon as serfdom was abolished but now the
+peasants begin to reintroduce them on their own account. In one district
+(Ostrogozhsk, in Kursk) the initiative of one person was sufficient to
+call them to life in four-fifths of all the villages. The same is met
+with in several other localities. On a given day the commoners come out,
+the richer ones with a plough or a cart and the poorer ones
+single-handed, and no attempt is made to discriminate one's share in the
+work. The crop is afterwards used for loans to the poorer commoners,
+mostly free grants, or for the orphans and widows, or for the village
+church, or for the school, or for repaying a communal debt.(40)
+
+That all sorts of work which enters, so to say, in the routine of
+village life (repair of roads and bridges, dams, drainage, supply of
+water for irrigation, cutting of wood, planting of trees, etc.) are made
+by whole communes, and that land is rented and meadows are mown by whole
+communes--the work being accomplished by old and young, men and women,
+in the way described by Tolstoi--is only what one may expect from people
+living under the village-community system.(41) They are of everyday
+occurrence all over the country. But the village community is also by no
+means averse to modern agricultural improvements, when it can stand the
+expense, and when knowledge, hitherto kept for the rich only, finds its
+way into the peasant's house.
+
+It has just been said that perfected ploughs rapidly spread in South
+Russia, and in many cases the village communities were instrumental in
+spreading their use. A plough was bought by the community, experimented
+upon on a portion of the communal land, and the necessary improvements
+were indicated to the makers, whom the communes often aided in starting
+the manufacture of cheap ploughs as a village industry. In the district
+of Moscow, where 1,560 ploughs were lately bought by the peasants during
+five years, the impulse came from those communes which rented lands as a
+body for the special purpose of improved culture.
+
+In the north-east (Vyatka) small associations of peasants, who travel
+with their winnowing machines (manufactured as a village industry in one
+of the iron districts), have spread the use of such machines in the
+neighbouring governments. The very wide spread of threshing machines in
+Samara, Saratov, and Kherson is due to the peasant associations, which
+can afford to buy a costly engine, while the individual peasant cannot.
+And while we read in nearly all economical treatises that the village
+community was doomed to disappear when the three-fields system had to be
+substituted by the rotation of crops system, we see in Russia many
+village communities taking the initiative of introducing the rotation of
+crops. Before accepting it the peasants usually set apart a portion of
+the communal fields for an experiment in artificial meadows, and the
+commune buys the seeds.(42) If the experiment proves successful they
+find no difficulty whatever in re-dividing their fields, so as to suit
+the five or six fields system.
+
+This system is now in use in hundreds of villages of Moscow, Tver,
+Smolensk, Vyatka, and Pskov.(43) And where land can be spared the
+communities give also a portion of their domain to allotments for
+fruit-growing. Finally, the sudden extension lately taken in Russia by
+the little model farms, orchards, kitchen gardens, and silkworm-culture
+grounds--which are started at the village school-houses, under the
+conduct of the school-master, or of a village volunteer--is also due to
+the support they found with the village communities.
+
+Moreover, such permanent improvements as drainage and irrigation are of
+frequent occurrence. For instance, in three districts of the province of
+Moscow--industrial to a great extent--drainage works have been
+accomplished within the last ten years on a large scale in no less than
+180 to 200 different villages--the commoners working themselves with the
+spade. At another extremity of Russia, in the dry Steppes of Novouzen,
+over a thousand dams for ponds were built and several hundreds of deep
+wells were sunk by the communes; while in a wealthy German colony of the
+south-east the commoners worked, men and women alike, for five weeks in
+succession, to erect a dam, two miles long, for irrigation purposes.
+What could isolated men do in that struggle against the dry climate?
+What could they obtain through individual effort when South Russia was
+struck with the marmot plague, and all people living on the land, rich
+and poor, commoners and individualists, had to work with their hands in
+order to conjure the plague? To call in the policeman would have been of
+no use; to associate was the only possible remedy.
+
+And now, after having said so much about mutual aid and support which
+are practised by the tillers of the soil in "civilized" countries, I see
+that I might fill an octavo volume with illustrations taken from the
+life of the hundreds of millions of men who also live under the
+tutorship of more or less centralized States, but are out of touch with
+modern civilization and modern ideas. I might describe the inner life of
+a Turkish village and its network of admirable mutual-aid customs and
+habits. On turning over my leaflets covered with illustrations from
+peasant life in Caucasia, I come across touching facts of mutual
+support. I trace the same customs in the Arab djemmaa and the Afghan
+purra, in the villages of Persia, India, and Java, in the undivided
+family of the Chinese, in the encampments of the semi-nomads of Central
+Asia and the nomads of the far North. On consulting notes taken at
+random in the literature of Africa, I find them replete with similar
+facts--of aids convoked to take in the crops, of houses built by all
+inhabitants of the village--sometimes to repair the havoc done by
+civilized filibusters--of people aiding each other in case of accident,
+protecting the traveller, and so on. And when I peruse such works as
+Post's compendium of African customary law I understand why,
+notwithstanding all tyranny, oppression, robberies and raids, tribal
+wars, glutton kings, deceiving witches and priests, slave-hunters, and
+the like, these populations have not gone astray in the woods; why they
+have maintained a certain civilization, and have remained men, instead
+of dropping to the level of straggling families of decaying
+orang-outans. The fact is, that the slave-hunters, the ivory robbers,
+the fighting kings, the Matabele and the Madagascar "heroes" pass away,
+leaving their traces marked with blood and fire; but the nucleus of
+mutual-aid institutions, habits, and customs, grown up in the tribe and
+the village community, remains; and it keeps men united in societies,
+open to the progress of civilization, and ready to receive it when the
+day comes that they shall receive civilization instead of bullets.
+
+The same applies to our civilized world. The natural and social
+calamities pass away. Whole populations are periodically reduced to
+misery or starvation; the very springs of life are crushed out of
+millions of men, reduced to city pauperism; the understanding and the
+feelings of the millions are vitiated by teachings worked out in the
+interest of the few. All this is certainly a part of our existence. But
+the nucleus of mutual-support institutions, habits, and customs remains
+alive with the millions; it keeps them together; and they prefer to
+cling to their customs, beliefs, and traditions rather than to accept
+the teachings of a war of each against all, which are offered to them
+under the title of science, but are no science at all.
+
+NOTES:
+
+1. A bulky literature, dealing with this formerly much neglected
+subject, is now growing in Germany. Keller's works, Ein Apostel der
+Wiedertaufer and Geschichte der Wiedertaufer, Cornelius's Geschichte des
+munsterischen Aufruhrs, and Janssen's Geschichte des deutschen Volkes
+may be named as the leading sources. The first attempt at familiarizing
+English readers with the results of the wide researches made in Germany
+in this direction has been made in an excellent little work by Richard
+Heath--"Anabaptism from its Rise at Zwickau to its Fall at Munster,
+1521-1536," London, 1895 (Baptist Manuals, vol. i.)--where the leading
+features of the movement are well indicated, and full bibliographical
+information is given. Also K. Kautsky's Communism in Central Europe in
+the Time of the Reformation, London, 1897.
+
+2. Few of our contemporaries realize both the extent of this movement
+and the means by which it was suppressed. But those who wrote
+immediately after the great peasant war estimated at from 100,000 to
+150,000 men the number of peasants slaughtered after their defeat in
+Germany. See Zimmermann's Allgemeine Geschichte des grossen
+Bauernkrieges. For the measures taken to suppress the movement in the
+Netherlands see Richard Heath's Anabaptism.
+
+3. "Chacun s'en est accommode selon sa bienseance ... on les a
+partages.. pour depouiller les communes, on s'est servi de dettes
+simulees" (Edict of Louis the Fourteenth, of 1667, quoted by several
+authors. Eight years before that date the communes had been taken under
+State management).
+
+4. "On a great landlord's estate, even if he has millions of revenue,
+you are sure to find the land uncultivated" (Arthur Young). "One-fourth
+part of the soil went out of culture;" "for the last hundred years the
+land has returned to a savage state;" "the formerly flourishing Sologne
+is now a big marsh;" and so on (Theron de Montauge, quoted by Taine in
+Origines de la France Contemporaine, tome i. p. 441).
+
+5. A. Babeau, Le Village sous l'Ancien Regime, 3e edition. Paris, 1892.
+
+6. In Eastern France the law only confirmed what the peasants had
+already done themselves. See my work, The Great French Revolution,
+chaps. xlvii and xlviii, London (Heinemann), 1909.
+
+7. After the triumph of the middle-class reaction the communal lands
+were declared (August 24, 1794) the States domains, and, together with
+the lands confiscated from the nobility, were put up for sale, and
+pilfered by the bandes noires of the small bourgeoisie. True that a stop
+to this pilfering was put next year (law of 2 Prairial, An V), and the
+preceding law was abrogated; but then the village Communities were
+simply abolished, and cantonal councils were introduced instead. Only
+seven years later (9 Prairial, An XII), i.e. in 1801, the village
+communities were reintroduced, but not until after having been deprived
+of all their rights, the mayor and syndics being nominated by the
+Government in the 36,000 communes of France! This system was maintained
+till after the revolution of 1830, when elected communal councils were
+reintroduced under the law of 1787. As to the communal lands, they were
+again seized upon by the State in 1813, plundered as such, and only
+partly restored to the communes in 1816. See the classical collection of
+French laws, by Dalloz, Repertoire de Jurisprudence; also the works of
+Doniol, Dareste, Bonnemere, Babeau, and many others.
+
+8. This procedure is so absurd that one would not believe it possible if
+the fifty-two different acts were not enumerated in full by a quite
+authoritative writer in the Journal des Economistes (1893, April, p.
+94), and several similar examples were not given by the same author.
+
+9. Dr. Ochenkowski, Englands wirthschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange
+des Mittelalters (Jena, 1879), pp. 35 seq., where the whole question is
+discussed with full knowledge of the texts.
+
+10. Nasse, Ueber die mittelalterliche Feldgemeinschaft und die
+Einhegungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts in England (Bonn, 1869), pp. 4, 5;
+Vinogradov, Villainage in England (Oxford, 1892).
+
+11. Fr. Seebohm, The English Village Community, 3rd ed., 1884, pp.
+13-15.
+
+12. "An examination into the details of an Enclosure Act will make clear
+the point that the system as above described [communal ownership] is the
+system which it was the object of the Enclosure Act to remove" (Seebohm,
+l.c. p. 13). And further on, "They were generally drawn in the same
+form, commencing with the recital that the open and common fields lie
+dispersed in small pieces, intermixed with each other and inconveniently
+situated; that divers persons own parts of them, and are entitled to
+rights of common on them ... and that it is desired that they may be
+divided and enclosed, a specific share being let out and allowed to each
+owner" (p. 14). Porter's list contained 3867 such Acts, of which the
+greatest numbers fall upon the decades of 1770-1780 and 1800-1820, as in
+France.
+
+13. In Switzerland we see a number of communes, ruined by wars, which
+have sold part of their lands, and now endeavour to buy them back.
+
+14. A. Buchenberger, "Agrarwesen und Agrarpolitik," in A. Wagner's
+Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie, 1892, Band i. pp. 280 seq.
+
+15. G.L. Gomme, "The Village Community, with special reference to its
+Origin and Forms of Survival in Great Britain" (Contemporary Science
+Series), London, 1890, pp. 141-143; also his Primitive Folkmoots
+(London, 1880), pp. 98 seq.
+
+16. "In almost all parts of the country, in the Midland and Eastern
+counties particularly, but also in the west--in Wiltshire, for
+example--in the south, as in Surrey, in the north, as in
+Yorkshire,--there are extensive open and common fields. Out of 316
+parishes of Northamptonshire 89 are in this condition; more than 100 in
+Oxfordshire; about 50,000 acres in Warwickshire; in Berkshire half the
+county; more than half of Wiltshire; in Huntingdonshire out of a total
+area of 240,000 acres 130,000 were commonable meadows, commons, and
+fields" (Marshall, quoted in Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities in
+the East and West, New York edition, 1876, pp. 88, 89). See also Dr. G.
+Slater's The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields,
+London, 1907.
+
+17. Ibid. p. 88; also Fifth Lecture.
+
+18. In quite a number of books dealing with English country life which I
+have consulted I have found charming descriptions of country scenery and
+the like, but almost nothing about the daily life and customs of the
+labourers.
+
+19. In Switzerland the peasants in the open land also fell under the
+dominion of lords, and large parts of their estates were appropriated by
+the lords in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (cf. A.
+Miaskowski, in Schmoller's Forschungen, Bd. ii. 1879, pp. 12 seq.) But
+the peasant war in Switzerland did not end in such a crushing defeat of
+the peasants as it did in other countries, and a great deal of the
+communal rights and lands was retained. The self-government of the
+communes is, in fact, the very foundation of the Swiss liberties. (cf.
+K. Burtli, Der Ursprung der Eidgenossenschaft aus der
+Markgenossenschaft, Zurich, 1891.)
+
+20. Dr. Reichesberg, Handworterbuch des Schweiz. Volkswirthschaft, Bern,
+1903.
+
+21. See on this subject a series of works, summed up in one of the
+excellent and suggestive chapters (not yet translated into English)
+which K. Bucher has added to the German translation of Laveleye's
+Primitive Ownership. Also Meitzen, "Das Agrar-und Forst-Wesen, die
+Allmenden und die Landgemeinden der Deutschen Schweiz," in Jahrbuch für
+Staatswissenschaft, 1880, iv. (analysis of Miaskowsky's works); O'Brien,
+"Notes in a Swiss village," in Macmillan's Magazine, October 1885.
+
+22. The wedding gifts, which often substantially contribute in this
+country to the comfort of the young households, are evidently a
+remainder of the communal habits.
+
+23. The communes own, 4,554,100 acres of woods out of 24,813,000 in the
+whole territory, and 6,936,300 acres of natural meadows out of
+11,394,000 acres in France. The remaining 2,000,000 acres are fields,
+orchards, and so on.
+
+24. In Caucasia they even do better among the Georgians. As the meal
+costs, and a poor man cannot afford to give it, a sheep is bought by
+those same neighbours who come to aid in the work.
+
+25. Alfred Baudrillart, in H. Baudrillart's Les Populations Rurales de
+la France, 3rd series (Paris, 1893), p. 479.
+
+26. The Journal des Economistes (August 1892, May and August 1893) has
+lately given some of the results of analyses made at the agricultural
+laboratories at Ghent and at Paris. The extent of falsification is
+simply incredible; so also the devices of the "honest traders." In
+certain seeds of grass there was 32 per cent. of gains of sand, coloured
+so as to Receive even an experienced eye; other samples contained from
+52 to 22 per cent. only of pure seed, the remainder being weeds. Seeds
+of vetch contained 11 per cent. of a poisonous grass (nielle); a flour
+for cattle-fattening contained 36 per cent. of sulphates; and so on ad
+infinitum.
+
+27. A. Baudrillart, l.c. p. 309. Originally one grower would undertake
+to supply water, and several others would agee to make use of it. "What
+especially characterises such associations," A. Baudrillart remarks, "is
+that no sort of written agreement is concluded. All is arranged in
+words. There was, however, not one single case of difficulties having
+arisen between the parties."
+
+28. A. Baudrillart, l.c. pp. 300, 341, etc. M. Terssac, president of the
+St. Gironnais syndicate (Ariege), wrote to my friend in substance as
+follows:--"For the exhibition of Toulouse our association has grouped
+the owners of cattle which seemed to us worth exhibiting. The society
+undertook to pay one-half of the travelling and exhibition expenses;
+one-fourth was paid by each owner, and the remaining fourth by those
+exhibitors who had got prizes. The result was that many took part in the
+exhibition who never would have done it otherwise. Those who got the
+highest awards (350 francs) have contributed 10 per cent. of their
+prizes, while those who have got no prize have only spent 6 to 7 francs
+each."
+
+29. In Wurttemberg 1,629 communes out of 1,910 have communal property.
+They owned in 1863 over 1,000,000 acres of land. In Baden 1,256 communes
+out of 1,582 have communal land; in 1884-1888 they held 121,500 acres of
+fields in communal culture, and 675,000 acres of forests, i.e. 46 per
+cent. of the total area under woods. In Saxony 39 per cent. of the total
+area is in communal ownership (Schmoller's Jahrbuch, 1886, p. 359). In
+Hohenzollern nearly two-thirds of all meadow land, and in
+Hohenzollern-Hechingen 41 per cent. of all landed property, are owned by
+the village communities (Buchenberger, Agrarwesen, vol. i. p. 300).
+
+30. See K. Bucher, who, in a special chapter added to Laveleye's
+Ureigenthum, has collected all information relative to the village
+community in Germany.
+
+31. K. Bucher, ibid. pp. 89, 90.
+
+32. For this legislation and the numerous obstacles which were put in
+the way, in the shape of red-tapeism and supervision, see Buchenberger's
+Agrarwesen und Agrarpolitik, Bd. ii. pp. 342-363, and p. 506, note.
+
+33. Buchenberger, l.c. Bd. ii. p. 510. The General Union of Agricultural
+Co-operation comprises an aggregate of 1,679 societies. In Silesia an
+aggregate of 32,000 acres of land has been lately drained by 73
+associations; 454,800 acres in Prussia by 516 associations; in Bavaria
+there are 1,715 drainage and irrigation unions.
+
+34. For the Balkan peninsula see Laveleye's Propriete Primitive.
+
+35. The facts concerning the village community, contained in nearly a
+hundred volumes (out of 450) of these inquests, have been classified and
+summed up in an excellent Russian work by "V.V." The Peasant Community
+(Krestianskaya Obschina), St. Petersburg, 1892, which, apart from its
+theoretical value, is a rich compendium of data relative to this
+subject. The above inquests have also given origin to an immense
+literature, in which the modern village-community question for the first
+time emerges from the domain of generalities and is put on the solid
+basis of reliable and sufficiently detailed facts.
+
+36. The redemption had to be paid by annuities for forty-nine years. As
+years went, and the greatest part of it was paid, it became easier and
+easier to redeem the smaller remaining part of it, and, as each
+allotment could be redeemed individually, advantage was taken of this
+disposition by traders, who bought land for half its value from the
+ruined peasants. A law was consequently passed to put a stop to such
+sales.
+
+37. Mr. V.V., in his Peasant Community, has grouped together all facts
+relative to this movement. About the rapid agricultural development of
+South Russia and the spread of machinery English readers will find
+information in the Consular Reports (Odessa, Taganrog).
+
+38. In some instances they proceeded with great caution. In one village
+they began by putting together all meadow land, but only a small portion
+of the fields (about five acres per soul) was rendered communal; the
+remainder continued to be owned individually. Later on, in 1862-1864,
+the system was extended, but only in 1884 was communal possession
+introduced in full.--V.V.'s Peasant Community, pp. 1-14.
+
+39. On the Mennonite village community see A. Klaus, Our Colonies (Nashi
+Kolonii), St. Petersburg, 1869.
+
+40. Such communal cultures are known to exist in 159 villages out of 195
+in the Ostrogozhsk district; in 150 out of 187 in Slavyanoserbsk; in 107
+village communities in Alexandrovsk, 93 in Nikolayevsk, 35 in
+Elisabethgrad. In a German colony the communal culture is made for
+repaying a communal debt. All join in the work, although the debt was
+contracted by 94 householders out of 155.
+
+41. Lists of such works which came under the notice of the zemstvo
+statisticians will be found in V.V.'s Peasant Community, pp. 459-600.
+
+42. In the government of Moscow the experiment was usually made on the
+field which was reserved for the above-mentioned communal culture.
+
+43. Several instances of such and similar improvements were given in the
+Official Messenger, 1894, Nos. 256-258. Associations between "horseless"
+peasants begin to appear also in South Russia. Another extremely
+interesting fact is the sudden development in Southern West Siberia of
+very numerous co-operative creameries for making butter. Hundreds of
+them spread in Tobolsk and Tomsk, without any one knowing wherefrom the
+initiative of the movement came. It came from the Danish co-operators,
+who used to export their own butter of higher quality, and to buy butter
+of a lower quality for their own use in Siberia. After a several years'
+intercourse, they introduced creameries there. Now, a great export
+trade, carried on by a Union of the Creameries, has grown out of their
+endeavours and more than a thousand co-operative shops have been opened
+in the villages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MUTUAL AID AMONGST OURSELVES (continued)
+
+Labour-unions grown after the destruction of the guilds by the State.
+Their struggles. Mutual Aid in strikes. Co-operation. Free associations
+for various purposes. Self-sacrifice. Countless societies for combined
+action under all possible aspects. Mutual Aid in slum-life. Personal
+aid.
+
+
+When we examine the every-day life of the rural populations of Europe,
+we find that, notwithstanding all that has been done in modern States
+for the destruction of the village community, the life of the peasants
+remains honeycombed with habits and customs of mutual aid and support;
+that important vestiges of the communal possession of the soil are still
+retained; and that, as soon as the legal obstacles to rural association
+were lately removed, a network of free unions for all sorts of
+economical purposes rapidly spread among the peasants--the tendency of
+this young movement being to reconstitute some sort of union similar to
+the village community of old. Such being the conclusions arrived at in
+the preceding chapter, we have now to consider, what institutions for
+mutual support can be found at the present time amongst the industrial
+populations.
+
+For the last three hundred years, the conditions for the growth of such
+institutions have been as unfavourable in the towns as they have been in
+the villages. It is well known, indeed, that when the medieval cities
+were subdued in the sixteenth century by growing military States, all
+institutions which kept the artisans, the masters, and the merchants
+together in the guilds and the cities were violently destroyed. The
+self-government and the self-jurisdiction of both, the guild and the
+city were abolished; the oath of allegiance between guild-brothers
+became an act of felony towards the State; the properties of the guilds
+were confiscated in the same way as the lands of the village
+communities; and the inner and technical organization of each trade was
+taken in hand by the State. Laws, gradually growing in severity, were
+passed to prevent artisans from combining in any way. For a time, some
+shadows of the old guilds were tolerated: merchants' guilds were allowed
+to exist under the condition of freely granting subsidies to the kings,
+and some artisan guilds were kept in existence as organs of
+administration. Some of them still drag on their meaningless existence.
+But what formerly was the vital force of medieval life and industry has
+long since disappeared under the crushing weight of the centralized
+State.
+
+In Great Britain, which may be taken as the best illustration of the
+industrial policy of the modern States, we see the Parliament beginning
+the destruction of the guilds as early as the fifteenth century; but it
+was especially in the next century that decisive measures were taken.
+Henry the Eighth not only ruined the organization of the guilds, but
+also confiscated their properties, with even less excuse and manners, as
+Toulmin Smith wrote, than he had produced for confiscating the estates
+of the monasteries.(1) Edward the Sixth completed his work,(2) and
+already in the second part of the sixteenth century we find the
+Parliament settling all the disputes between craftsmen and merchants,
+which formerly were settled in each city separately. The Parliament and
+the king not only legislated in all such contests, but, keeping in view
+the interests of the Crown in the exports, they soon began to determine
+the number of apprentices in each trade and minutely to regulate the
+very technics of each fabrication--the weights of the stuffs, the number
+of threads in the yard of cloth, and the like. With little success, it
+must be said; because contests and technical difficulties which were
+arranged for centuries in succession by agreement between
+closely-interdependent guilds and federated cities lay entirely beyond
+the powers of the centralized State. The continual interference of its
+officials paralyzed the trades; bringing most of them to a complete
+decay; and the last century economists, when they rose against the State
+regulation of industries, only ventilated a widely-felt discontent. The
+abolition of that interference by the French Revolution was greeted as
+an act of liberation, and the example of France was soon followed
+elsewhere.
+
+With the regulation of wages the State had no better success. In the
+medieval cities, when the distinction between masters and apprentices or
+journeymen became more and more apparent in the fifteenth century,
+unions of apprentices (Gesellenverbande), occasionally assuming an
+international character, were opposed to the unions of masters and
+merchants. Now it was the State which undertook to settle their griefs,
+and under the Elizabethan Statute of 1563 the Justices of Peace had to
+settle the wages, so as to guarantee a "convenient" livelihood to
+journeymen and apprentices. The Justices, however, proved helpless to
+conciliate the conflicting interests, and still less to compel the
+masters to obey their decisions. The law gradually became a dead letter,
+and was repealed by the end of the eighteenth century. But while the
+State thus abandoned the function of regulating wages, it continued
+severely to prohibit all combinations which were entered upon by
+journeymen and workers in order to raise their wages, or to keep them at
+a certain level. All through the eighteenth century it legislated
+against the workers' unions, and in 1799 it finally prohibited all sorts
+of combinations, under the menace of severe punishments. In fact, the
+British Parliament only followed in this case the example of the French
+Revolutionary Convention, which had issued a draconic law against
+coalitions of workers-coalitions between a number of citizens being
+considered as attempts against the sovereignty of the State, which was
+supposed equally to protect all its subjects. The work of destruction of
+the medieval unions was thus completed. Both in the town and in the
+village the State reigned over loose aggregations of individuals, and
+was ready to prevent by the most stringent measures the reconstitution
+of any sort of separate unions among them. These were, then, the
+conditions under which the mutual-aid tendency had to make its way in
+the nineteenth century.
+
+Need it be said that no such measures could destroy that tendency?
+Throughout the eighteenth century, the workers' unions were continually
+reconstituted.(3) Nor were they stopped by the cruel prosecutions which
+took place under the laws of 1797 and 1799. Every flaw in supervision,
+every delay of the masters in denouncing the unions was taken advantage
+of. Under the cover of friendly societies, burial clubs, or secret
+brotherhoods, the unions spread in the textile industries, among the
+Sheffield cutlers, the miners, and vigorous federal organizations were
+formed to support the branches during strikes and prosecutions.(4) The
+repeal of the Combination Laws in 1825 gave a new impulse to the
+movement. Unions and national federations were formed in all trades.(5)
+and when Robert Owen started his Grand National Consolidated Trades'
+Union, it mustered half a million members in a few months. True that
+this period of relative liberty did not last long. Prosecution began
+anew in the thirties, and the well-known ferocious condemnations of
+1832-1844 followed. The Grand National Union was disbanded, and all over
+the country, both the private employers and the Government in its own
+workshops began to compel the workers to resign all connection with
+unions, and to sign "the Document" to that effect. Unionists were
+prosecuted wholesale under the Master and Servant Act--workers being
+summarily arrested and condemned upon a mere complaint of misbehaviour
+lodged by the master.(6) Strikes were suppressed in an autocratic way,
+and the most astounding condemnations took place for merely having
+announced a strike or acted as a delegate in it--to say nothing of the
+military suppression of strike riots, nor of the condemnations which
+followed the frequent outbursts of acts of violence. To practise mutual
+support under such circumstances was anything but an easy task. And yet,
+notwithstanding all obstacles, of which our own generation hardly can
+have an idea, the revival of the unions began again in 1841, and the
+amalgamation of the workers has been steadily continued since. After a
+long fight, which lasted for over a hundred years, the right of
+combining together was conquered, and at the present time nearly
+one-fourth part of the regularly-employed workers, i.e. about 1,500,000,
+belong to trade unions.(7)
+
+As to the other European States, sufficient to say that up to a very
+recent date, all sorts of unions were prosecuted as conspiracies; and
+that nevertheless they exist everywhere, even though they must often
+take the form of secret societies; while the extension and the force of
+labour organizations, and especially of the Knights of Labour, in the
+United States and in Belgium, have been sufficiently illustrated by
+strikes in the nineties. It must, however, be borne in mind that,
+prosecution apart, the mere fact of belonging to a labour union implies
+considerable sacrifices in money, in time, and in unpaid work, and
+continually implies the risk of losing employment for the mere fact of
+being a unionist.(8) There is, moreover, the strike, which a unionist
+has continually to face; and the grim reality of a strike is, that the
+limited credit of a worker's family at the baker's and the pawnbroker's
+is soon exhausted, the strike-pay goes not far even for food, and hunger
+is soon written on the children's faces. For one who lives in close
+contact with workers, a protracted strike is the most heartrending
+sight; while what a strike meant forty years ago in this country, and
+still means in all but the wealthiest parts of the continent, can easily
+be conceived. Continually, even now, strikes will end with the total
+ruin and the forced emigration of whole populations, while the shooting
+down of strikers on the slightest provocation, or even without any
+provocation,(9) is quite habitual still on the continent.
+
+And yet, every year there are thousands of strikes and lock-outs in
+Europe and America--the most severe and protracted contests being, as a
+rule, the so-called "sympathy strikes," which are entered upon to
+support locked-out comrades or to maintain the rights of the unions. And
+while a portion of the Press is prone to explain strikes by
+"intimidation," those who have lived among strikers speak with
+admiration of the mutual aid and support which are constantly practised
+by them. Every one has heard of the colossal amount of work which was
+done by volunteer workers for organizing relief during the London
+dock-labourers' strike; of the miners who, after having themselves been
+idle for many weeks, paid a levy of four shillings a week to the strike
+fund when they resumed work; of the miner widow who, during the
+Yorkshire labour war of 1894, brought her husband's life-savings to the
+strike-fund; of the last loaf of bread being always shared with
+neighbours; of the Radstock miners, favoured with larger
+kitchen-gardens, who invited four hundred Bristol miners to take their
+share of cabbage and potatoes, and so on. All newspaper correspondents,
+during the great strike of miners in Yorkshire in 1894, knew heaps of
+such facts, although not all of them could report such "irrelevant"
+matters to their respective papers.(10)
+
+Unionism is not, however, the only form in which the worker's need of
+mutual support finds its expression. There are, besides, the political
+associations, whose activity many workers consider as more conducive to
+general welfare than the trade-unions, limited as they are now in their
+purposes. Of course the mere fact of belonging to a political body
+cannot be taken as a manifestation of the mutual-aid tendency. We all
+know that politics are the field in which the purely egotistic elements
+of society enter into the most entangled combinations with altruistic
+aspirations. But every experienced politician knows that all great
+political movements were fought upon large and often distant issues, and
+that those of them were the strongest which provoked most disinterested
+enthusiasm. All great historical movements have had this character, and
+for our own generation Socialism stands in that case. "Paid agitators"
+is, no doubt, the favourite refrain of those who know nothing about it.
+The truth, however, is that--to speak only of what I know personally--if
+I had kept a diary for the last twenty-four years and inscribed in it
+all the devotion and self-sacrifice which I came across in the Socialist
+movement, the reader of such a diary would have had the word "heroism"
+constantly on his lips. But the men I would have spoken of were not
+heroes; they were average men, inspired by a grand idea. Every Socialist
+newspaper--and there are hundreds of them in Europe alone--has the same
+history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward, and, in the
+overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal ambition. I
+have seen families living without knowing what would be their food
+to-morrow, the husband boycotted all round in his little town for his
+part in the paper, and the wife supporting the family by sewing, and
+such a situation lasting for years, until the family would retire,
+without a word of reproach, simply saying: "Continue; we can hold on no
+more!" I have seen men, dying from consumption, and knowing it, and yet
+knocking about in snow and fog to prepare meetings, speaking at meetings
+within a few weeks from death, and only then retiring to the hospital
+with the words: "Now, friends, I am done; the doctors say I have but a
+few weeks to live. Tell the comrades that I shall be happy if they come
+to see me." I have seen facts which would be described as "idealization"
+if I told them in this place; and the very names of these men, hardly
+known outside a narrow circle of friends, will soon be forgotten when
+the friends, too, have passed away. In fact, I don't know myself which
+most to admire, the unbounded devotion of these few, or the sum total of
+petty acts of devotion of the great number. Every quire of a penny paper
+sold, every meeting, every hundred votes which are won at a Socialist
+election, represent an amount of energy and sacrifices of which no
+outsider has the faintest idea. And what is now done by Socialists has
+been done in every popular and advanced party, political and religious,
+in the past. All past progress has been promoted by like men and by a
+like devotion.
+
+Co-operation, especially in Britain, is often described as "joint-stock
+individualism"; and such as it is now, it undoubtedly tends to breed a
+co-operative egotism, not only towards the community at large, but also
+among the co-operators themselves. It is, nevertheless, certain that at
+its origin the movement had an essentially mutual-aid character. Even
+now, its most ardent promoters are persuaded that co-operation leads
+mankind to a higher harmonic stage of economical relations, and it is
+not possible to stay in some of the strongholds of co-operation in the
+North without realizing that the great number of the rank and file hold
+the same opinion. Most of them would lose interest in the movement if
+that faith were gone; and it must be owned that within the last few
+years broader ideals of general welfare and of the producers' solidarity
+have begun to be current among the co-operators. There is undoubtedly
+now a tendency towards establishing better relations between the owners
+of the co-operative workshops and the workers.
+
+The importance of co-operation in this country, in Holland and in
+Denmark is well known; while in Germany, and especially on the Rhine,
+the co-operative societies are already an important factor of industrial
+life.(11) It is, however, Russia which offers perhaps the best field for
+the study of cooperation under an infinite variety of aspects. In
+Russia, it is a natural growth, an inheritance from the middle ages; and
+while a formally established co-operative society would have to cope
+with many legal difficulties and official suspicion, the informal
+co-operation--the artel--makes the very substance of Russian peasant
+life. The history of "the making of Russia," and of the colonization of
+Siberia, is a history of the hunting and trading artels or guilds,
+followed by village communities, and at the present time we find the
+artel everywhere; among each group of ten to fifty peasants who come
+from the same village to work at a factory, in all the building trades,
+among fishermen and hunters, among convicts on their way to and in
+Siberia, among railway porters, Exchange messengers, Customs House
+labourers, everywhere in the village industries, which give occupation
+to 7,000,000 men--from top to bottom of the working world, permanent and
+temporary, for production and consumption under all possible aspects.
+Until now, many of the fishing-grounds on the tributaries of the Caspian
+Sea are held by immense artels, the Ural river belonging to the whole of
+the Ural Cossacks, who allot and re-allot the fishing-grounds--perhaps
+the richest in the world--among the villages, without any interference
+of the authorities. Fishing is always made by artels in the Ural, the
+Volga, and all the lakes of Northern Russia. Besides these permanent
+organizations, there are the simply countless temporary artels,
+constituted for each special purpose. When ten or twenty peasants come
+from some locality to a big town, to work as weavers, carpenters,
+masons, boat-builders, and so on, they always constitute an artel. They
+hire rooms, hire a cook (very often the wife of one of them acts in this
+capacity), elect an elder, and take their meals in common, each one
+paying his share for food and lodging to the artel. A party of convicts
+on its way to Siberia always does the same, and its elected elder is the
+officially-recognized intermediary between the convicts and the military
+chief of the party. In the hard-labour prisons they have the same
+organization. The railway porters, the messengers at the Exchange, the
+workers at the Custom House, the town messengers in the capitals, who
+are collectively responsible for each member, enjoy such a reputation
+that any amount of money or bank-notes is trusted to the artel-member by
+the merchants. In the building trades, artels of from 10 to 200 members
+are formed; and the serious builders and railway contractors always
+prefer to deal with an artel than with separately-hired workers. The
+last attempts of the Ministry of War to deal directly with productive
+artels, formed ad hoc in the domestic trades, and to give them orders
+for boots and all sorts of brass and iron goods, are described as most
+satisfactory; while the renting of a Crown iron work, (Votkinsk) to an
+artel of workers, which took place seven or eight years ago, has been a
+decided success.
+
+We can thus see in Russia how the old medieval institution, having not
+been interfered with by the State (in its informal manifestations), has
+fully survived until now, and takes the greatest variety of forms in
+accordance with the requirements of modern industry and commerce. As to
+the Balkan peninsula, the Turkish Empire and Caucasia, the old guilds
+are maintained there in full. The esnafs of Servia have fully preserved
+their medieval character; they include both masters and journeymen,
+regulate the trades, and are institutions for mutual support in labour
+and sickness;(12) while the amkari of Caucasia, and especially at
+Tiflis, add to these functions a considerable influence in municipal
+life.(13)
+
+In connection with co-operation, I ought perhaps to mention also the
+friendly societies, the unities of oddfellows, the village and town
+clubs organized for meeting the doctors' bills, the dress and burial
+clubs, the small clubs very common among factory girls, to which they
+contribute a few pence every week, and afterwards draw by lot the sum of
+one pound, which can at least be used for some substantial purchase, and
+many others. A not inconsiderable amount of sociable or jovial spirit is
+alive in all such societies and clubs, even though the "credit and
+debit" of each member are closely watched over. But there are so many
+associations based on the readiness to sacrifice time, health, and life
+if required, that we can produce numbers of illustrations of the best
+forms of mutual support.
+
+The Lifeboat Association in this country, and similar institutions on
+the Continent, must be mentioned in the first place. The former has now
+over three hundred boats along the coasts of these isles, and it would
+have twice as many were it not for the poverty of the fisher men, who
+cannot afford to buy lifeboats. The crews consist, however, of
+volunteers, whose readiness to sacrifice their lives for the rescue of
+absolute strangers to them is put every year to a severe test; every
+winter the loss of several of the bravest among them stands on record.
+And if we ask these men what moves them to risk their lives, even when
+there is no reasonable chance of success, their answer is something on
+the following lines. A fearful snowstorm, blowing across the Channel,
+raged on the flat, sandy coast of a tiny village in Kent, and a small
+smack, laden with oranges, stranded on the sands near by. In these
+shallow waters only a flat-bottomed lifeboat of a simplified type can be
+kept, and to launch it during such a storm was to face an almost certain
+disaster. And yet the men went out, fought for hours against the wind,
+and the boat capsized twice. One man was drowned, the others were cast
+ashore. One of these last, a refined coastguard, was found next morning,
+badly bruised and half frozen in the snow. I asked him, how they came to
+make that desperate attempt? "I don't know myself," was his reply."
+There was the wreck; all the people from the village stood on the beach,
+and all said it would be foolish to go out; we never should work through
+the surf. We saw five or six men clinging to the mast, making desperate
+signals. We all felt that something must be done, but what could we do?
+One hour passed, two hours, and we all stood there. We all felt most
+uncomfortable. Then, all of a sudden, through the storm, it seemed to us
+as if we heard their cries--they had a boy with them. We could not stand
+that any longer. All at once we said, "We must go!" The women said so
+too; they would have treated us as cowards if we had not gone, although
+next day they said we had been fools to go. As one man, we rushed to the
+boat, and went. The boat capsized, but we took hold of it. The worst was
+to see poor drowning by the side of the boat, and we could do nothing to
+save him. Then came a fearful wave, the boat capsized again, and we were
+cast ashore. The men were still rescued by the D. boat, ours was caught
+miles away. I was found next morning in the snow."
+
+The same feeling moved also the miners of the Rhonda Valley, when they
+worked for the rescue of their comrades from the inundated mine. They
+had pierced through thirty-two yards of coal in order to reach their
+entombed comrades; but when only three yards more remained to be
+pierced, fire-damp enveloped them. The lamps went out, and the
+rescue-men retired. To work in such conditions was to risk being blown
+up at every moment. But the raps of the entombed miners were still
+heard, the men were still alive and appealed for help, and several
+miners volunteered to work at any risk; and as they went down the mine,
+their wives had only silent tears to follow them--not one word to stop
+them.
+
+There is the gist of human psychology. Unless men are maddened in the
+battlefield, they "cannot stand it" to hear appeals for help, and not to
+respond to them. The hero goes; and what the hero does, all feel that
+they ought to have done as well. The sophisms of the brain cannot resist
+the mutual-aid feeling, because this feeling has been nurtured by
+thousands of years of human social life and hundreds of thousands of
+years of pre-human life in societies.
+
+"But what about those men who were drowned in the Serpentine in the
+presence of a crowd, out of which no one moved for their rescue?" it may
+be asked. "What about the child which fell into the Regent's Park
+Canal--also in the presence of a holiday crowd--and was only saved
+through the presence of mind of a maid who let out a Newfoundland dog to
+the rescue?" The answer is plain enough. Man is a result of both his
+inherited instincts and his education. Among the miners and the seamen,
+their common occupations and their every-day contact with one another
+create a feeling of solidarity, while the surrounding dangers maintain
+courage and pluck. In the cities, on the contrary, the absence of common
+interest nurtures indifference, while courage and pluck, which seldom
+find their opportunities, disappear, or take another direction.
+Moreover, the tradition of the hero of the mine and the sea lives in the
+miners' and fishermen's villages, adorned with a poetical halo. But what
+are the traditions of a motley London crowd? The only tradition they
+might have in common ought to be created by literature, but a literature
+which would correspond to the village epics hardly exists. The clergy
+are so anxious to prove that all that comes from human nature is sin,
+and that all good in man has a supernatural origin, that they mostly
+ignore the facts which cannot be produced as an example of higher
+inspiration or grace, coming from above. And as to the lay-writers,
+their attention is chiefly directed towards one sort of heroism, the
+heroism which promotes the idea of the State. Therefore, they admire the
+Roman hero, or the soldier in the battle, while they pass by the
+fisherman's heroism, hardly paying attention to it. The poet and the
+painter might, of course, be taken by the beauty of the human heart in
+itself; but both seldom know the life of the poorer classes, and while
+they can sing or paint the Roman or the military hero in conventional
+surroundings, they can neither sing nor paint impressively the hero who
+acts in those modest surroundings which they ignore. If they venture to
+do so, they produce a mere piece of rhetoric.(14)
+
+The countless societies, clubs, and alliances, for the enjoyment of
+life, for study and research, for education, and so on, which have
+lately grown up in such numbers that it would require many years to
+simply tabulate them, are another manifestation of the same everworking
+tendency for association and mutual support. Some of them, like the
+broods of young birds of different species which come together in the
+autumn, are entirely given to share in common the joys of life. Every
+village in this country, in Switzerland, Germany, and so on, has its
+cricket, football, tennis, nine-pins, pigeon, musical or singing clubs.
+Other societies are much more numerous, and some of them, like the
+Cyclists' Alliance, have suddenly taken a formidable development.
+Although the members of this alliance have nothing in common but the
+love of cycling, there is already among them a sort of freemasonry for
+mutual help, especially in the remote nooks and corners which are not
+flooded by cyclists; they look upon the "C.A.C."--the Cyclists' Alliance
+Club--in a village as a sort of home; and at the yearly Cyclists' Camp
+many a standing friendship has been established. The Kegelbruder, the
+Brothers of the Nine Pins, in Germany, are a similar association; so
+also the Gymnasts' Societies (300,000 members in Germany), the informal
+brotherhood of paddlers in France, the yacht clubs, and so on. Such
+associations certainly do not alter the economical stratification of
+society, but, especially in the small towns, they contribute to smooth
+social distinctions, and as they all tend to join in large national and
+international federations, they certainly aid the growth of personal
+friendly intercourse between all sorts of men scattered in different
+parts of the globe.
+
+The Alpine Clubs, the Jagdschutzverein in Germany, which has over
+100,000 members--hunters, educated foresters, zoologists, and simple
+lovers of Nature--and the International Ornithological Society, which
+includes zoologists, breeders, and simple peasants in Germany, have the
+same character. Not only have they done in a few years a large amount of
+very useful work, which large associations alone could do properly
+(maps, refuge huts, mountain roads; studies of animal life, of noxious
+insects, of migrations of birds, and so on), but they create new bonds
+between men. Two Alpinists of different nationalities who meet in a
+refuge hut in the Caucasus, or the professor and the peasant
+ornithologist who stay in the same house, are no more strangers to each
+other; while the Uncle Toby's Society at Newcastle, which has already
+induced over 260,000 boys and girls never to destroy birds' nests and to
+be kind to all animals, has certainly done more for the development of
+human feelings and of taste in natural science than lots of moralists
+and most of our schools.
+
+We cannot omit, even in this rapid review, the thousands of scientific,
+literary, artistic, and educational societies. Up till now, the
+scientific bodies, closely controlled and often subsidized by the State,
+have generally moved in a very narrow circle, and they often came to be
+looked upon as mere openings for getting State appointments, while the
+very narrowness of their circles undoubtedly bred petty jealousies.
+Still it is a fact that the distinctions of birth, political parties and
+creeds are smoothed to some extent by such associations; while in the
+smaller and remote towns the scientific, geographical, or musical
+societies, especially those of them which appeal to a larger circle of
+amateurs, become small centres of intellectual life, a sort of link
+between the little spot and the wide world, and a place where men of
+very different conditions meet on a footing of equality. To fully
+appreciate the value of such centres, one ought to know them, say, in
+Siberia. As to the countless educational societies which only now begin
+to break down the State's and the Church's monopoly in education, they
+are sure to become before long the leading power in that branch. To the
+"Froebel Unions" we already owe the Kindergarten system; and to a number
+of formal and informal educational associations we owe the high standard
+of women's education in Russia, although all the time these societies
+and groups had to act in strong opposition to a powerful government.(15)
+As to the various pedagogical societies in Germany, it is well known
+that they have done the best part in the working out of the modern
+methods of teaching science in popular schools. In such associations the
+teacher finds also his best support. How miserable the overworked and
+under-paid village teacher would have been without their aid!(16)
+
+All these associations, societies, brotherhoods, alliances, institutes,
+and so on, which must now be counted by the ten thousand in Europe
+alone, and each of which represents an immense amount of voluntary,
+unambitious, and unpaid or underpaid work--what are they but so many
+manifestations, under an infinite variety of aspects, of the same
+ever-living tendency of man towards mutual aid and support? For nearly
+three centuries men were prevented from joining hands even for literary,
+artistic, and educational purposes. Societies could only be formed under
+the protection of the State, or the Church, or as secret brotherhoods,
+like free-masonry. But now that the resistance has been broken, they
+swarm in all directions, they extend over all multifarious branches of
+human activity, they become international, and they undoubtedly
+contribute, to an extent which cannot yet be fully appreciated, to break
+down the screens erected by States between different nationalities.
+Notwithstanding the jealousies which are bred by commercial competition,
+and the provocations to hatred which are sounded by the ghosts of a
+decaying past, there is a conscience of international solidarity which
+is growing both among the leading spirits of the world and the masses of
+the workers, since they also have conquered the right of international
+intercourse; and in the preventing of a European war during the last
+quarter of a century, this spirit has undoubtedly had its share.
+
+The religious charitable associations, which again represent a whole
+world, certainly must be mentioned in this place. There is not the
+slightest doubt that the great bulk of their members are moved by the
+same mutual-aid feelings which are common to all mankind. Unhappily the
+religious teachers of men prefer to ascribe to such feelings a
+supernatural origin. Many of them pretend that man does not consciously
+obey the mutual-aid inspiration so long as he has not been enlightened
+by the teachings of the special religion which they represent, and, with
+St. Augustin, most of them do not recognize such feelings in the "pagan
+savage." Moreover, while early Christianity, like all other religions,
+was an appeal to the broadly human feelings of mutual aid and sympathy,
+the Christian Church has aided the State in wrecking all standing
+institutions of mutual aid and support which were anterior to it, or
+developed outside of it; and, instead of the mutual aid which every
+savage considers as due to his kinsman, it has preached charity which
+bears a character of inspiration from above, and, accordingly, implies a
+certain superiority of the giver upon the receiver. With this
+limitation, and without any intention to give offence to those who
+consider themselves as a body elect when they accomplish acts simply
+humane, we certainly may consider the immense numbers of religious
+charitable associations as an outcome of the same mutual-aid tendency.
+
+All these facts show that a reckless prosecution of personal interests,
+with no regard to other people's needs, is not the only characteristic
+of modern life. By the side of this current which so proudly claims
+leadership in human affairs, we perceive a hard struggle sustained by
+both the rural and industrial populations in order to reintroduce
+standing institutions of mutual aid and support; and we discover, in all
+classes of society, a widely-spread movement towards the establishment
+of an infinite variety of more or less permanent institutions for the
+same purpose. But when we pass from public life to the private life of
+the modern individual, we discover another extremely wide world of
+mutual aid and support, which only passes unnoticed by most sociologists
+because it is limited to the narrow circle of the family and personal
+friendship.(17)
+
+Under the present social system, all bonds of union among the
+inhabitants of the same street or neighbourhood have been dissolved. In
+the richer parts of the large towns, people live without knowing who are
+their next-door neighbours. But in the crowded lanes people know each
+other perfectly, and are continually brought into mutual contact. Of
+course, petty quarrels go their course, in the lanes as elsewhere; but
+groupings in accordance with personal affinities grow up, and within
+their circle mutual aid is practised to an extent of which the richer
+classes have no idea. If we take, for instance, the children of a poor
+neighbourhood who play in a street or a churchyard, or on a green, we
+notice at once that a close union exists among them, notwithstanding the
+temporary fights, and that that union protects them from all sorts of
+misfortunes. As soon as a mite bends inquisitively over the opening of a
+drain--"Don't stop there," another mite shouts out, "fever sits in the
+hole!" "Don't climb over that wall, the train will kill you if you
+tumble down! Don't come near to the ditch! Don't eat those
+berries--poison! you will die." Such are the first teachings imparted to
+the urchin when he joins his mates out-doors. How many of the children
+whose play-grounds are the pavements around "model workers' dwellings,"
+or the quays and bridges of the canals, would be crushed to death by the
+carts or drowned in the muddy waters, were it not for that sort of
+mutual support. And when a fair Jack has made a slip into the
+unprotected ditch at the back of the milkman's yard, or a cherry-cheeked
+Lizzie has, after all, tumbled down into the canal, the young brood
+raises such cries that all the neighbourhood is on the alert and rushes
+to the rescue.
+
+Then comes in the alliance of the mothers. "You could not imagine" (a
+lady-doctor who lives in a poor neighbourhood told me lately) "how much
+they help each other. If a woman has prepared nothing, or could prepare
+nothing, for the baby which she expected--and how often that
+happens!--all the neighbours bring something for the new-comer. One of
+the neighbours always takes care of the children, and some other always
+drops in to take care of the household, so long as the mother is in
+bed." This habit is general. It is mentioned by all those who have lived
+among the poor. In a thousand small ways the mothers support each other
+and bestow their care upon children that are not their own. Some
+training--good or bad, let them decide it for themselves--is required in
+a lady of the richer classes to render her able to pass by a shivering
+and hungry child in the street without noticing it. But the mothers of
+the poorer classes have not that training. They cannot stand the sight
+of a hungry child; they must feed it, and so they do. "When the school
+children beg bread, they seldom or rather never meet with a refusal"--a
+lady-friend, who has worked several years in Whitechapel in connection
+with a workers' club, writes to me. But I may, perhaps, as well
+transcribe a few more passages from her letter:--
+
+"Nursing neighbours, in cases of illness, without any shade of
+remuneration, is quite general among the workers. Also, when a woman has
+little children, and goes out for work, another mother always takes care
+of them.
+
+"If, in the working classes, they would not help each other, they could
+not exist. I know families which continually help each other--with
+money, with food, with fuel, for bringing up the little children, in
+cases of illness, in cases of death.
+
+"'The mine' and 'thine' is much less sharply observed among the poor
+than among the rich. Shoes, dress, hats, and so on,--what may be wanted
+on the spot--are continually borrowed from each other, also all sorts of
+household things.
+
+"Last winter the members of the United Radical Club had brought together
+some little money, and began after Christmas to distribute free soup and
+bread to the children going to school. Gradually they had 1,800 children
+to attend to. The money came from outsiders, but all the work was done
+by the members of the club. Some of them, who were out of work, came at
+four in the morning to wash and to peel the vegetables; five women came
+at nine or ten (after having done their own household work) for cooking,
+and stayed till six or seven to wash the dishes. And at meal time,
+between twelve and half-past one, twenty to thirty workers came in to
+aid in serving the soup, each one staying what he could spare of his
+meal time. This lasted for two months. No one was paid."
+
+My friend also mentions various individual cases, of which the following
+are typical:--
+
+"Annie W. was given by her mother to be boarded by an old person in
+Wilmot Street. When her mother died, the old woman, who herself was very
+poor, kept the child without being paid a penny for that. When the old
+lady died too, the child, who was five years old, was of course
+neglected during her illness, and was ragged; but she was taken at once
+by Mrs. S., the wife of a shoemaker, who herself has six children.
+Lately, when the husband was ill, they had not much to eat, all of them.
+
+"The other day, Mrs. M., mother of six children, attended Mrs. M--g
+throughout her illness, and took to her own rooms the elder child....
+But do you need such facts? They are quite general.... I know also Mrs.
+D. (Oval, Hackney Road), who has a sewing machine and continually sews
+for others, without ever accepting any remuneration, although she has
+herself five children and her husband to look after.... And so on."
+
+For every one who has any idea of the life of the labouring classes it
+is evident that without mutual aid being practised among them on a large
+scale they never could pull through all their difficulties. It is only
+by chance that a worker's family can live its lifetime without having to
+face such circumstances as the crisis described by the ribbon weaver,
+Joseph Gutteridge, in his autobiography.(18) And if all do not go to the
+ground in such cases, they owe it to mutual help. In Gutteridge's case
+it was an old nurse, miserably poor herself, who turned up at the moment
+when the family was slipping towards a final catastrophe, and brought in
+some bread, coal, and bedding, which she had obtained on credit. In
+other cases, it will be some one else, or the neighbours will take steps
+to save the family. But without some aid from other poor, how many more
+would be brought every year to irreparable ruin!(19)
+
+Mr. Plimsoll, after he had lived for some time among the poor, on 7s.
+6d. a week, was compelled to recognize that the kindly feelings he took
+with him when he began this life "changed into hearty respect and
+admiration" when he saw how the relations between the poor are permeated
+with mutual aid and support, and learned the simple ways in which that
+support is given. After a many years' experience, his conclusion was
+that "when you come to think of it, such as these men were, so were the
+vast majority of the working classes."(20) As to bringing up orphans,
+even by the poorest families, it is so widely-spread a habit, that it
+may be described as a general rule; thus among the miners it was found,
+after the two explosions at Warren Vale and at Lund Hill, that "nearly
+one-third of the men killed, as the respective committees can testify,
+were thus supporting relations other than wife and child." "Have you
+reflected," Mr. Plimsoll added, "what this is? Rich men, even
+comfortably-to-do men do this, I don't doubt. But consider the
+difference." Consider what a sum of one shilling, subscribed by each
+worker to help a comrade's widow, or 6d. to help a fellow-worker to
+defray the extra expense of a funeral, means for one who earns 16s. a
+week and has a wife, and in some cases five or six children to
+support.(21) But such subscriptions are a general practice among the
+workers all over the world, even in much more ordinary cases than a
+death in the family, while aid in work is the commonest thing in their
+lives.
+
+Nor do the same practices of mutual aid and support fail among the
+richer classes. Of course, when one thinks of the harshness which is
+often shown by the richer employers towards their employees, one feels
+inclined to take the most pessimist view of human nature. Many must
+remember the indignation which was aroused during the great Yorkshire
+strike of 1894, when old miners who had picked coal from an abandoned
+pit were prosecuted by the colliery owners. And, even if we leave aside
+the horrors of the periods of struggle and social war, such as the
+extermination of thousands of workers' prisoners after the fall of the
+Paris Commune--who can read, for instance, revelations of the labour
+inquest which was made here in the forties, or what Lord Shaftesbury
+wrote about "the frightful waste of human life in the factories, to
+which the children taken from the workhouses, or simply purchased all
+over this country to be sold as factory slaves, were consigned"(22)--who
+can read that without being vividly impressed by the baseness which is
+possible in man when his greediness is at stake? But it must also be
+said that all fault for such treatment must not be thrown entirely upon
+the criminality of human nature. Were not the teachings of men of
+science, and even of a notable portion of the clergy, up to a quite
+recent time, teachings of distrust, despite and almost hatred towards
+the poorer classes? Did not science teach that since serfdom has been
+abolished, no one need be poor unless for his own vices? And how few in
+the Church had the courage to blame the children-killers, while the
+great numbers taught that the sufferings of the poor, and even the
+slavery of the negroes, were part of the Divine Plan! Was not
+Nonconformism itself largely a popular protest against the harsh
+treatment of the poor at the hand of the established Church?
+
+With such spiritual leaders, the feelings of the richer classes
+necessarily became, as Mr. Pimsoll remarked, not so much blunted as
+"stratified." They seldom went downwards towards the poor, from whom the
+well-to-do-people are separated by their manner of life, and whom they
+do not know under their best aspects, in their every-day life. But among
+themselves--allowance being made for the effects of the
+wealth-accumulating passions and the futile expenses imposed by wealth
+itself--among themselves, in the circle of family and friends, the rich
+practise the same mutual aid and support as the poor. Dr. Ihering and L.
+Dargun are perfectly right in saying that if a statistical record could
+be taken of all the money which passes from hand to hand in the shape of
+friendly loans and aid, the sum total would be enormous, even in
+comparison with the commercial transactions of the world's trade. And if
+we could add to it, as we certainly ought to, what is spent in
+hospitality, petty mutual services, the management of other people's
+affairs, gifts and charities, we certainly should be struck by the
+importance of such transfers in national economy. Even in the world
+which is ruled by commercial egotism, the current expression, "We have
+been harshly treated by that firm," shows that there is also the
+friendly treatment, as opposed to the harsh, i.e. the legal treatment;
+while every commercial man knows how many firms are saved every year
+from failure by the friendly support of other firms.
+
+As to the charities and the amounts of work for general well-being which
+are voluntarily done by so many well-to-do persons, as well as by
+workers, and especially by professional men, every one knows the part
+which is played by these two categories of benevolence in modern life.
+If the desire of acquiring notoriety, political power, or social
+distinction often spoils the true character of that sort of benevolence,
+there is no doubt possible as to the impulse coming in the majority of
+cases from the same mutual-aid feelings. Men who have acquired wealth
+very often do not find in it the expected satisfaction. Others begin to
+feel that, whatever economists may say about wealth being the reward of
+capacity, their own reward is exaggerated. The conscience of human
+solidarity begins to tell; and, although society life is so arranged as
+to stifle that feeling by thousands of artful means, it often gets the
+upper hand; and then they try to find an outcome for that deeply human
+need by giving their fortune, or their forces, to something which, in
+their opinion, will promote general welfare.
+
+In short, neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the
+teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned
+with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and
+sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply
+lodged in men's understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by
+all our preceding evolution. What was the outcome of evolution since its
+earliest stages cannot be overpowered by one of the aspects of that same
+evolution. And the need of mutual aid and support which had lately taken
+refuge in the narrow circle of the family, or the slum neighbours, in
+the village, or the secret union of workers, re-asserts itself again,
+even in our modern society, and claims its rights to be, as it always
+has been, the chief leader towards further progress. Such are the
+conclusions which we are necessarily brought to when we carefully ponder
+over each of the groups of facts briefly enumerated in the last two
+chapters.
+
+NOTES:
+
+1. Toulmin Smith, English Guilds, London, 1870, Introd. p. xliii.
+
+2. The Act of Edward the Sixth--the first of his reign--ordered to hand
+over to the Crown "all fraternities, brotherhoods, and guilds being
+within the realm of England and Wales and other of the king's dominions;
+and all manors, lands, tenements, and other hereditaments belonging to
+them or any of them" (English Guilds, Introd. p. xliii). See also
+Ockenkowski's Englands wirtschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des
+Mittelalters, Jena, 1879, chaps. ii-v.
+
+3. See Sidney and Beatrice Webb, History of Trade-Unionism, London,
+1894, pp. 21-38.
+
+4. See in Sidney Webb's work the associations which existed at that
+time. The London artisans are supposed to have never been better
+organized than in 1810-20.
+
+5. The National Association for the Protection of Labour included about
+150 separate unions, which paid high levies, and had a membership of
+about 100,000. The Builders' Union and the Miners' Unions also were big
+organizations (Webb, l.c. p. 107).
+
+6. I follow in this Mr. Webb's work, which is replete with documents to
+confirm his statements.
+
+7. Great changes have taken place since the forties in the attitude of
+the richer classes towards the unions. However, even in the sixties, the
+employers made a formidable concerted attempt to crush them by locking
+out whole populations. Up to 1869 the simple agreement to strike, and
+the announcement of a strike by placards, to say nothing of picketing,
+were often punished as intimidation. Only in 1875 the Master and Servant
+Act was repealed, peaceful picketing was permitted, and "violence and
+intimidation" during strikes fell into the domain of common law. Yet,
+even during the dock-labourers' strike in 1887, relief money had to be
+spent for fighting before the Courts for the right of picketing, while
+the prosecutions of the last few years menace once more to render the
+conquered rights illusory.
+
+8. A weekly contribution of 6d. out of an 18s. wage, or of 1s. out of
+25s., means much more than 9l. out of a 300l. income: it is mostly taken
+upon food; and the levy is soon doubled when a strike is declared in a
+brother union. The graphic description of trade-union life, by a skilled
+craftsman, published by Mr. and Mrs. Webb (pp. 431 seq.), gives an
+excellent idea of the amount of work required from a unionist.
+
+9. See the debates upon the strikes of Falkenau in Austria before the
+Austrian Reichstag on the 10th of May, 1894, in which debates the fact
+is fully recognized by the Ministry and the owner of the colliery. Also
+the English Press of that time.
+
+10. Many such facts will be found in the Daily Chronicle and partly the
+Daily News for October and November 1894.
+
+11. The 31,473 productive and consumers' associations on the Middle
+Rhine showed, about 1890, a yearly expenditure of 18,437,500l.;
+3,675,000l. were granted during the year in loans.
+
+12. British Consular Report, April 1889.
+
+13. A capital research on this subject has been published in Russian in
+the Zapiski (Memoirs) of the Caucasian Geographical Society, vol. vi. 2,
+Tiflis, 1891, by C. Egiazaroff.
+
+14. Escape from a French prison is extremely difficult; nevertheless a
+prisoner escaped from one of the French prisons in 1884 or 1885. He even
+managed to conceal himself during the whole day, although the alarm was
+given and the peasants in the neighbourhood were on the look-out for
+him. Next morning found him concealed in a ditch, close by a small
+village. Perhaps he intended to steal some food, or some clothes in
+order to take off his prison uniform. As he was lying in the ditch a
+fire broke out in the village. He saw a woman running out of one of the
+burning houses, and heard her desperate appeals to rescue a child in the
+upper storey of the burning house. No one moved to do so. Then the
+escaped prisoner dashed out of his retreat, made his way through the
+fire, and, with a scalded face and burning clothes, brought the child
+safe out of the fire, and handed it to its mother. Of course he was
+arrested on the spot by the village gendarme, who now made his
+appearance. He was taken back to the prison. The fact was reported in
+all French papers, but none of them bestirred itself to obtain his
+release. If he had shielded a warder from a comrade's blow, he would
+have been made a hero of. But his act was simply humane, it did not
+promote the State's ideal; he himself did not attribute it to a sudden
+inspiration of divine grace; and that was enough to let the man fall
+into oblivion. Perhaps, six or twelve months were added to his sentence
+for having stolen--"the State's property"--the prison's dress.
+
+15. The medical Academy for Women (which has given to Russia a large
+portion of her 700 graduated lady doctors), the four Ladies'
+Universities (about 1000 pupils in 1887; closed that year, and reopened
+in 1895), and the High Commercial School for Women are entirely the work
+of such private societies. To the same societies we owe the high
+standard which the girls' gymnasia attained since they were opened in
+the sixties. The 100 gymnasia now scattered over the Empire (over 70,000
+pupils), correspond to the High Schools for Girls in this country; all
+teachers are, however, graduates of the universities.
+
+16. The Verein für Verbreitung gemeinnutslicher Kenntnisse, although it
+has only 5500 members, has already opened more than 1000 public and
+school libraries, organized thousands of lectures, and published most
+valuable books.
+
+17. Very few writers in sociology have paid attention to it. Dr. Ihering
+is one of them, and his case is very instructive. When the great German
+writer on law began his philosophical work, Der Zweck im Rechte
+("Purpose in Law"), he intended to analyze "the active forces which call
+forth the advance of society and maintain it," and to thus give "the
+theory of the sociable man." He analyzed, first, the egotistic forces at
+work, including the present wage-system and coercion in its variety of
+political and social laws; and in a carefully worked-out scheme of his
+work he intended to give the last paragraph to the ethical forces--the
+sense of duty and mutual love--which contribute to the same aim. When he
+came, however, to discuss the social functions of these two factors, he
+had to write a second volume, twice as big as the first; and yet he
+treated only of the personal factors which will take in the following
+pages only a few lines. L. Dargun took up the same idea in Egoismus und
+Altruismus in der Nationalokonomie, Leipzig, 1885, adding some new
+facts. Buchner's Love, and the several paraphrases of it published here
+and in Germany, deal with the same subject.
+
+18. Light and Shadows in the Life of an Artisan. Coventry, 1893.
+
+19. Many rich people cannot understand how the very poor can help each
+other, because they do not realize upon what infinitesimal amounts of
+food or money often hangs the life of one of the poorest classes. Lord
+Shaftesbury had understood this terrible truth when he started his
+Flowers and Watercress Girls' Fund, out of which loans of one pound, and
+only occasionally two pounds, were granted, to enable the girls to buy a
+basket and flowers when the winter sets in and they are in dire
+distress. The loans were given to girls who had "not a sixpence," but
+never failed to find some other poor to go bail for them. "Of all the
+movements I have ever been connected with," Lord Shaftesbury wrote, "I
+look upon this Watercress Girls' movement as the most successful.... It
+was begun in 1872, and we have had out 800 to 1,000 loans, and have not
+lost 50l. during the whole period.... What has been lost--and it has
+been very little, under the circumstances--has been by reason of death
+or sickness, not by fraud" (The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of
+Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder, vol. iii. p. 322. London, 1885-86).
+Several more facts in point in Ch. Booth's Life and Labour in London,
+vol. i; in Miss Beatrice Potter's "Pages from a Work Girl's Diary"
+(Nineteenth Century, September 1888, p. 310); and so on.
+
+20. Samuel Plimsoll, Our Seamen, cheap edition, London, 1870, p. 110.
+
+21. Our Seamen, u.s., p. 110. Mr. Plimsoll added: "I don't wish to
+disparage the rich, but I think it may be reasonably doubted whether
+these qualities are so fully developed in them; for, notwithstanding
+that not a few of them are not unacquainted with the claims, reasonable
+or unreasonable, of poor relatives, these qualities are not in such
+constant exercise. Riches seem in so many cases to smother the manliness
+of their possessors, and their sympathies become, not so much narrowed
+as--so to speak--stratified: they are reserved for the sufferings of
+their own class, and also the woes of those above them. They seldom tend
+downwards much, and they are far more likely to admire an act of courage
+... than to admire the constantly exercised fortitude and the tenderness
+which are the daily characteristics of a British workman's life"--and of
+the workmen all over the world as well.
+
+22. Life of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder, vol. i.
+pp. 137-138.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+If we take now the teachings which can be borrowed from the analysis of
+modern society, in connection with the body of evidence relative to the
+importance of mutual aid in the evolution of the animal world and of
+mankind, we may sum up our inquiry as follows.
+
+In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live
+in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the
+struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian
+sense--not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a
+struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The
+animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its
+narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the
+greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most
+prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection
+which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and
+of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the
+further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the
+species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The
+unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
+
+Going next over to man, we found him living in clans and tribes at the
+very dawn of the stone age; we saw a wide series of social institutions
+developed already in the lower savage stage, in the clan and the tribe;
+and we found that the earliest tribal customs and habits gave to mankind
+the embryo of all the institutions which made later on the leading
+aspects of further progress. Out of the savage tribe grew up the
+barbarian village community; and a new, still wider, circle of social
+customs, habits, and institutions, numbers of which are still alive
+among ourselves, was developed under the principles of common possession
+of a given territory and common defence of it, under the jurisdiction of
+the village folkmote, and in the federation of villages belonging, or
+supposed to belong, to one stem. And when new requirements induced men
+to make a new start, they made it in the city, which represented a
+double network of territorial units (village communities), connected
+with guilds these latter arising out of the common prosecution of a
+given art or craft, or for mutual support and defence.
+
+And finally, in the last two chapters facts were produced to show that
+although the growth of the State on the pattern of Imperial Rome had put
+a violent end to all medieval institutions for mutual support, this new
+aspect of civilization could not last. The State, based upon loose
+aggregations of individuals and undertaking to be their only bond of
+union, did not answer its purpose. The mutual-aid tendency finally broke
+down its iron rules; it reappeared and reasserted itself in an infinity
+of associations which now tend to embrace all aspects of life and to
+take possession of all that is required by man for life and for
+reproducing the waste occasioned by life.
+
+It will probably be remarked that mutual aid, even though it may
+represent one of the factors of evolution, covers nevertheless one
+aspect only of human relations; that by the side of this current,
+powerful though it may be, there is, and always has been, the other
+current--the self-assertion of the individual, not only in its efforts
+to attain personal or caste superiority, economical, political, and
+spiritual, but also in its much more important although less evident
+function of breaking through the bonds, always prone to become
+crystallized, which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the
+State impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the
+self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element.
+
+It is evident that no review of evolution can be complete, unless these
+two dominant currents are analyzed. However, the self-assertion of the
+individual or of groups of individuals, their struggles for superiority,
+and the conflicts which resulted therefrom, have already been analyzed,
+described, and glorified from time immemorial. In fact, up to the
+present time, this current alone has received attention from the epical
+poet, the annalist, the historian, and the sociologist. History, such as
+it has hitherto been written, is almost entirely a description of the
+ways and means by which theocracy, military power, autocracy, and, later
+on, the richer classes' rule have been promoted, established, and
+maintained. The struggles between these forces make, in fact, the
+substance of history. We may thus take the knowledge of the individual
+factor in human history as granted--even though there is full room for a
+new study of the subject on the lines just alluded to; while, on the
+other side, the mutual-aid factor has been hitherto totally lost sight
+of; it was simply denied, or even scoffed at, by the writers of the
+present and past generation. It was therefore necessary to show, first
+of all, the immense part which this factor plays in the evolution of
+both the animal world and human societies. Only after this has been
+fully recognized will it be possible to proceed to a comparison between
+the two factors.
+
+To make even a rough estimate of their relative importance by any method
+more or less statistical, is evidently impossible. One single war--we
+all know--may be productive of more evil, immediate and subsequent, than
+hundreds of years of the unchecked action of the mutual-aid principle
+may be productive of good. But when we see that in the animal world,
+progressive development and mutual aid go hand in hand, while the inner
+struggle within the species is concomitant with retrogressive
+development; when we notice that with man, even success in struggle and
+war is proportionate to the development of mutual aid in each of the two
+conflicting nations, cities, parties, or tribes, and that in the process
+of evolution war itself (so far as it can go this way) has been made
+subservient to the ends of progress in mutual aid within the nation, the
+city or the clan--we already obtain a perception of the dominating
+influence of the mutual-aid factor as an element of progress. But we see
+also that the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments
+have created the very conditions of society life in which man was
+enabled to develop his arts, knowledge, and intelligence; and that the
+periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their
+greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in
+arts, industry, and science. In fact, the study of the inner life of the
+medieval city and of the ancient Greek cities reveals the fact that the
+combination of mutual aid, as it was practised within the guild and the
+Greek clan, with a large initiative which was left to the individual and
+the group by means of the federative principle, gave to mankind the two
+greatest periods of its history--the ancient Greek city and the medieval
+city periods; while the ruin of the above institutions during the State
+periods of history, which followed, corresponded in both cases to a
+rapid decay.
+
+As to the sudden industrial progress which has been achieved during our
+own century, and which is usually ascribed to the triumph of
+individualism and competition, it certainly has a much deeper origin
+than that. Once the great discoveries of the fifteenth century were
+made, especially that of the pressure of the atmosphere, supported by a
+series of advances in natural philosophy--and they were made under the
+medieval city organization,--once these discoveries were made, the
+invention of the steam-motor, and all the revolution which the conquest
+of a new power implied, had necessarily to follow. If the medieval
+cities had lived to bring their discoveries to that point, the ethical
+consequences of the revolution effected by steam might have been
+different; but the same revolution in technics and science would have
+inevitably taken place. It remains, indeed, an open question whether the
+general decay of industries which followed the ruin of the free cities,
+and was especially noticeable in the first part of the eighteenth
+century, did not considerably retard the appearance of the steam-engine
+as well as the consequent revolution in arts. When we consider the
+astounding rapidity of industrial progress from the twelfth to the
+fifteenth centuries--in weaving, working of metals, architecture and
+navigation, and ponder over the scientific discoveries which that
+industrial progress led to at the end of the fifteenth century--we must
+ask ourselves whether mankind was not delayed in its taking full
+advantage of these conquests when a general depression of arts and
+industries took place in Europe after the decay of medieval
+civilization. Surely it was not the disappearance of the artist-artisan,
+nor the ruin of large cities and the extinction of intercourse between
+them, which could favour the industrial revolution; and we know indeed
+that James Watt spent twenty or more years of his life in order to
+render his invention serviceable, because he could not find in the last
+century what he would have readily found in medieval Florence or Brugge,
+that is, the artisans capable of realizing his devices in metal, and of
+giving them the artistic finish and precision which the steam-engine
+requires.
+
+To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the
+war of each against all which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the
+man who, knowing not the causes of rain, attributes it to the victim he
+has immolated before his clay idol. For industrial progress, as for each
+other conquest over nature, mutual aid and close intercourse certainly
+are, as they have been, much more advantageous than mutual struggle.
+
+However, it is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating
+importance of the mutual-aid principle appears in full. That mutual aid
+is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough.
+But whatever the opinions as to the first origin of the mutual-aid
+feeling or instinct may be whether a biological or a supernatural cause
+is ascribed to it--we must trace its existence as far back as to the
+lowest stages of the animal world; and from these stages we can follow
+its uninterrupted evolution, in opposition to a number of contrary
+agencies, through all degrees of human development, up to the present
+times. Even the new religions which were born from time to time--always
+at epochs when the mutual-aid principle was falling into decay in the
+theocracies and despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the
+Roman Empire--even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same
+principle. They found their first supporters among the humble, in the
+lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid principle is
+the necessary foundation of every-day life; and the new forms of union
+which were introduced in the earliest Buddhist and Christian
+communities, in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on, took the character
+of a return to the best aspects of mutual aid in early tribal life.
+
+Each time, however, that an attempt to return to this old principle was
+made, its fundamental idea itself was widened. From the clan it was
+extended to the stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and
+finally--in ideal, at least--to the whole of mankind. It was also
+refined at the same time. In primitive Buddhism, in primitive
+Christianity, in the writings of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the
+early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and
+philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the
+total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of "due reward"--of good
+for good and evil for evil--is affirmed more and more vigorously. The
+higher conception of "no revenge for wrongs," and of freely giving more
+than one expects to receive from his neighbours, is proclaimed as being
+the real principle of morality--a principle superior to mere
+equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness. And
+man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which
+is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his
+oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we
+can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the
+positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can
+affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual
+struggle--has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the
+present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier
+evolution of our race.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Mutual Aid, by kniaz' Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin
+
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