Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Unhappily, feuds are not uncommon — not in con- sequence of "overstocking of the area," or "keen competition," and like inventions of a mercantile cen- tury, 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 con- sidered, 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 sea- coast.^

Many striking pages could be written about the j harmony which prevails in the villages of the Poly- (' nesian 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 Frenchj 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. ^

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 1 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 note-books. differ from those of palseolithic man, and some of their tribes do not yet know fishing : they simply spear the fish with a kind of harpoon. ^ 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.^ 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." ^ Close cohabitation and close interdependence are

2 In Australia whole clans have been seen exchanging all their wives, in order to conjure a calamity (Post, Studien zur Entwick- lungsgeschichte des Famtlienrechts, 1890, p. 342). More brotherhood is their specific against calamities. 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." ^

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 pene- trates 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.^ Like distributions of wealth appear

^ 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 know- ledge 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.

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.^ In my opinion these distributions reveal a very old institution, con- temporaneous with the first apparition of personal wealth ; they must have been a means for re-estab- lishing 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 cere- mony : 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 siniply carrying his property to the grave and

1 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 ior periodically distributing it." He also mentions \loc. cit. p. 31) "the destruction of property for the same purpose" (of maintaining equality). taking it back to his house after the burial ceremony is over — a habit which still prevails with the Euro- peans as regards swords, crosses, and other marks of public distinction.^

The high standard of the tribal morality of the Eskimos has often been mentioned in general liter- ature. Nevertheless the following remarks upon the manners of the Aleoutes — nearly akin to the Eskimos — w^ill 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 shame- ful 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.^

•* Veniaminoff, Memoirs relative to the District of Unalashka (Russian), 3 vols. St. Petersburg, 1840. Extracts, in English, from the above are given in Ball's Alaska. A like description of the Australians' morality is given in Nature, xlii. p. 639. ^ It is most remarkable that several writers (Middendorff, Schrenk, O. Finsch) described the 0;5tyaks 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. " Quarrel- ling is also rare among their children." (Rink, loc. cit.) And so on.

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 illus- trated 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 co- existence of facts which, to the European mind, seem so contradictory at the first sight. I have just men- tioned 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. ^ And so on.

Like facts are met with by the score ; so that, when we see that these same loving parents practise 1 Gill, quoted in Gerland and Waltz's Anthropologic, v. 641. See also pp. 636-640, where many facts of parental and filial love are quoted. infanticide, we are bound to recognize that the habit (whatever its uherior 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, primi- tive 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 reluct- antly, 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,^ 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.^ 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 get- ting 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 moraliz-

ing 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 shiver- ing 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 tow3irds 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.' 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 ! may be there will be some unexpected rescue ! "

West European men of science, when coming across these facts, are absolutely unable to stand them ; they cannot 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 §ets 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

1 Erskine, quoted in Gerland and Waitz's Anthropologie, v. 640. 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 "baby- farming." "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 cannibal- ism. 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 super- stition 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 render- ing a last service to the tribe. This is why cannibal- ism 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,^ 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 con- clusions. 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.^ But when the offender belongs to

^ It is remarkable, however, that in case of a sentence of death, nobody will take upon himself to be the executioner. Every one 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.^ 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.^

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 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.

1 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 /urisprudenz, Leipzig, 1887, vol. i. p. 77. 2 See Prof. M. Kovalevsky's Modern Customs and Ancient Law (Russian), Moscow, 1886, vol. ii., which contains many important considerations upon this subject. 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.^ It appears, however, that this affirmation was a gross exaggeration. More- over, Dayak "head-hunting" takes quite another aspect when we learn that the supposed " head- hunter" 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 1 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."

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." ^ 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, ^ Ida Pfeiffer, Meine zweite Weltrieze, Wien, 1856, vol. i. pp. 116 seq. See also Miiller and Temminch's Z>«/<r/4 Possessions in Archi- pelagic India, quoted by Elisde Reclus, in Ghgraphie Universelle, xiii. 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

In the last century the " savage " and his " Hfe 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 main- tained 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 super- stition ; and altogether, in whatever the savage does, he sees but the immediate consequences of his acts ; be cannot foresee their indirect and ulterior con^