Alexander Maclaren - "Expositions of Holy Scripture"

Christopher Pierce Cranch - "The Last of the Huggermuggers"

Holland Thompson - "The Age of Invention, A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest"

Lucian of Samosata - "Works, V1"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Mutual Aid

P >> P. Kropotkin >> Mutual Aid




To do what lay before him openly and like a man, without fear
of either foes, fiends, or fate;... to be free and daring in all
his deeds; to be gentle and generous to his friends and kinsmen;
to be stern and grim to his foes [those who are under the lex
talionis], but even towards them to fulfil all bounden duties....
To be no truce-breaker, nor tale-bearer, nor backbiter. To utter
nothing against any man that he would not dare to tell him to his
face. To turn no man from his door who sought food or shelter,
even though he were a foe.(26)

The same or still better principles permeate the Welsh epic
poetry and triads. To act "according to the nature of mildness
and the principles of equity," without regard to the foes or to
the friends, and "to repair the wrong," are the highest duties of
man; "evil is death, good is life," exclaims the poet
legislator.(27) "The World would be fool, if agreements made on
lips were not honourable"--the Brehon law says. And the humble
Shamanist Mordovian, after having praised the same qualities,
will add, moreover, in his principles of customary law, that
"among neighbours the cow and the milking-jar are in common."
that, "the cow must be milked for yourself and him who may ask
milk;" that "the body of a child reddens from the stroke, but the
face of him who strikes reddens from shame;"(28) and so on. Many
pages might be filled with like principles expressed and followed
by the "barbarians."

One feature more of the old village communities deserves a
special mention. It is the gradual extension of the circle of men
embraced by the feelings of solidarity. Not only the tribes
federated into stems, but the stems as well, even though of
different origin, joined together in confederations. Some unions
were so close that, for instance, the Vandals, after part of
their confederation had left for the Rhine, and thence went over
to Spain and Africa, respected for forty consecutive years the
landmarks and the abandoned villages of their confederates, and
did not take possession of them until they had ascertained
through envoys that their confederates did not intend to return.
With other barbarians, the soil was cultivated by one part of the
stem, while the other part fought on or beyond the frontiers of
the common territory. As to the leagues between several stems,
they were quite habitual. The Sicambers united with the
Cherusques and the Sueves, the Quades with the Sarmates; the
Sarmates with the Alans, the Carpes, and the Huns. Later on, we
also see the conception of nations gradually developing in
Europe, long before anything like a State had grown in any part
of the continent occupied by the barbarians. These nations--for
it is impossible to refuse the name of a nation to the
Merovingian France, or to the Russia of the eleventh and twelfth
century--were nevertheless kept together by nothing else but a
community of language, and a tacit agreement of the small
republics to take their dukes from none but one special family.

Wars were certainly unavoidable; migration means war; but Sir
Henry Maine has already fully proved in his remarkable study of
the tribal origin of International Law, that "Man has never been
so ferocious or so stupid as to submit to such an evil as war
without some kind of effort to prevent it," and he has shown how
exceedingly great is "the number of ancient institutions which
bear the marks of a design to stand in the way of war, or to
provide an alternative to it."(29) In reality, man is so far
from the warlike being he is supposed to be, that when the
barbarians had once settled they so rapidly lost the very habits
of warfare that very soon they were compelled to keep special
dukes followed by special scholae or bands of warriors, in order
to protect them from possible intruders. They preferred peaceful
toil to war, the very peacefulness of man being the cause of the
specialization of the warrior's trade, which specialization
resulted later on in serfdom and in all the wars of the "States
period" of human history.

History finds great difficulties in restoring to life the
institutions of the barbarians. At every step the historian meets
with some faint indication which he is unable to explain with the
aid of his own documents only. But a broad light is thrown on the
past as soon as we refer to the institutions of the very numerous
tribes which are still living under a social organization almost
identical with that of our barbarian ancestors. Here we simply
have the difficulty of choice, because the islands of the
Pacific, the steppes of Asia, and the tablelands of Africa are
real historical museums containing specimens of all possible
intermediate stages which mankind has lived through, when passing
from the savage gentes up to the States' organization. Let us,
then, examine a few of those specimens.

If we take the village communities of the Mongol Buryates,
especially those of the Kudinsk Steppe on the upper Lena which
have better escaped Russian influence, we have fair
representatives of barbarians in a transitional state, between
cattle-breeding and agriculture.(30) These Buryates are still
living in "joint families"; that is, although each son, when he
is married, goes to live in a separate hut, the huts of at least
three generations remain within the same enclosure, and the joint
family work in common in their fields, and own in common their
joint households and their cattle, as well as their "calves'
grounds" (small fenced patches of soil kept under soft grass for
the rearing of calves). As a rule, the meals are taken separately
in each hut; but when meat is roasted, all the twenty to sixty
members of the joint household feast together. Several joint
households which live in a cluster, as well as several smaller
families settled in the same village--mostly debris of joint
households accidentally broken up--make the oulous, or the
village community. several oulouses make a tribe; and the,
forty-six tribes, or clans, of the Kudinsk Steppe are united into
one confederation. Smaller and closer confederations are entered
into, as necessity arises for special wants, by several tribes.
They know no private property in land--the land being held in
common by the oulous, or rather by the confederation, and if it
becomes necessary, the territory is re-allotted between the
different oulouses at a folkmote of the tribe, and between the
forty-six tribes at a folkmote of the confederation. It is worthy
of note that the same organization prevails among all the 250,000
Buryates of East Siberia, although they have been for three
centuries under Russian rule, and are well acquainted with
Russian institutions.

With all that, inequalities of fortune rapidly develop among
the Buryates, especially since the Russian Government is giving
an exaggerated importance to their elected taishas (princes),
whom it considers as responsible tax-collectors and
representatives of the confederations in their administrative and
even commercial relations with the Russians. The channels for the
enrichment of the few are thus many, while the impoverishment of
the great number goes hand in hand, through the appropriation of
the Buryate lands by the Russians. But it is a habit with the
Buryates, especially those of Kudinsk--and habit is more than
law--that if a family has lost its cattle, the richer families
give it some cows and horses that it may recover. As to the
destitute man who has no family, he takes his meals in the huts
of his congeners; he enters a hut, takes--by right, not for
charity--his seat by the fire, and shares the meal which always
is scrupulously divided into equal parts; he sleeps where he has
taken his evening meal. Altogether, the Russian conquerors of
Siberia were so much struck by the communistic practices of the
Buryates, that they gave them the name of Bratskiye--"the
Brotherly Ones"--and reported to Moscow. "With them everything
is in common; whatever they have is shared in common." Even now,
when the Lena Buryates sell their wheat, or send some of their
cattle to be sold to a Russian butcher, the families of the
oulous, or the tribe, put their wheat and cattle together, and
sell it as a whole. Each oulous has, moreover, its grain store
for loans in case of need, its communal baking oven (the four
banal of the old French communities), and its blacksmith, who,
like the blacksmith of the Indian communities,(31) being a
member of the community, is never paid for his work within the
community. He must make it for nothing, and if he utilizes his
spare time for fabricating the small plates of chiselled and
silvered iron which are used in Buryate land for the decoration
of dress, he may occasionally sell them to a woman from another
clan, but to the women of his own clan the attire is presented as
a gift. Selling and buying cannot take place within the
community, and the rule is so severe that when a richer family
hires a labourer the labourer must be taken from another clan or
from among the Russians. This habit is evidently not specific to
the Buryates; it is so widely spread among the modern barbarians,
Aryan and Ural-Altayan, that it must have been universal among
our ancestors.

The feeling of union within the confederation is kept alive
by the common interests of the tribes, their folkmotes, and the
festivities which are usually kept in connection with the
folkmotes. The same feeling is, however, maintained by another
institution, the aba, or common hunt, which is a reminiscence of
a very remote past. Every autumn, the forty-six clans of Kudinsk
come together for such a hunt, the produce of which is divided
among all the families. Moreover, national abas, to assert the
unity of the whole Buryate nation, are convoked from time to
time. In such cases, all Buryate clans which are scattered for
hundreds of miles west and east of Lake Baikal, are bound to send
their delegate hunters. Thousands of men come together, each one
bringing provisions for a whole month. Every one's share must be
equal to all the others, and therefore, before being put
together, they are weighed by an elected elder (always "with the
hand": scales would be a profanation of the old custom). After
that the hunters divide into bands of twenty, and the parties go
hunting according to a well-settled plan. In such abas the entire
Buryate nation revives its epic traditions of a time when it was
united in a powerful league. Let me add that such communal hunts
are quite usual with the Red Indians and the Chinese on the banks
of the Usuri (the kada).(32)

With the Kabyles, whose manners of life have been so well
described by two French explorers,(33) we have barbarians still
more advanced in agriculture. Their fields, irrigated and
manured, are well attended to, and in the hilly tracts every
available plot of land is cultivated by the spade. The Kabyles
have known many vicissitudes in their history; they have followed
for sometime the Mussulman law of inheritance, but, being adverse
to it, they have returned, 150 years ago, to the tribal customary
law of old. Accordingly, their land-tenure is of a mixed
character, and private property in land exists side by side with
communal possession. Still, the basis of their present
organization is the village community, the thaddart, which
usually consists of several joint families (kharoubas), claiming
a community of origin, as well as of smaller families of
strangers. Several villages are grouped into clans or tribes
(arch); several tribes make the confederation (thak'ebilt); and
several confederations may occasionally enter into a league,
chiefly for purposes of armed defence.

The Kabyles know no authority whatever besides that of the
djemmaa, or folkmote of the village community. All men of age
take part in it, in the open air, or in a special building
provided with stone seats. and the decisions of the djemmaa are
evidently taken at unanimity: that is, the discussions continue
until all present agree to accept, or to submit to, some
decision. There being no authority in a village community to
impose a decision, this system has been practised by mankind
wherever there have been village communities, and it is practised
still wherever they continue to exist, i.e. by several hundred
million men all over the world. The djemmaa nominates its
executive--the elder, the scribe, and the treasurer; it
assesses its own taxes; and it manages the repartition of the
common lands, as well as all kinds of works of public utility. A
great deal of work is done in common: the roads, the mosques, the
fountains, the irrigation canals, the towers erected for
protection from robbers, the fences, and so on, are built by the
village community; while the high-roads, the larger mosques, and
the great market-places are the work of the tribe. Many traces of
common culture continue to exist, and the houses continue to be
built by, or with the aid of, all men and women of the village.
Altogether, the "aids" are of daily occurrence, and are
continually called in for the cultivation of the fields, for
harvesting, and so on. As to the skilled work, each community has
its blacksmith, who enjoys his part of the communal land, and
works for the community; when the tilling season approaches he
visits every house, and repairs the tools and the ploughs,
without expecting any pay, while the making of new ploughs is
considered as a pious work which can by no means be recompensed
in money, or by any other form of salary.

As the Kabyles already have private property, they evidently
have both rich and poor among them. But like all people who
closely live together, and know how poverty begins, they consider
it as an accident which may visit every one. "Don't say that you
will never wear the beggar's bag, nor go to prison," is a proverb
of the Russian peasants; the Kabyles practise it, and no
difference can be detected in the external behaviour between rich
and poor; when the poor convokes an "aid," the rich man works in
his field, just as the poor man does it reciprocally in his
turn.(34) Moreover, the djemmaas set aside certain gardens and
fields, sometimes cultivated in common, for the use of the
poorest members. Many like customs continue to exist. As the
poorer families would not be able to buy meat, meat is regularly
bought with the money of the fines, or the gifts to the djemmaa,
or the payments for the use of the communal olive-oil basins, and
it is distributed in equal parts among those who cannot afford
buying meat themselves. And when a sheep or a bullock is killed
by a family for its own use on a day which is not a market day,
the fact is announced in the streets by the village crier, in
order that sick people and pregnant women may take of it what
they want. Mutual support permeates the life of the Kabyles, and
if one of them, during a journey abroad, meets with another
Kabyle in need, he is bound to come to his aid, even at the risk
of his own fortune and life; if this has not been done, the
djemmaa of the man who has suffered from such neglect may lodge a
complaint, and the djemmaa of the selfish man will at once make
good the loss. We thus come across a custom which is familiar to
the students of the mediaeval merchant guilds. Every stranger who
enters a Kabyle village has right to housing in the winter, and
his horses can always graze on the communal lands for twenty-four
hours. But in case of need he can reckon upon an almost unlimited
support. Thus, during the famine of 1867-68, the Kabyles received
and fed every one who sought refuge in their villages, without
distinction of origin. In the district of Dellys, no less than
12,000 people who came from all parts of Algeria, and even from
Morocco, were fed in this way. While people died from starvation
all over Algeria, there was not one single case of death due to
this cause on Kabylian soil. The djemmaas, depriving themselves
of necessaries, organized relief, without ever asking any aid
from the Government, or uttering the slightest complaint; they
considered it as a natural duty. And while among the European
settlers all kind of police measures were taken to prevent thefts
and disorder resulting from such an influx of strangers, nothing
of the kind was required on the Kabyles' territory: the djemmaas
needed neither aid nor protection from without.(35)

I can only cursorily mention two other most interesting
features of Kabyle life; namely, the anaya, or protection granted
to wells, canals, mosques, marketplaces, some roads, and so on,
in case of war, and the cofs. In the anaya we have a series of
institutions both for diminishing the evils of war and for
preventing conflicts. Thus the market-place is anaya, especially
if it stands on a frontier and brings Kabyles and strangers
together; no one dares disturb peace in the market, and if a
disturbance arises, it is quelled at once by the strangers who
have gathered in the market town. The road upon which the women
go from the village to the fountain also is anaya in case of war;
and so on. As to the cof it is a widely spread form of
association, having some characters of the mediaeval Burgschaften
or Gegilden, as well as of societies both for mutual protection
and for various purposes--intellectual, political, and
emotional--which cannot be satisfied by the territorial
organization of the village, the clan, and the con federation.
The cof knows no territorial limits; it recruits its members in
various villages, even among strangers; and it protects them in
all possible eventualities of life. Altogether, it is an attempt
at supplementing the territorial grouping by an extra-territorial
grouping intended to give an expression to mutual affinities of
all kinds across the frontiers. The free international
association of individual tastes and ideas, which we consider as
one of the best features of our own life, has thus its origin in
barbarian antiquity.

The mountaineers of Caucasia offer another extremely
instructive field for illustrations of the same kind. In studying
the present customs of the Ossetes--their joint families and
communes and their judiciary conceptions--Professor Kovalevsky,
in a remarkable work on Modern Custom and Ancient Law was enabled
step by step to trace the similar dispositions of the old
barbarian codes and even to study the origins of feudalism. With
other Caucasian stems we occasionally catch a glimpse into the
origin of the village community in those cases where it was not
tribal but originated from a voluntary union between families of
distinct origin. Such was recently the case with some Khevsoure
villages, the inhabitants of which took the oath of "community
and fraternity."(36) In another part of Caucasus, Daghestan, we
see the growth of feudal relations between two tribes, both
maintaining at the same time their village communities (and even
traces of the gentile "classes"), and thus giving a living
illustration of the forms taken by the conquest of Italy and Gaul
by the barbarians. The victorious race, the Lezghines, who have
conquered several Georgian and Tartar villages in the Zakataly
district, did not bring them under the dominion of separate
families; they constituted a feudal clan which now includes
12,000 households in three villages, and owns in common no less
than twenty Georgian and Tartar villages. The conquerors divided
their own land among their clans, and the clans divided it in
equal parts among the families; but they did not interfere with
the djemmaas of their tributaries which still practise the habit
mentioned by Julius Caesar; namely, the djemmaa decides each year
which part of the communal territory must be cultivated, and this
land is divided into as many parts as there are families, and the
parts are distributed by lot. It is worthy of note that although
proletarians are of common occurrence among the Lezghines (who
live under a system of private property in land, and common
ownership of serfs(37)) they are rare among their Georgian
serfs, who continue to hold their land in common. As to the
customary law of the Caucasian mountaineers, it is much the same
as that of the Longobards or Salic Franks, and several of its
dispositions explain a good deal the judicial procedure of the
barbarians of old. Being of a very impressionable character, they
do their best to prevent quarrels from taking a fatal issue; so,
with the Khevsoures, the swords are very soon drawn when a
quarrel breaks out; but if a woman rushes out and throws among
them the piece of linen which she wears on her head, the swords
are at once returned to their sheaths, and the quarrel is
appeased. The head-dress of the women is anaya. If a quarrel has
not been stopped in time and has ended in murder, the
compensation money is so considerable that the aggressor is
entirely ruined for his life, unless he is adopted by the wronged
family; and if he has resorted to his sword in a trifling quarrel
and has inflicted wounds, he loses for ever the consideration of
his kin. In all disputes, mediators take the matter in hand; they
select from among the members of the clan the judges--six in
smaller affairs, and from ten to fifteen in more serious matters--
and Russian observers testify to the absolute incorruptibility
of the judges. An oath has such a significance that men enjoying
general esteem are dispensed from taking it: a simple affirmation
is quite sufficient, the more so as in grave affairs the
Khevsoure never hesitates to recognize his guilt (I mean, of
course, the Khevsoure untouched yet by civilization). The oath is
chiefly reserved for such cases, like disputes about property,
which require some sort of appreciation in addition to a simple
statement of facts; and in such cases the men whose affirmation
will decide in the dispute, act with the greatest circumspection.
Altogether it is certainly not a want of honesty or of respect to
the rights of the congeners which characterizes the barbarian
societies of Caucasus.

The stems of Africa offer such an immense variety of
extremely interesting societies standing at all intermediate
stages from the early village community to the despotic barbarian
monarchies that I must abandon the idea of giving here even the
chief results of a comparative study of their institutions.(38)
Suffice it to say, that, even under the most horrid despotism of
kings, the folkmotes of the village communities and their
customary law remain sovereign in a wide circle of affairs. The
law of the State allows the king to take any one's life for a
simple caprice, or even for simply satisfying his gluttony; but
the customary law of the people continues to maintain the same
network of institutions for mutual support which exist among
other barbarians or have existed among our ancestors. And with
some better-favoured stems (in Bornu, Uganda, Abyssinia), and
especially the Bogos, some of the dispositions of the customary
law are inspired with really graceful and delicate feelings.

The village communities of the natives of both Americas have
the same character. The Tupi of Brazil were found living in "long
houses" occupied by whole clans which used to cultivate their
corn and manioc fields in common. The Arani, much more advanced
in civilization, used to cultivate their fields in common; so
also the Oucagas, who had learned under their system of primitive
communism and "long houses" to build good roads and to carry on a
variety of domestic industries,(39) not inferior to those of the
early medieval times in Europe. All of them were also living
under the same customary law of which we have given specimens on
the preceding pages. At another extremity of the world we find
the Malayan feudalism, but this feudalism has been powerless to
unroot the negaria, or village community, with its common
ownership of at least part of the land, and the redistribution of
land among the several negarias of the tribe.(40) With the
Alfurus of Minahasa we find the communal rotation of the crops;
with the Indian stem of the Wyandots we have the periodical
redistribution of land within the tribe, and the clan-culture of
the soil; and in all those parts of Sumatra where Moslem
institutions have not yet totally destroyed the old organization
we find the joint family (suka) and the village community (kota)
which maintains its right upon the land, even if part of it has
been cleared without its authorization.(41) But to say this, is
to say that all customs for mutual protection and prevention of
feuds and wars, which have been briefly indicated in the
preceding pages as characteristic of the village community, exist
as well. More than that: the more fully the communal possession
of land has been maintained, the better and the gentler are the
habits. De Stuers positively affirms that wherever the
institution of the village community has been less encroached
upon by the conquerors, the inequalities of fortunes are smaller,
and the very prescriptions of the lex talionis are less cruel;
while, on the contrary, wherever the village community has been
totally broken up, "the inhabitants suffer the most unbearable
oppression from their despotic rulers."(42) This is quite
natural. And when Waitz made the remark that those stems which
have maintained their tribal confederations stand on a higher
level of development and have a richer literature than those
stems which have forfeited the old bonds of union, he only
pointed out what might have been foretold in advance.