Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

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 Acro- polis of Athens, the cathedral of a mediaeval 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 ;^ 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 con- tributed 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," ^ praising the city's allies, and sending to eternal fire its enemies.

1 Dr. L. Ennen, Der Bom zu Koln, seine Construction und Anstaltung, Koln, 1871. ^ The three statues are among the outer decorations of Notre Dame de Paris. And each guild bestowed its love upon the communal monument by richly decorating it with stained win- dows, paintings, " gates, worthy to be the gates of Paradise," as Michel Angelo said, or stone decorations of each minutest corner of the building.^ Small cities, even small parishes,^ vied with the big agglo- merations 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.^

All arts had progressed in the same way in the mediaeval 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 1 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.

* Sismondi, iv. 172; xvi. 356. The great cznsS., Naviglio Grande, which brings the water from the Tessino, was begun in 1179,/.!?. after the conquest of independence, and it was ended in the thirteenth century. On the subsequent decay, see xvi. 355. 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.^ The chiselling of precious metals, the art of casting, the fine forging of iron, were creations of the mediaeval "mysteries" which had succeeded in attain- ing 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 ; alge- bra, trigonometry, chemistry, counterpoint (an invention equivalent to a new creation of music) ; these are all posses- sions 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 mediaeval 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

^ 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.

both mechanics and natural philosophy. Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Copernicus were ji|| direct descendants of a Roger Bacon and a MichcM^Scot, as the steani 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 mediaeval 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 mediseval city created during the four centuries it lived ?

The mediaeval 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 initia- tive, 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 '^ 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 Itgistes in the. con- stitution of royal authority, Histoire des Franfais, Paris, 1826, viii. 85-99. The popular hatred against these " weise Dvktoren und Beutelschmider des Volks " broke out with full force in the first years of the sixteenth century in the sermons of the early Reform move- ment.

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 ori 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 cen- tralized 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 — He 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 appear- ance ; 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval citizen had committed a formidable mistake at the outset. Instead of looking upon th-e 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 new- comers. 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."^ The trade, which was formerly com- munal, 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

1 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. within its walls, simply carried on the old war within the very precincts of the city. They disliked to sub- mit 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.^ 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,^ 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

^ The trade in slaves kidnapped in the East was never discon- tinued in the Italian republics till the fifteenth century. Feeble traces of it are found also in Germany and elsewhere. See Cibrario. Delia schiavit'U e del servaggio, 2 vols. Milan, 1868; Professor Luchitzkiy, " Slavery and Russian Slaves in Florence in the Four- teenth and Fifteenth Centuries," in Izvestia of the Kieff University, cities in the east, by Slavonian cities in the far north- east. Mercenary armies began to be kept for colonial wars, and soon for local defence as well. Loans were contracted 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 com- munal institutions, which stands higher and lies deeper than all the above. The history of the mediaeval 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 lead- ing 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 ;^ that one man can and must be the saviour of society, and that in the name of public salvation he can com-

1 See the theories expressed by the Bologna lawyers, already at the Congress of Roncaglia in 1158. mit 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 atten- tion, 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 01 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, ^^y 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 mediaeval 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.

, Popular revolts at the beginning of the State-period. — Mutual Aid institutions of the present time. — The village community : its strug- gles 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 popula- tions 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

After having passed through the savage tribe, and next through the village community, the Europeans came to work out in mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 com- munal lands being restored to the village qommunities and feudal servitudes being abolished, and they always alluded, to the ' ' true ''.. faith — a faith ojFJjrotherhood. 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 prin- ciples of communism.^ 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.^

1 A bulky literature, dealing with this formerly much-neglected subject, is now growing in Germany. Keller's works, £in Apostel der Wiedertdufer and Geschichte der Wiedertaufer, Cornelius's Geschichte des miinsterischen 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 ex- cellent little work by Richard Heath — " Anabaptism from its Rise at Zwickau to its Fall at Miinster, 1521-1536," London, 1895 {Baptist Manuals, vol. i.) — where the leading features of the move- ment 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.

^ Few of our contemporaries realize both the extent of this move- ment 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 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 com- munities were bereft of their folkmotes, their courts and independent administration ; their lands were confiscated. The guilds were spoliated of their posses- sions 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 be- came 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 institu- tions 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

their defeat in Germany. See Zimmermann's Allgemeine Geschichte des grossen Bauemkrieges. For the measures taken to suppress the movement in the Netherlands see Richard Heath's AnabapHsm. 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 individ- uals, 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 mediaeval 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 in trude : it is the police- man's business to interfere, or not. And while in a ! savage land, among the Hottentots, it would be scan- dalous to eat withnnrJ^.a.vijig. InnHly f-pllf^d. PUt 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 la 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. WKat 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 institu- 7 tions has been going onTn"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 wHiHTinen 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.