Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

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 ^ Walter, Das alte Wallis, p. 323 ; Dm. Bakradze and N. Khou- dadoff in Russian Zapiskioi the Caucasian Geogr. Society, xiv. Part I. ^ Bancroft's Native Races ; Waitz, Anthropologie, iii. 423 ; Mon- trozier, in Bull. Soc. d^ Anthropologic, 1870 ; Post's Studien, etc.

* 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 Jobb^-Duval, in Nouvelle Revue historique de droit fran^is et itranger, 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 pos- session of land and communal culture are described in that work.

houses" Inhabitpd 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. How- ever, the tradition of communal meals was piously kept alive ; every available opportunity, such as the com- memoration 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 com- munity ; 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_inspjring_sights ; it ^showsjsfhatJiuman work might be^ajad. QugHHOETTTie 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 an- nounces 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.^ 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 dotted — all 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 common 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.^

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 oppres- sion by the cunningest and the strongest which so easily might have developed during those disturbed times. The imaginary barbarian — the man who fights ?.nd 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 ; ^ 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.^ The judicial procedure was imbued with the same spirit. Every dispute was brought first before media- 1 tors or arbiters, and it mostly ended with them, thei 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 con- ditional 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 morel 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 folk- mote 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

^ Konigswarter, £tudes sur le dtveloppement des sociith humaines, Paris, 1850. 2 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. members.^ 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. ^ The moral authority of the com- mune 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 ecclesi- astic, 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 be- came serfs under the lord, he was bound to appear before the folkmote when they summoned him.^

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 i 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 1 The habit is in force still with many African and other tribes. ^ Maurer (Gesch. der Markverfassung, § 29, 97) is quite decisive upon this subject. He maintains that "All members of the com- munity .... 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.

law. This was a holy duty, a duty towards the ances- tors, which had to be accomplished in broad daylight, never in secrecy, and rendered widely known. There- fore 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 num- bers 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 en- couraged, and at last enforced," compensation instead of revenge.^ 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 qyite different from the fine or fred,'^ was habitually so high for all kinds of active offences that it certainly was no encouragement for such offences. Ln 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

^ Konigswarter has shown that the /red originated from an offer- ing 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. in the poorer tribes.^ 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 th§ 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 becon^es a " milk-brother " to all men of the wronged family. ^^ With several African tribes he must give his daught^ 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.^

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 influ- ence. 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.

2 O. Miller and M. Kovalevsky, " In the Mountaineer Communi- ties of Kabardia," in Vestnik Evropy, April, 1884. With the Shakh- sevens 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. i, 21). * 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.

" moral dissoluteness " of the barbarians. On the contrary, we cannot but admire the deeply moral prin- ciples elaborated within the early village communities which found their expression in Welsh triads, in legends about King Arthur, in Brehon commentaries,^ in old German legends and so on, or find still their expression in the sayings of the modern barbarians. In his intro- duction to The Story of Burnt Nj'al, George Dasent very justly sums up as follows the qualities of a North- man, 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.^

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," with- out 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.^ " 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

1 See the excellent chapter, "Le droit de la Vieille Irland^" (also "Le Haut Nord") m. iltudesde droit international et de droit politique, by Prof. E. Nys, Bruxelles, 1896. 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 ; " ^ 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 soli- darity. 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 aban- doned 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 gradu- ally 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

1 Maynoff, " Sketches of the Judicial Practices of the Mordovians," in the ethnographical Zapiski of the Russian Geographical Society, 1885, pp. 236, 257. 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 agree- ment 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 Inter- national 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." ^ 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 scholce 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 con- taining 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-breed- ing and agriculture.^ 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 en- closure, 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 dibris of joint households accidentally broken up — make the oulous, or the village

1 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. 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 con- federation. 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 mme oi Braiskiye — "the Brotherly Ones "—and reported to Moscow: "With them every- thing 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,^ 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 cannotjake 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 folk- motes, and the festivities which are usually kept in 1 Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities, New York, 1876, pp. 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 CEises, all Buryate clans which are scattered for hundreds of miles west and east of Lake Baikal, are bound to send their delegate hunters. Thou- sands of men come together, each one bringing pro- visions 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 profan- ation 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 kadd)}

With the Kabyles, whose manners ot life have been so well described by two French explorers,^ 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 culti- vated by the spade. The Kabyles have known many vicissitudes in their history ; they have followed for some time the Mussulman law of inheritance, but, being adverse to it, they have returned, 1 50 years ago, to the tribal customary law of old. Accordingly, their land-tenure is of a mixed character, andprivate property in land exists side by side with communal posses- sion. 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 occasion- ally enter into a league, chiefly for purposes of armed defence.

The Kabyles know no authority whatever besides that of the djemmda, 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 djemmda 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 com- munity 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 djemmda nominates its executive — the elder, the scribe, and the treasurer ; it assesses its own taxes ; and it manages the re- partition 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. Al- together, 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 com- munity ; 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.^ Moreover, the dj'emmdas set aside certain gardens and fields, sometimes cultivated in common, for the use of

1 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. 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 djemmda, 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 djemTnda ot the man who has suffered from such neglect may lodge a complaint, and the djemmda 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 mediae- val 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 djemmdas, depriving themselves of necessaries, organized relief, without