James Elroy Flecker - "Hassan: The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and How He Came to"

Charles Darwin - "The Power Of Movement In Plants"

Andrew Lang - "The Lilac Fairy Book"

John Lothrop Motley - "History of the United Netherlands, 1588"

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Books: Mutual Aid

P >> P. Kropotkin >> Mutual Aid




The importance of migration and of the consequent isolation
of groups of animals, for the origin of new varieties and
ultimately of new species, which was indicated by Moritz Wagner,
was fully recognized by Darwin himself. Consequent researches
have only accentuated the importance of this factor, and they
have shown how the largeness of the area occupied by a given
species--which Darwin considered with full reason so important
for the appearance of new varieties--can be combined with the
isolation of parts of the species, in consequence of local
geological changes, or of local barriers. It would be impossible
to enter here into the discussion of this wide question, but a
few remarks will do to illustrate the combined action of these
agencies. It is known that portions of a given species will often
take to a new sort of food. The squirrels, for instance, when
there is a scarcity of cones in the larch forests, remove to the
fir-tree forests, and this change of food has certain well-known
physiological effects on the squirrels. If this change of habits
does not last--if next year the cones are again plentiful in
the dark larch woods--no new variety of squirrels will
evidently arise from this cause. But if part of the wide area
occupied by the squirrels begins to have its physical characters
altered--in consequence of, let us say, a milder climate or
desiccation, which both bring about an increase of the pine
forests in proportion to the larch woods--and if some other
conditions concur to induce the squirrels to dwell on the
outskirts of the desiccating region--we shall have then a new
variety, i.e. an incipient new species of squirrels, without
there having been anything that would deserve the name of
extermination among the squirrels. A larger proportion of
squirrels of the new, better adapted variety would survive every
year, and the intermediate links would die in the course of time,
without having been starved out by Malthusian competitors. This
is exactly what we see going on during the great physical changes
which are accomplished over large areas in Central Asia, owing to
the desiccation which is going on there since the glacial period.

To take another example, it has been proved by geologists
that the present wild horse (Equus Przewalski) has slowly been
evolved during the later parts of the Tertiary and the Quaternary
period, but that during this succession of ages its ancestors
were not confined to some given, limited area of the globe. They
wandered over both the Old and New World, returning, in all
probability, after a time to the pastures which they had, in the
course of their migrations, formerly left.(34) Consequently, if
we do not find now, in Asia, all the intermediate links between
the present wild horse and its Asiatic Post-Tertiary ancestors,
this does not mean at all that the intermediate links have been
exterminated. No such extermination has ever taken place. No
exceptional mortality may even have occurred among the ancestral
species: the individuals which belonged to intermediate varieties
and species have died in the usual course of events--often
amidst plentiful food, and their remains were buried all over the
globe.

In short, if we carefully consider this matter, and,
carefully re-read what Darwin himself wrote upon this subject, we
see that if the word "extermination" be used at all in connection
with transitional varieties, it must be used in its metaphoric
sense. As to "competition," this expression, too, is continually
used by Darwin (see, for instance, the paragraph "On Extinction")
as an image, or as a way-of-speaking, rather than with the
intention of conveying the idea of a real competition between two
portions of the same species for the means of existence. At any
rate, the absence of intermediate forms is no argument in favour
of it.

In reality, the chief argument in favour of a keen
competition for the means of existence continually going on
within every animal species is--to use Professor Geddes'
expression--the "arithmetical argument" borrowed from Malthus.

But this argument does not prove it at all. We might as well
take a number of villages in South-East Russia, the inhabitants
of which enjoy plenty of food, but have no sanitary accommodation
of any kind; and seeing that for the last eighty years the
birth-rate was sixty in the thousand, while the population is now
what it was eighty years ago, we might conclude that there has
been a terrible competition between the inhabitants. But the
truth is that from year to year the population remained
stationary, for the simple reason that one-third of the new-born
died before reaching their sixth month of life; one-half died
within the next four years, and out of each hundred born, only
seventeen or so reached the age of twenty. The new-comers went
away before having grown to be competitors. It is evident that if
such is the case with men, it is still more the case with
animals. In the feathered world the destruction of the eggs goes
on on such a tremendous scale that eggs are the chief food of
several species in the early summer; not to, say a word of the
storms, the inundations which destroy nests by the million in
America, and the sudden changes of weather which are fatal to the
young mammals. Each storm, each inundation, each visit of a rat
to a bird's nest, each sudden change of temperature, take away
those competitors which appear so terrible in theory.

As to the facts of an extremely rapid increase of horses and
cattle in America, of pigs and rabbits in New Zealand, and even
of wild animals imported from Europe (where their numbers are
kept down by man, not by competition), they rather seem opposed
to the theory of over-population. If horses and cattle could so
rapidly multiply in America, it simply proved that, however
numberless the buffaloes and other ruminants were at that time in
the New World, its grass-eating population was far below what the
prairies could maintain. If millions of intruders have found
plenty of food without starving out the former population of the
prairies, we must rather conclude that the Europeans found a want
of grass-eaters in America, not an excess. And we have good
reasons to believe that want of animal population is the natural
state of things all over the world, with but a few temporary
exceptions to the rule. The actual numbers of animals in a given
region are determined, not by the highest feeding capacity of the
region, but by what it is every year under the most unfavourable
conditions. So that, for that reason alone, competition hardly
can be a normal condition. but other causes intervene as well to
cut, down the animal population below even that low standard. If
we take the horses and cattle which are grazing all the winter
through in the Steppes of Transbaikalia, we find them very lean
and exhausted at the end of the winter. But they grow exhausted
not because there is not enough food for all of them--the grass
buried under a thin sheet of snow is everywhere in abundance--
but because of the difficulty of getting it from beneath the
snow, and this difficulty is the same for all horses alike.
Besides, days of glazed frost are common in early spring, and if
several such days come in succession the horses grow still more
exhausted. But then comes a snow-storm, which compels the already
weakened animals to remain without any food for several days, and
very great numbers of them die. The losses during the spring are
so severe that if the season has been more inclement than usual
they are even not repaired by the new breeds--the more so as
all horses are exhausted, and the young foals are born in a
weaker condition. The numbers of horses and cattle thus always
remain beneath what they otherwise might be; all the year round
there is food for five or ten times as many animals, and yet
their population increases extremely slowly. But as soon as the
Buriate owner makes ever so small a provision of hay in the
steppe, and throws it open during days of glazed frost, or
heavier snow-fall, he immediately sees the increase of his herd.
Almost all free grass-eating animals and many rodents in Asia and
America being in very much the same conditions, we can safely say
that their numbers are not kept down by competition; that at no
time of the year they can struggle for food, and that if they
never reach anything approaching to over-population, the cause is
in the climate, not in competition.

The importance of natural checks to over-multiplication, and
especially their bearing upon the competition hypothesis, seems
never to have been taken into due account The checks, or rather
some of them, are mentioned, but their action is seldom studied
in detail. However, if we compare the action of the natural
checks with that of competition, we must recognize at once that
the latter sustains no comparison whatever with the other checks.
Thus, Mr. Bates mentions the really astounding numbers of winged
ants which are destroyed during their exodus. The dead or
half-dead bodies of the formica de fuego (Myrmica saevissima)
which had been blown into the river during a gale "were heaped in
a line an inch or two in height and breadth, the line continuing
without interruption for miles at the edge of the water."(35)
Myriads of ants are thus destroyed amidst a nature which might
support a hundred times as many ants as are actually living. Dr.
Altum, a German forester, who wrote a very interesting book about
animals injurious to our forests, also gives many facts showing
the immense importance of natural checks. He says, that a
succession of gales or cold and damp weather during the exodus of
the pine-moth (Bombyx pini) destroy it to incredible amounts, and
during the spring of 1871 all these moths disappeared at once,
probably killed by a succession of cold nights.(36) Many like
examples relative to various insects could be quoted from various
parts of Europe. Dr. Altum also mentions the bird-enemies of the
pine-moth, and the immense amount of its eggs destroyed by foxes;
but he adds that the parasitic fungi which periodically infest it
are a far more terrible enemy than any bird, because they destroy
the moth over very large areas at once. As to various species of
mice (Mus sylvaticus, Arvicola arvalis, and A. agrestis), the
same author gives a long list of their enemies, but he remarks:
"However, the most terrible enemies of mice are not other
animals, but such sudden changes of weather as occur almost every
year." Alternations of frost and warm weather destroy them in
numberless quantities; "one single sudden change can reduce
thousands of mice to the number of a few individuals." On the
other side, a warm winter, or a winter which gradually steps in,
make them multiply in menacing proportions, notwithstanding every
enemy; such was the case in 1876 and 1877.(37) Competition, in
the case of mice, thus appears a quite trifling factor when
compared with weather. Other facts to the same effect are also
given as regards squirrels.

As to birds, it is well known how they suffer from sudden
changes of weather. Late snow-storms are as destructive of
bird-life on the English moors, as they are in Siberia; and Ch.
Dixon saw the red grouse so pressed during some exceptionally
severe winters, that they quitted the moors in numbers, "and we
have then known them actually to be taken in the streets of
Sheffield. Persistent wet," he adds, "is almost as fatal to
them."

On the other side, the contagious diseases which continually
visit most animal species destroy them in such numbers that the
losses often cannot be repaired for many years, even with the
most rapidly-multiply ing animals. Thus, some sixty years ago,
the sousliks suddenly disappeared in the neighbourhood of
Sarepta, in South-Eastern Russia, in consequence of some
epidemics; and for years no sousliks were seen in that
neighbourhood. It took many years before they became as numerous
as they formerly were.(38)

Like facts, all tending to reduce the importance given to
competition, could be produced in numbers. Of course, it might
be replied, in Darwin's words, that nevertheless each organic being
"at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during
each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to
suffer great destruction," and that the fittest survive during such
periods of hard struggle for life. But if the evolution of the
animal world were based exclusively, or even chiefly, upon the
survival of the fittest during periods of calamities; if natural
selection were limited in its action to periods of exceptional
drought, or sudden changes of temperature, or inundations,
retrogression would be the rule in the animal world. Those who
survive a famine, or a severe epidemic of cholera, or small-pox, or
diphtheria, such as we see them in uncivilized countries, are
neither the strongest, nor the healthiest, nor the most intelligent.
No progress could be based on those survivals--the less so as all
survivors usually come out of the ordeal with an impaired health,
like the Transbaikalian horses just mentioned, or the Arctic crews,
or the garrison of a fortress which has been compelled to live for a
few months on half rations, and comes out of its experience with a
broken health, and subsequently shows a quite abnormal mortality.
All that natural selection can do in times of calamities is to spare
the individuals endowed with the greatest endurance for privations
of all kinds. So it does among the Siberian horses and cattle. They
are enduring; they can feed upon the Polar birch in case of need;
they resist cold and hunger. But no Siberian horse is capable of
carrying half the weight which a European horse carries with ease;
no Siberian cow gives half the amount of milk given by a Jersey cow,
and no natives of uncivilized countries can bear a comparison with
Europeans. They may better endure hunger and cold, but their
physical force is very far below that of a well-fed European, and
their intellectual progress is despairingly slow. "Evil cannot be
productive of good," as Tchernyshevsky wrote in a remarkable essay
upon Darwinism.(39)

Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the
animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to
exceptional periods, and natural selection finds better fields
for its activity. Better conditions are created by the
elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual
Support.(40) In the great struggle for life--for the greatest
possible fulness and intensity of life with the least waste of
energy--natural selection continually seeks out the ways
precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible. The ants
combine in nests and nations; they pile up their stores, they
rear their cattle--and thus avoid competition; and natural
selection picks out of the ants' family the species which know
best how to avoid competition, with its unavoidably deleterious
consequences. Most of our birds slowly move southwards as the
winter comes, or gather in numberless societies and undertake
long journeys--and thus avoid competition. Many rodents fall
asleep when the time comes that competition should set in; while
other rodents store food for the winter, and gather in large
villages for obtaining the necessary protection when at work. The
reindeer, when the lichens are dry in the interior of the
continent, migrate towards the sea. Buffaloes cross an immense
continent in order to find plenty of food. And the beavers, when
they grow numerous on a river, divide into two parties, and go,
the old ones down the river, and the young ones up the river and
avoid competition. And when animals can neither fall asleep, nor
migrate, nor lay in stores, nor themselves grow their food like
the ants, they do what the titmouse does, and what Wallace
(Darwinism, ch. v) has so charmingly described: they resort to
new kinds of food--and thus, again, avoid competition.

"Don't compete!--competition is always injurious to the
species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!" That is
the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always
present. That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush,
the forest, the river, the ocean. "Therefore combine--practise
mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each and to
all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and
progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral." That is what Nature
teaches us; and that is what all those animals which have
attained the highest position in their respective classes have
done. That is also what man--the most primitive man--has been
doing; and that is why man has reached the position upon which we
stand now, as we shall see in the subsequent chapters devoted to
mutual aid in human societies.

NOTES:

1. Syevettsoff's Periodical Phenomena, p. 251.

2. Seyfferlitz, quoted by Brehm, iv. 760.

3. The Arctic Voyages of A.E. Nordenskjold, London, 1879, p. 135.
See also the powerful description of the St. Kilda islands by Mr.
Dixon (quoted by Seebohm), and nearly all books of Arctic travel.

4. Elliot Coues, in Bulletin U.S. Geol. Survey of Territories,
iv. No. 7, pp. 556, 579, etc. Among the gulls (Larus argentatus),
Polyakoff saw on a marsh in Northern Russia, that the nesting
grounds of a very great number of these birds were always
patrolled by one male, which warned the colony of the approach of
danger. All birds rose in such case and attacked the enemy with
great vigour. The females, which had five or six nests together
On each knoll of the marsh, kept a certain order in leaving their
nests in search of food. The fledglings, which otherwise are
extremely unprotected and easily become the prey of the rapacious
birds, were never left alone ("Family Habits among the Aquatic
Birds," in Proceedings of the Zool. Section of St. Petersburg
Soc. of Nat., Dec. 17, 1874).

5. Brehm Father, quoted by A. Brehm, iv. 34 seq. See also White's
Natural History of Selborne, Letter XI.

6. Dr. Coues, Birds of Dakota and Montana, in Bulletin U.S.
Survey of Territories, iv. No. 7.

7. It has often been intimated that larger birds may occasionally
transport some of the smaller birds when they cross together the
Mediterranean, but the fact still remains doubtful. On the other
side, it is certain that some smaller birds join the bigger ones
for migration. The fact has been noticed several times, and it
was recently confirmed by L. Buxbaum at Raunheim. He saw several
parties of cranes which had larks flying in the midst and on both
sides of their migratory columns (Der zoologische Garten, 1886,
p. 133).

8. H. Seebohm and Ch. Dixon both mention this habit.

9. The fact is well known to every field-naturalist, and with
reference to England several examples may be found in Charles
Dixon's Among the Birds in Northern Shires. The chaffinches
arrive during winter in vast flocks; and about the same time,
i.e. in November, come flocks of bramblings; redwings also
frequent the same places "in similar large companies," and so on
(pp. 165, 166).

10. S.W. Baker, Wild Beasts, etc., vol. i. p. 316.

11. Tschudi, Thierleben der Alpenwelt, p. 404.

12. Houzeau's Etudes, ii. 463.

13. For their hunting associations see Sir E. Tennant's Natural
History of Ceylon, quoted in Romanes's Animal Intelligence, p.
432.

14. See Emil Huter's letter in L. Buchner's Liebe.

15. With regard to the viscacha it is very interesting to note
that these highly-sociable little animals not only live peaceably
together in each village, but that whole villages visit each
other at nights. Sociability is thus extended to the whole
species--not only to a given society, or to a nation, as we saw
it with the ants. When the farmer destroys a viscacha-burrow, and
buries the inhabitants under a heap of earth, other viscachas--
we are told by Hudson--"come from a distance to dig out those
that are buried alive" (l.c., p. 311). This is a widely-known
fact in La Plata, verified by the author.

16. Handbuch fur Juger und Jagdberechtigte, quoted by Brehm, ii.
223.

17. Buffon's Histoire Naturelle.

18. In connection with the horses it is worthy of notice that the
quagga zebra, which never comes together with the dauw zebra,
nevertheless lives on excellent terms, not only with ostriches,
which are very good sentries, but also with gazelles, several
species of antelopes, and gnus. We thus have a case of mutual
dislike between the quagga and the dauw which cannot be explained
by competition for food. The fact that the quagga lives together
with ruminants feeding on the same grass as itself excludes that
hypothesis, and we must look for some incompatibility of
character, as in the case of the hare and the rabbit. Cf., among
others, Clive Phillips-Wolley's Big Game Shooting (Badminton
Library), which contains excellent illustrations of various
species living together in East Africa.

19. Our Tungus hunter, who was going to marry, and therefore was
prompted by the desire of getting as many furs as he possibly
could, was beating the hill-sides all day long on horseback in
search of deer. His efforts were not rewarded by even so much as
one fallow deer killed every day; and he was an excellent hunter.

20. According to Samuel W. Baker, elephants combine in larger
groups than the "compound family." "I have frequently observed,"
he wrote, "in the portion of Ceylon known as the Park Country,
the tracks of elephants in great numbers which have evidently
been considerable herds that have joined together in a general
retreat from a ground which they considered insecure" (Wild
Beasts and their Ways, vol. i. p. 102).

21. Pigs, attacked by wolves, do the same (Hudson, l.c.).

22. Romanes's Animal Intelligence, p. 472.

23. Brehm, i. 82; Darwin's Descent of Man, ch. iii. The Kozloff
expedition of 1899-1901 have also had to sustain in Northern
Thibet a similar fight.

24. The more strange was it to read in the previously-mentioned
article by Huxley the following paraphrase of a well-known
sentence of Rousseau: "The first men who substituted mutual peace
for that of mutual war--whatever the motive which impelled them
to take that step--created society" (Nineteenth Century, Feb.
1888, p. 165). Society has not been created by man; it is
anterior to man.

25. Such monographs as the chapter on "Music and Dancing in
Nature" which we have in Hudson's Naturalist on the La Plata, and
Carl Gross' Play of Animals, have already thrown a considerable
light upon an instinct which is absolutely universal in Nature.

26. Not only numerous species of birds possess the habit of
assembling together--in many cases always at the same spot--
to indulge in antics and dancing performances, but W.H. Hudson's
experience is that nearly all mammals and birds ("probably there
are really no exceptions") indulge frequently in more or less
regular or set performances with or without sound, or composed of
sound exclusively (p. 264).

27. For the choruses of monkeys, see Brehm.

28. Haygarth, Bush Life in Australia, p. 58.

29. To quote but a few instances, a wounded badger was carried
away by another badger suddenly appearing on the scene; rats have
been seen feeding a blind couple (Seelenleben der Thiere, p. 64
seq.). Brehm himself saw two crows feeding in a hollow tree a
third crow which was wounded; its wound was several weeks old
(Hausfreund, 1874, 715; Buchner's Liebe, 203). Mr. Blyth saw
Indian crows feeding two or three blind comrades; and so on.

30. Man and Beast, p. 344.

31. L.H. Morgan, The American Beaver, 1868, p. 272; Descent of
Man, ch. iv.

32. One species of swallow is said to have caused the decrease of
another swallow species in North America; the recent increase of
the missel-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the
song-thrush; the brown rat has taken the place of the black rat
in Europe; in Russia the small cockroach has everywhere driven
before it its greater congener; and in Australia the imported
hive-bee is rapidly exterminating the small stingless bee. Two
other cases, but relative to domesticated animals, are mentioned
in the preceding paragraph. While recalling these same facts,
A.R. Wallace remarks in a footnote relative to the Scottish
thrushes: "Prof. A. Newton, however, informs me that these
species do not interfere in the way here stated" (Darwinism, p.
34). As to the brown rat, it is known that, owing to its
amphibian habits, it usually stays in the lower parts of human
dwellings (low cellars, sewers, etc.), as also on the banks of
canals and rivers; it also undertakes distant migrations in
numberless bands. The black rat, on the contrary, prefers staying
in our dwellings themselves, under the floor, as well as in our
stables and barns. It thus is much more exposed to be
exterminated by man; and we cannot maintain, with any approach to
certainty, that the black rat is being either exterminated or
starved out by the brown rat and not by man.

33. "But it may be urged that when several closely-allied species
inhabit the same territory, we surely ought to find at the
present time many transitional forms.... By my theory these
allied species are descended from a common parent; and during the
process of modification, each has become adapted to the
conditions of life of its own region, and has supplanted and
exterminated its original parent-form and all the transitional
varieties between its past and present states" (Origin of
Species, 6th ed. p. 134); also p. 137, 296 (all paragraph "On
Extinction").