Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

sequences — 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 morejblindly, than. Jthe, civilized V- r^^matToSiaKa fhp presc;ri.p.tions of the jyritten law. _^ , ^' cojnmon law is his religion ; it is his very habit of livingr~~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.^ 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.^

In short, within the tribe thsjiule of " each formal!" is supreme, so long as the separate family has not yet / broken up the tribal unity. But that rule is not ex- tended to the neighbouring clans, or tribes, even when they are federated for mutual protection. Each tribe, ur clan, is a separate unity. Just as among mammals 2 Miklukho-Maclay, loc. cit. Same habit with the Hottentots. 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 in- tentions. 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 1 tribe, and the relations with the outsiders; and (likel our international law) the " inter-tribal " law widely | differs from the common law. Therefore, when it conres 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 incon- veniences ; 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 them- selves 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 extermin- ated 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 ■■:"»cracy in the State.

The great migrations. — New organization rendered necessary. — The village community. — Communal work. — Judicial procedure. — Inter-tribaJ law. — Illustrations from the life of our contemporaries. — Buryates. — Kabyles. — Caucasian mountaineers. — African stems. It is not possible to study primitive mankind with- out 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 war- like 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 precon- ceived 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-sided- ness. 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 indi- vidual 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 imper- fect. 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 monu- ments, 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 dis- torted 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 ot 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 indi- cate 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 natur- ally 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. '^ Against it

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 terri- tory. 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

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.^ 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 institu- tions which had kept them together in their mother- countries had been totally wrecked during the stratifi- cation 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 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.

. 1 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). 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 com- mon territory, appropriated or protected by common efforts, was elaborated, and it took the place of the vanishing conceptions of common descent. The com- mon 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. Terri- torial unions grew up instead of the consanguine unions of old, and this new organization evidently ^ffered many advantages under the given circum-

stances. It recognized the independence of the family and even emphasized it, the village community dis- claiming 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 dis- tinguished 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;^ it was at the bottom of the social organiza- tion of old Scotland, old Ireland, and old Wales. In France, the communal possession and the communal allotment of arable land by the village folkmote per- sisted 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

1 If I follow the opinions of (to name modern specialists only) Nasse, Kovalevsky, and Vinogradov, and not those of Mr. Seebohm (Mr. Denman Ross c^ 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.

Italy, and revived after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was the rule with the Scandinavians, the Slavonians, the Finns (in the pittay'd, 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.^

1 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, Prkcis de I'histoire du droit frartfais : Droit privt, 1886, and several of his monographs in Bibl. de VEcale des Chartes ; Babeau, Le Village sous Fancien rkgime (the mir in the eighteenth century), third edition, 1887 ; Bonnemfere, Doniol, etc. For Italy and Scandinavia, the chief works are named in Laveleye's Primitive Property, German version by K. Biicher. For the Finns, Rein's Poreldsningar, i. 16; Koskinen, Finnische Geschichte, 1874, and various monographs. For the Lives and Coures, Prof. Lutchitzky in Severnyi Vestnik, 1891. For the Teutons, besides the well-known works of Maurer, Sohm (Altdeutsche Reichs- und Gerichts-Verfassung),

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.^ With other stems, or in other circumstances,

also Dahn(£/>-z«/, Vdlkerwanderung,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, Efimen- ko, 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 KulturgescMchte, Post, Dargun, etc., also the lectures of M. Kovalevsky {Tableau des origines et de revolution de la famille et de la propriete, Stockholm, 1890). Many special mono- graphs ought to be mentioned; their titles may be found in the excellent lists given by P. VioUet in Droit prive and Droit public. For other races, see subsequent notes.

1 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 Gan. I conceive the early village com- munities as slowly originating directly from the gentes, and consisting, according to racial and local circumstances, either of several joint

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 con- ceived 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.^ As to private property in land, the village community did not, and could not, recognize anything of the kind,

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. 1 Stobbe, Beitrdg zur Geschichte des deutschen Rechtes, p. 62. 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.^ 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

^ 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-Sterne^'s Die Ausbildung der grossen Grundherrschaften in Deutschland, Bd. i. 1878. Also, Besseler, Neubruch nack dem dlieren deutschen Recht, pp. 11-12, quoted by Kovalevsky, Modern Custom and Ancient Law, Moscow, 1886, i. 134.

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 commoii 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 con- federation. 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 gen^s. 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 Suevei' 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.^ As to the later survivals of the

1 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. 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). ^ 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,^ 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.^ In short, communal culture is so habitual with many Aryan, Ural-Altayan, Mongolian!, Negro, Red Indian, Malayan, and Melanesian stents that we must consider it as a universal — though not as the only possible — form of primitive agriculture.*