P. G. Wodehouse - "A Man of Means"

Arthur M. Winfield - "The Rover Boys out West"

Christopher Pierce Cranch - "The Last of the Huggermuggers"

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




The importance of co-operation in this country, in Holland
and in Denmark is well known; while in Germany, and especially on
the Rhine, the co-operative societies are already an important
factor of industrial life.(11) It is, however, Russia which
offers perhaps the best field for the study of cooperation under
an infinite variety of aspects. In Russia, it is a natural
growth, an inheritance from the middle ages; and while a formally
established co-operative society would have to cope with many
legal difficulties and official suspicion, the informal
co-operation--the artel--makes the very substance of Russian
peasant life. The history of "the making of Russia," and of the
colonization of Siberia, is a history of the hunting and trading
artels or guilds, followed by village communities, and at the
present time we find the artel everywhere; among each group of
ten to fifty peasants who come from the same village to work at a
factory, in all the building trades, among fishermen and hunters,
among convicts on their way to and in Siberia, among railway
porters, Exchange messengers, Customs House labourers, everywhere
in the village industries, which give occupation to 7,000,000 men--
from top to bottom of the working world, permanent and
temporary, for production and consumption under all possible
aspects. Until now, many of the fishing-grounds on the
tributaries of the Caspian Sea are held by immense artels, the
Ural river belonging to the whole of the Ural Cossacks, who allot
and re-allot the fishing-grounds--perhaps the richest in the
world--among the villages, without any interference of the
authorities. Fishing is always made by artels in the Ural, the
Volga, and all the lakes of Northern Russia. Besides these
permanent organizations, there are the simply countless temporary
artels, constituted for each special purpose. When ten or twenty
peasants come from some locality to a big town, to work as
weavers, carpenters, masons, boat-builders, and so on, they
always constitute an artel. They hire rooms, hire a cook (very
often the wife of one of them acts in this capacity), elect an
elder, and take their meals in common, each one paying his share
for food and lodging to the artel. A party of convicts on its way
to Siberia always does the same, and its elected elder is the
officially-recognized intermediary between the convicts and the
military chief of the party. In the hard-labour prisons they have
the same organization. The railway porters, the messengers at the
Exchange, the workers at the Custom House, the town messengers in
the capitals, who are collectively responsible for each member,
enjoy such a reputation that any amount of money or bank-notes is
trusted to the artel-member by the merchants. In the building
trades, artels of from 10 to 200 members are formed; and the
serious builders and railway contractors always prefer to deal
with an artel than with separately-hired workers. The last
attempts of the Ministry of War to deal directly with productive
artels, formed ad hoc in the domestic trades, and to give them
orders for boots and all sorts of brass and iron goods, are
described as most satisfactory; while the renting of a Crown iron
work, (Votkinsk) to an artel of workers, which took place seven
or eight years ago, has been a decided success.

We can thus see in Russia how the old medieval institution,
having not been interfered with by the State (in its informal
manifestations), has fully survived until now, and takes the
greatest variety of forms in accordance with the requirements of
modern industry and commerce. As to the Balkan peninsula, the
Turkish Empire and Caucasia, the old guilds are maintained there
in full. The esnafs of Servia have fully preserved their medieval
character; they include both masters and journeymen, regulate the
trades, and are institutions for mutual support in labour and
sickness;(12) while the amkari of Caucasia, and especially at
Tiflis, add to these functions a considerable influence in
municipal life.(13)

In connection with co-operation, I ought perhaps to mention
also the friendly societies, the unities of oddfellows, the
village and town clubs organized for meeting the doctors' bills,
the dress and burial clubs, the small clubs very common among
factory girls, to which they contribute a few pence every week,
and afterwards draw by lot the sum of one pound, which can at
least be used for some substantial purchase, and many others. A
not inconsiderable amount of sociable or jovial spirit is alive
in all such societies and clubs, even though the "credit and
debit" of each member are closely watched over. But there are so
many associations based on the readiness to sacrifice time,
health, and life if required, that we can produce numbers of
illustrations of the best forms of mutual support.

The Lifeboat Association in this country, and similar
institutions on the Continent, must be mentioned in the first
place. The former has now over three hundred boats along the
coasts of these isles, and it would have twice as many were it
not for the poverty of the fisher men, who cannot afford to buy
lifeboats. The crews consist, however, of volunteers, whose
readiness to sacrifice their lives for the rescue of absolute
strangers to them is put every year to a severe test; every
winter the loss of several of the bravest among them stands on
record. And if we ask these men what moves them to risk their
lives, even when there is no reasonable chance of success, their
answer is something on the following lines. A fearful snowstorm,
blowing across the Channel, raged on the flat, sandy coast of a
tiny village in Kent, and a small smack, laden with oranges,
stranded on the sands near by. In these shallow waters only a
flat-bottomed lifeboat of a simplified type can be kept, and to
launch it during such a storm was to face an almost certain
disaster. And yet the men went out, fought for hours against the
wind, and the boat capsized twice. One man was drowned, the
others were cast ashore. One of these last, a refined coastguard,
was found next morning, badly bruised and half frozen in the
snow. I asked him, how they came to make that desperate attempt?"
I don't know myself," was his reply." There was the wreck; all
the people from the village stood on the beach, and all said it
would be foolish to go out; we never should work through the
surf. We saw five or six men clinging to the mast, making
desperate signals. We all felt that something must be done, but
what could we do? One hour passed, two hours, and we all stood
there. We all felt most uncomfortable. Then, all of a sudden,
through the storm, it seemed to us as if we heard their cries--
they had a boy with them. We could not stand that any longer. All
at once we said, "We must go!" The women said so too; they would
have treated us as cowards if we had not gone, although next day
they said we had been fools to go. As one man, we rushed to the
boat, and went. The boat capsized, but we took hold of it. The
worst was to see poor drowning by the side of the boat, and we
could do nothing to save him. Then came a fearful wave, the boat
capsized again, and we were cast ashore. The men were still
rescued by the D. boat, ours was caught miles away. I was found
next morning in the snow."

The same feeling moved also the miners of the Rhonda Valley,
when they worked for the rescue of their comrades from the
inundated mine. They had pierced through thirty-two yards of coal
in order to reach their entombed comrades; but when only three
yards more remained to be pierced, fire-damp enveloped them. The
lamps went out, and the rescue-men retired. To work in such
conditions was to risk being blown up at every moment. But the
raps of the entombed miners were still heard, the men were still
alive and appealed for help, and several miners volunteered to
work at any risk; and as they went down the mine, their wives had
only silent tears to follow them--not one word to stop them.

There is the gist of human psychology. Unless men are
maddened in the battlefield, they "cannot stand it" to hear
appeals for help, and not to respond to them. The hero goes; and
what the hero does, all feel that they ought to have done as
well. The sophisms of the brain cannot resist the mutual-aid
feeling, because this feeling has been nurtured by thousands of
years of human social life and hundreds of thousands of years of
pre-human life in societies.

"But what about those men who were drowned in the Serpentine
in the presence of a crowd, out of which no one moved for their
rescue?" it may be asked. "What about the child which fell into
the Regent's Park Canal--also in the presence of a holiday
crowd--and was only saved through the presence of mind of a
maid who let out a Newfoundland dog to the rescue?" The answer is
plain enough. Man is a result of both his inherited instincts and
his education. Among the miners and the seamen, their common
occupations and their every-day contact with one another create a
feeling of solidarity, while the surrounding dangers maintain
courage and pluck. In the cities, on the contrary, the absence of
common interest nurtures indifference, while courage and pluck,
which seldom find their opportunities, disappear, or take another
direction. Moreover, the tradition of the hero of the mine and
the sea lives in the miners' and fishermen's villages, adorned
with a poetical halo. But what are the traditions of a motley
London crowd? The only tradition they might have in common ought
to be created by literature, but a literature which would
correspond to the village epics hardly exists. The clergy are so
anxious to prove that all that comes from human nature is sin,
and that all good in man has a supernatural origin, that they
mostly ignore the facts which cannot be produced as an example of
higher inspiration or grace, coming from above. And as to the
lay-writers, their attention is chiefly directed towards one sort
of heroism, the heroism which promotes the idea of the State.
Therefore, they admire the Roman hero, or the soldier in the
battle, while they pass by the fisherman's heroism, hardly paying
attention to it. The poet and the painter might, of course, be
taken by the beauty of the human heart in itself; but both seldom
know the life of the poorer classes, and while they can sing or
paint the Roman or the military hero in conventional
surroundings, they can neither sing nor paint impressively the
hero who acts in those modest surroundings which they ignore. If
they venture to do so, they produce a mere piece of
rhetoric.(14)

The countless societies, clubs, and alliances, for the
enjoyment of life, for study and research, for education, and so
on, which have lately grown up in such numbers that it would
require many years to simply tabulate them, are another
manifestation of the same everworking tendency for association
and mutual support. Some of them, like the broods of young birds
of different species which come together in the autumn, are
entirely given to share in common the joys of life. Every village
in this country, in Switzerland, Germany, and so on, has its
cricket, football, tennis, nine-pins, pigeon, musical or singing
clubs. Other societies are much more numerous, and some of them,
like the Cyclists' Alliance, have suddenly taken a formidable
development. Although the members of this alliance have nothing
in common but the love of cycling, there is already among them a
sort of freemasonry for mutual help, especially in the remote
nooks and corners which are not flooded by cyclists; they look
upon the "C.A.C."--the Cyclists' Alliance Club--in a village
as a sort of home; and at the yearly Cyclists' Camp many a
standing friendship has been established. The Kegelbruder, the
Brothers of the Nine Pins, in Germany, are a similar association;
so also the Gymnasts' Societies (300,000 members in Germany), the
informal brotherhood of paddlers in France, the yacht clubs, and
so on. Such associations certainly do not alter the economical
stratification of society, but, especially in the small towns,
they contribute to smooth social distinctions, and as they all
tend to join in large national and international federations,
they certainly aid the growth of personal friendly intercourse
between all sorts of men scattered in different parts of the
globe.

The Alpine Clubs, the Jagdschutzverein in Germany, which has
over 100,000 members--hunters, educated foresters, zoologists,
and simple lovers of Nature--and the International
Ornithological Society, which includes zoologists, breeders, and
simple peasants in Germany, have the same character. Not only
have they done in a few years a large amount of very useful work,
which large associations alone could do properly (maps, refuge
huts, mountain roads; studies of animal life, of noxious insects,
of migrations of birds, and so on), but they create new bonds
between men. Two Alpinists of different nationalities who meet in
a refuge hut in the Caucasus, or the professor and the peasant
ornithologist who stay in the same house, are no more strangers
to each other; while the Uncle Toby's Society at Newcastle, which
has already induced over 260,000 boys and girls never to destroy
birds' nests and to be kind to all animals, has certainly done
more for the development of human feelings and of taste in
natural science than lots of moralists and most of our schools.

We cannot omit, even in this rapid review, the thousands of
scientific, literary, artistic, and educational societies. Up
till now, the scientific bodies, closely controlled and often
subsidized by the State, have generally moved in a very narrow
circle, and they often came to be looked upon as mere openings
for getting State appointments, while the very narrowness of
their circles undoubtedly bred petty jealousies. Still it is a
fact that the distinctions of birth, political parties and creeds
are smoothed to some extent by such associations; while in the
smaller and remote towns the scientific, geographical, or musical
societies, especially those of them which appeal to a larger
circle of amateurs, become small centres of intellectual life, a
sort of link between the little spot and the wide world, and a
place where men of very different conditions meet on a footing of
equality. To fully appreciate the value of such centres, one
ought to know them, say, in Siberia. As to the countless
educational societies which only now begin to break down the
State's and the Church's monopoly in education, they are sure to
become before long the leading power in that branch. To the
"Froebel Unions" we already owe the Kindergarten system; and to a
number of formal and informal educational associations we owe the
high standard of women's education in Russia, although all the
time these societies and groups had to act in strong opposition
to a powerful government.(15) As to the various pedagogical
societies in Germany, it is well known that they have done the
best part in the working out of the modern methods of teaching
science in popular schools. In such associations the teacher
finds also his best support. How miserable the overworked and
under-paid village teacher would have been without their
aid!(16)

All these associations, societies, brotherhoods, alliances,
institutes, and so on, which must now be counted by the ten
thousand in Europe alone, and each of which represents an immense
amount of voluntary, unambitious, and unpaid or underpaid work--
what are they but so many manifestations, under an infinite
variety of aspects, of the same ever-living tendency of man
towards mutual aid and support? For nearly three centuries men
were prevented from joining hands even for literary, artistic,
and educational purposes. Societies could only be formed under
the protection of the State, or the Church, or as secret
brotherhoods, like free-masonry. But now that the resistance has
been broken, they swarm in all directions, they extend over all
multifarious branches of human activity, they become
international, and they undoubtedly contribute, to an extent
which cannot yet be fully appreciated, to break down the screens
erected by States between different nationalities.
Notwithstanding the jealousies which are bred by commercial
competition, and the provocations to hatred which are sounded by
the ghosts of a decaying past, there is a conscience of
international solidarity which is growing both among the leading
spirits of the world and the masses of the workers, since they
also have conquered the right of international intercourse; and
in the preventing of a European war during the last quarter of a
century, this spirit has undoubtedly had its share.

The religious charitable associations, which again represent
a whole world, certainly must be mentioned in this place. There
is not the slightest doubt that the great bulk of their members
are moved by the same mutual-aid feelings which are common to all
mankind. Unhappily the religious teachers of men prefer to
ascribe to such feelings a supernatural origin. Many of them
pretend that man does not consciously obey the mutual-aid
inspiration so long as he has not been enlightened by the
teachings of the special religion which they represent, and, with
St. Augustin, most of them do not recognize such feelings in the
"pagan savage." Moreover, while early Christianity, like all
other religions, was an appeal to the broadly human feelings of
mutual aid and sympathy, the Christian Church has aided the State
in wrecking all standing institutions of mutual aid and support
which were anterior to it, or developed outside of it; and,
instead of the mutual aid which every savage considers as due to
his kinsman, it has preached charity which bears a character of
inspiration from above, and, accordingly, implies a certain
superiority of the giver upon the receiver. With this limitation,
and without any intention to give offence to those who consider
themselves as a body elect when they accomplish acts simply
humane, we certainly may consider the immense numbers of
religious charitable associations as an outcome of the same
mutual-aid tendency.

All these facts show that a reckless prosecution of personal
interests, with no regard to other people's needs, is not the
only characteristic of modern life. By the side of this current
which so proudly claims leadership in human affairs, we perceive
a hard struggle sustained by both the rural and industrial
populations in order to reintroduce standing institutions of
mutual aid and support; and we discover, in all classes of
society, a widely-spread movement towards the establishment of an
infinite variety of more or less permanent institutions for the
same purpose. But when we pass from public life to the private
life of the modern individual, we discover another extremely wide
world of mutual aid and support, which only passes unnoticed by
most sociologists because it is limited to the narrow circle of
the family and personal friendship.(17)

Under the present social system, all bonds of union among the
inhabitants of the same street or neighbourhood have been
dissolved. In the richer parts of the large towns, people live
without knowing who are their next-door neighbours. But in the
crowded lanes people know each other perfectly, and are
continually brought into mutual contact. Of course, petty
quarrels go their course, in the lanes as elsewhere; but
groupings in accordance with personal affinities grow up, and
within their circle mutual aid is practised to an extent of which
the richer classes have no idea. If we take, for instance, the
children of a poor neighbourhood who play in a street or a
churchyard, or on a green, we notice at once that a close union
exists among them, notwithstanding the temporary fights, and that
that union protects them from all sorts of misfortunes. As soon
as a mite bends inquisitively over the opening of a drain--
"Don't stop there," another mite shouts out, "fever sits in the
hole!" "Don't climb over that wall, the train will kill you if
you tumble down! Don't come near to the ditch! Don't eat those
berries--poison! you will die." Such are the first teachings
imparted to the urchin when he joins his mates out-doors. How
many of the children whose play-grounds are the pavements around
"model workers' dwellings," or the quays and bridges of the
canals, would be crushed to death by the carts or drowned in the
muddy waters, were it not for that sort of mutual support. And
when a fair Jack has made a slip into the unprotected ditch at
the back of the milkman's yard, or a cherry-cheeked Lizzie has,
after all, tumbled down into the canal, the young brood raises
such cries that all the neighbourhood is on the alert and rushes
to the rescue.

Then comes in the alliance of the mothers. "You could not
imagine" (a lady-doctor who lives in a poor neighbourhood told me
lately) "how much they help each other. If a woman has prepared
nothing, or could prepare nothing, for the baby which she
expected--and how often that happens!--all the neighbours
bring something for the new-comer. One of the neighbours always
takes care of the children, and some other always drops in to
take care of the household, so long as the mother is in bed."
This habit is general. It is mentioned by all those who have
lived among the poor. In a thousand small ways the mothers
support each other and bestow their care upon children that are
not their own. Some training--good or bad, let them decide it
for themselves--is required in a lady of the richer classes to
render her able to pass by a shivering and hungry child in the
street without noticing it. But the mothers of the poorer classes
have not that training. They cannot stand the sight of a hungry
child; they must feed it, and so they do. "When the school
children beg bread, they seldom or rather never meet with a
refusal"--a lady-friend, who has worked several years in
Whitechapel in connection with a workers' club, writes to me. But
I may, perhaps, as well transcribe a few more passages from her
letter:--

"Nursing neighbours, in cases of illness, without any shade
of remuneration, is quite general among the workers. Also, when a
woman has little children, and goes out for work, another mother
always takes care of them.

"If, in the working classes, they would not help each other,
they could not exist. I know families which continually help each
other--with money, with food, with fuel, for bringing up the
little children, in cases of illness, in cases of death.

"'The mine' and 'thine' is much less sharply observed among
the poor than among the rich. Shoes, dress, hats, and so on,--
what may be wanted on the spot--are continually borrowed from
each other, also all sorts of household things.

"Last winter the members of the United Radical Club had
brought together some little money, and began after Christmas to
distribute free soup and bread to the children going to school.
Gradually they had 1,800 children to attend to. The money came
from outsiders, but all the work was done by the members of the
club. Some of them, who were out of work, came at four in the
morning to wash and to peel the vegetables; five women came at
nine or ten (after having done their own household work) for
cooking, and stayed till six or seven to wash the dishes. And at
meal time, between twelve and half-past one, twenty to thirty
workers came in to aid in serving the soup, each one staying what
he could spare of his meal time. This lasted for two months. No
one was paid."

My friend also mentions various individual cases, of which
the following are typical:--

"Annie W. was given by her mother to be boarded by an old
person in Wilmot Street. When her mother died, the old woman, who
herself was very poor, kept the child without being paid a penny
for that. When the old lady died too, the child, who was five
years old, was of course neglected during her illness, and was
ragged; but she was taken at once by Mrs. S., the wife of a
shoemaker, who herself has six children. Lately, when the husband
was ill, they had not much to eat, all of them.

"The other day, Mrs. M., mother of six children, attended
Mrs. M--g throughout her illness, and took to her own rooms the
elder child.... But do you need such facts? They are quite
general.... I know also Mrs. D. (Oval, Hackney Road), who has a
sewing machine and continually sews for others, without ever
accepting any remuneration, although she has herself five
children and her husband to look after.... And so on."

For every one who has any idea of the life of the labouring
classes it is evident that without mutual aid being practised
among them on a large scale they never could pull through all
their difficulties. It is only by chance that a worker's family
can live its lifetime without having to face such circumstances
as the crisis described by the ribbon weaver, Joseph Gutteridge,
in his autobiography.(18) And if all do not go to the ground in
such cases, they owe it to mutual help. In Gutteridge's case it
was an old nurse, miserably poor herself, who turned up at the
moment when the family was slipping towards a final catastrophe,
and brought in some bread, coal, and bedding, which she had
obtained on credit. In other cases, it will be some one else, or
the neighbours will take steps to save the family. But without
some aid from other poor, how many more would be brought every
year to irreparable ruin!(19)