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34. According to Madame Marie Pavloff, who has made a special
study of this subject, they migrated from Asia to Africa, stayed
there some time, and returned next to Asia. Whether this double
migration be confirmed or not, the fact of a former extension of
the ancestor of our horse over Asia, Africa, and America is
settled beyond doubt.
35. The Naturalist on the River Amazons, ii. 85, 95.
36. Dr. B. Altum, Waldbeschadigungen durch Thiere und Gegenmittel
(Berlin, 1889), pp. 207 seq.
37. Dr. B. Altum, ut supra, pp. 13 and 187.
38. A. Becker in the Bulletin de la Societe des Naturalistes de
Moscou, 1889, p. 625.
39. Russkaya Mysl, Sept. 1888: "The Theory of Beneficency of
Struggle for Life, being a Preface to various Treatises on
Botanics, Zoology, and Human Life," by an Old Transformist.
40. "One of the most frequent modes in which Natural Selection
acts is, by adapting some individuals of a species to a somewhat
different mode of life, whereby they are able to seize
unappropriated places in Nature" (Origin of Species, p. 145)--
in other words, to avoid competition.
CHAPTER III
MUTUAL AID AMONG SAVAGES
Supposed war of each against all. Tribal origin of human
society. Late appearance of the separate family. Bushmen
and Hottentots. Australians, Papuas. Eskimos, Aleoutes.
Features of savage life difficult to understand for the European.
The Dayak's conception of justice. Common law.
The immense part played by mutual aid and mutual support in
the evolution of the animal world has been briefly analyzed in
the preceding chapters. We have now to cast a glance upon the
part played by the same agencies in the evolution of mankind. We
saw how few are the animal species which live an isolated life,
and how numberless are those which live in societies, either for
mutual defence, or for hunting and storing up food, or for
rearing their offspring, or simply for enjoying life in common.
We also saw that, though a good deal of warfare goes on between
different classes of animals, or different species, or even
different tribes of the same species, peace and mutual support
are the rule within the tribe or the species; and that those
species which best know how to combine, and to avoid competition,
have the best chances of survival and of a further progressive
development. They prosper, while the unsociable species decay.
It is evident that it would be quite contrary to all that we
know of nature if men were an exception to so general a rule: if
a creature so defenceless as man was at his beginnings should
have found his protection and his way to progress, not in mutual
support, like other animals, but in a reckless competition for
personal advantages, with no regard to the interests of the
species. To a mind accustomed to the idea of unity in nature,
such a proposition appears utterly indefensible. And yet,
improbable and unphilosophical as it is, it has never found a
lack of supporters. There always were writers who took a
pessimistic view of mankind. They knew it, more or less
superficially, through their own limited experience; they knew of
history what the annalists, always watchful of wars, cruelty, and
oppression, told of it, and little more besides; and they
concluded that mankind is nothing but a loose aggregation of
beings, always ready to fight with each other, and only prevented
from so doing by the intervention of some authority.
Hobbes took that position; and while some of his
eighteenth-century followers endeavoured to prove that at no
epoch of its existence--not even in its most primitive
condition--mankind lived in a state of perpetual warfare; that
men have been sociable even in "the state of nature," and that
want of knowledge, rather than the natural bad inclinations of
man, brought humanity to all the horrors of its early historical
life,--his idea was, on the contrary, that the so-called "state
of nature" was nothing but a permanent fight between individuals,
accidentally huddled together by the mere caprice of their
bestial existence. True, that science has made some progress
since Hobbes's time, and that we have safer ground to stand upon
than the speculations of Hobbes or Rousseau. But the Hobbesian
philosophy has plenty of admirers still; and we have had of late
quite a school of writers who, taking possession of Darwin's
terminology rather than of his leading ideas, made of it an
argument in favour of Hobbes's views upon primitive man, and even
succeeded in giving them a scientific appearance. Huxley, as is
known, took the lead of that school, and in a paper written in
1888 he represented primitive men as a sort of tigers or lions,
deprived of all ethical conceptions, fighting out the struggle
for existence to its bitter end, and living a life of "continual
free fight"; to quote his own words--"beyond the limited and,
temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each
against all was the normal state of existence."(1)
It has been remarked more than once that the chief error of
Hobbes, and the eighteenth-century philosophers as well, was to
imagine that mankind began its life in the shape of small
straggling families, something like the "limited and temporary"
families of the bigger carnivores, while in reality it is now
positively known that such was not the case. Of course, we have
no direct evidence as to the modes of life of the first man-like
beings. We are not yet settled even as to the time of their first
appearance, geologists being inclined at present to see their
traces in the pliocene, or even the miocene, deposits of the
Tertiary period. But we have the indirect method which permits us
to throw some light even upon that remote antiquity. A most
careful investigation into the social institutions of the lowest
races has been carried on during the last forty years, and it has
revealed among the present institutions of primitive folk some
traces of still older institutions which have long disappeared,
but nevertheless left unmistakable traces of their previous
existence. A whole science devoted to the embryology of human
institutions has thus developed in the hands of Bachofen,
MacLennan, Morgan, Edwin Tylor, Maine, Post, Kovalevsky, Lubbock,
and many others. And that science has established beyond any
doubt that mankind did not begin its life in the shape of small
isolated families.
Far from being a primitive form of organization, the family
is a very late product of human evolution. As far as we can go
back in the palaeo-ethnology of mankind, we find men living in
societies--in tribes similar to those of the highest mammals;
and an extremely slow and long evolution was required to bring
these societies to the gentile, or clan organization, which, in
its turn, had to undergo another, also very long evolution,
before the first germs of family, polygamous or monogamous, could
appear. Societies, bands, or tribes--not families--were thus
the primitive form of organization of mankind and its earliest
ancestors. That is what ethnology has come to after its
painstaking researches. And in so doing it simply came to what
might have been foreseen by the zoologist. None of the higher
mammals, save a few carnivores and a few undoubtedly-decaying
species of apes (orang-outans and gorillas), live in small
families, isolatedly straggling in the woods. All others live in
societies. And Darwin so well understood that isolately-living
apes never could have developed into man-like beings, that he was
inclined to consider man as descended from some comparatively
weak but social species, like the chimpanzee, rather than from
some stronger but unsociable species, like the gorilla.(2)
Zoology and palaeo-ethnology are thus agreed in considering that
the band, not the family, was the earliest form of social life.
The first human societies simply were a further development of
those societies which constitute the very essence of life of the
higher animals.(3)
If we now go over to positive evidence, we see that the
earliest traces of man, dating from the glacial or the early
post-glacial period, afford unmistakable proofs of man having
lived even then in societies. Isolated finds of stone implements,
even from the old stone age, are very rare; on the contrary,
wherever one flint implement is discovered others are sure to be
found, in most cases in very large quantities. At a time when men
were dwelling in caves, or under occasionally protruding rocks,
in company with mammals now extinct, and hardly succeeded in
making the roughest sorts of flint hatchets, they already knew
the advantages of life in societies. In the valleys of the
tributaries of the Dordogne, the surface of the rocks is in some
places entirely covered with caves which were inhabited by
palaeolithic men.(4) Sometimes the cave-dwellings are superposed
in storeys, and they certainly recall much more the nesting
colonies of swallows than the dens of carnivores. As to the flint
implements discovered in those caves, to use Lubbock's words,
"one may say without exaggeration that they are numberless." The
same is true of other palaeolithic stations. It also appears from
Lartet's investigations that the inhabitants of the Aurignac
region in the south of France partook of tribal meals at the
burial of their dead. So that men lived in societies, and had
germs of a tribal worship, even at that extremely remote epoch.
The same is still better proved as regards the later part of
the stone age. Traces of neolithic man have been found in
numberless quantities, so that we can reconstitute his manner of
life to a great extent. When the ice-cap (which must have spread
from the Polar regions as far south as middle France, middle
Germany, and middle Russia, and covered Canada as well as a good
deal of what is now the United States) began to melt away, the
surfaces freed from ice were covered, first, with swamps and
marshes, and later on with numberless lakes.(5) Lakes filled all
depressions of the valleys before their waters dug out those
permanent channels which, during a subsequent epoch, became our
rivers. And wherever we explore, in Europe, Asia, or America, the
shores of the literally numberless lakes of that period, whose
proper name would be the Lacustrine period, we find traces of
neolithic man. They are so numerous that we can only wonder at
the relative density of population at that time. The "stations"
of neolithic man closely follow each other on the terraces which
now mark the shores of the old lakes. And at each of those
stations stone implements appear in such numbers, that no doubt
is possible as to the length of time during which they were
inhabited by rather numerous tribes. Whole workshops of flint
implements, testifying of the numbers of workers who used to come
together, have been discovered by the archaeologists.
Traces of a more advanced period, already characterized by
the use of some pottery, are found in the shell-heaps of Denmark.
They appear, as is well known, in the shape of heaps from five to
ten feet thick, from 100 to 200 feet wide, and 1,000 feet or more
in length, and they are so common along some parts of the
sea-coast that for a long time they were considered as natural
growths. And yet they "contain nothing but what has been in some
way or other subservient to the use of man," and they are so
densely stuffed with products of human industry that, during a
two days' stay at Milgaard, Lubbock dug out no less than 191
pieces of stone-implements and four fragments of pottery.(6) The
very size and extension of the shell heaps prove that for
generations and generations the coasts of Denmark were inhabited
by hundreds of small tribes which certainly lived as peacefully
together as the Fuegian tribes, which also accumulate like
shellheaps, are living in our own times.
As to the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, which represent a
still further advance in civilization, they yield still better
evidence of life and work in societies. It is known that even
during the stone age the shores of the Swiss lakes were dotted
with a succession of villages, each of which consisted of several
huts, and was built upon a platform supported by numberless
pillars in the lake. No less than twenty-four, mostly stone age
villages, were discovered along the shores of Lake Leman,
thirty-two in the Lake of Constance, forty-six in the Lake of
Neuchatel, and so on; and each of them testifies to the immense
amount of labour which was spent in common by the tribe, not by
the family. It has even been asserted that the life of the
lake-dwellers must have been remarkably free of warfare. And so
it probably was, especially if we refer to the life of those
primitive folk who live until the present time in similar
villages built upon pillars on the sea coasts.
It is thus seen, even from the above rapid hints, that our
knowledge of primitive man is not so scanty after all, and that,
so far as it goes, it is rather opposed than favourable to the
Hobbesian speculations. Moreover, it may be supplemented, to a
great extent, by the direct observation of such primitive tribes
as now stand on the same level of civilization as the inhabitants
of Europe stood in prehistoric times.
That these primitive tribes which we find now are not
degenerated specimens of mankind who formerly knew a higher
civilization, as it has occasionally been maintained, has
sufficiently been proved by Edwin Tylor and Lubbock. However, to
the arguments already opposed to the degeneration theory, the
following may be added. Save a few tribes clustering in the
less-accessible highlands, the "savages" represent a girdle which
encircles the more or less civilized nations, and they occupy the
extremities of our continents, most of which have retained still,
or recently were bearing, an early post-glacial character. Such
are the Eskimos and their congeners in Greenland, Arctic America,
and Northern Siberia; and, in the Southern hemisphere, the
Australians, the Papuas, the Fuegians, and, partly, the Bushmen;
while within the civilized area, like primitive folk are only
found in the Himalayas, the highlands of Australasia, and the
plateaus of Brazil. Now it must be borne in mind that the glacial
age did not come to an end at once over the whole surface of the
earth. It still continues in Greenland. Therefore, at a time when
the littoral regions of the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, or
the Gulf of Mexico already enjoyed a warmer climate, and became
the seats of higher civilizations, immense territories in middle
Europe, Siberia, and Northern America, as well as in Patagonia,
Southern Africa, and Southern Australasia, remained in early
postglacial conditions which rendered them inaccessible to the
civilized nations of the torrid and sub-torrid zones. They were
at that time what the terrible urmans of North-West Siberia are
now, and their population, inaccessible to and untouched by
civilization, retained the characters of early post-glacial man.
Later on, when desiccation rendered these territories more
suitable for agriculture, they were peopled with more civilized
immigrants; and while part of their previous inhabitants were
assimilated by the new settlers, another part migrated further,
and settled where we find them. The territories they inhabit now
are still, or recently were, sub-glacial, as to their physical
features; their arts and implements are those of the neolithic
age; and, notwithstanding their racial differences, and the
distances which separate them, their modes of life and social
institutions bear a striking likeness. So we cannot but consider
them as fragments of the early post-glacial population of the now
civilized area.
The first thing which strikes us as soon as we begin studying
primitive folk is the complexity of the organization of marriage
relations under which they are living. With most of them the
family, in the sense we attribute to it, is hardly found in its
germs. But they are by no means loose aggregations of men and
women coming in a disorderly manner together in conformity with
their momentary caprices. All of them are under a certain
organization, which has been described by Morgan in its general
aspects as the "gentile," or clan organization.(7)
To tell the matter as briefly as possible, there is little
doubt that mankind has passed at its beginnings through a stage
which may be described as that of "communal marriage"; that is,
the whole tribe had husbands and wives in common with but little
regard to consanguinity. But it is also certain that some
restrictions to that free intercourse were imposed at a very
early period. Inter-marriage was soon prohibited between the sons
of one mother and her sisters, granddaughters, and aunts. Later
on it was prohibited between the sons and daughters of the same
mother, and further limitations did not fail to follow. The idea
of a gens, or clan, which embodied all presumed descendants from
one stock (or rather all those who gathered in one group) was
evolved, and marriage within the clan was entirely prohibited. It
still remained "communal," but the wife or the husband had to be
taken from another clan. And when a gens became too numerous, and
subdivided into several gentes, each of them was divided into
classes (usually four), and marriage was permitted only between
certain well-defined classes. That is the stage which we find now
among the Kamilaroi-speaking Australians. As to the family, its
first germs appeared amidst the clan organization. A woman who
was captured in war from some other clan, and who formerly would
have belonged to the whole gens, could be kept at a later period
by the capturer, under certain obligations towards the tribe. She
may be taken by him to a separate hut, after she had paid a
certain tribute to the clan, and thus constitute within the gens
a separate family, the appearance of which evidently was opening
a quite new phase of civilization.
Now, if we take into consideration that this complicated
organization developed among men who stood at the lowest known
degree of development, and that it maintained itself in societies
knowing no kind of authority besides the authority of public
opinion, we at once see how deeply inrooted social instincts must
have been in human nature, even at its lowest stages. A savage
who is capable of living under such an organization, and of
freely submitting to rules which continually clash with his
personal desires, certainly is not a beast devoid of ethical
principles and knowing no rein to its passions. But the fact
becomes still more striking if we consider the immense antiquity
of the clan organization. It is now known that the primitive
Semites, the Greeks of Homer, the prehistoric Romans, the Germans
of Tacitus, the early Celts and the early Slavonians, all have
had their own period of clan organization, closely analogous to
that of the Australians, the Red Indians, the Eskimos, and other
inhabitants of the "savage girdle."(9) So we must admit that
either the evolution of marriage laws went on on the same lines
among all human races, or the rudiments of the clan rules were
developed among some common ancestors of the Semites, the Aryans,
the Polynesians, etc., before their differentiation into separate
races took place, and that these rules were maintained, until
now, among races long ago separated from the common stock. Both
alternatives imply, however, an equally striking tenacity of the
institution--such a tenacity that no assaults of the individual
could break it down through the scores of thousands of years that
it was in existence. The very persistence of the clan
organization shows how utterly false it is to represent primitive
mankind as a disorderly agglomeration of individuals, who only
obey their individual passions, and take advantage of their
personal force and cunningness against all other representatives
of the species. Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but
it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.(10)
Going now over to the existing savages, we may begin with the
Bushmen, who stand at a very low level of development--so low
indeed that they have no dwellings and sleep in holes dug in the
soil, occasionally protected by some screens. It is known that
when Europeans settled in their territory and destroyed deer, the
Bushmen began stealing the settlers' cattle, whereupon a war of
extermination, too horrible to be related here, was waged against
them. Five hundred Bushmen were slaughtered in 1774, three
thousand in 1808 and 1809 by the Farmers' Alliance, and so on.
They were poisoned like rats, killed by hunters lying in ambush
before the carcass of some animal, killed wherever met with.(11)
So that our knowledge of the Bushmen, being chiefly borrowed from
those same people who exterminated them, is necessarily limited.
But still we know that when the Europeans came, the Bushmen lived
in small tribes (or clans), sometimes federated together; that
they used to hunt in common, and divided the spoil without
quarrelling; that they never abandoned their wounded, and
displayed strong affection to their comrades. Lichtenstein has a
most touching story about a Bushman, nearly drowned in a river,
who was rescued by his companions. They took off their furs to
cover him, and shivered themselves; they dried him, rubbed him
before the fire, and smeared his body with warm grease till they
brought him back to life. And when the Bushmen found, in Johan
van der Walt, a man who treated them well, they expressed their
thankfulness by a most touching attachment to that man.(12)
Burchell and Moffat both represent them as goodhearted,
disinterested, true to their promises, and grateful,(13) all
qualities which could develop only by being practised within the
tribe. As to their love to children, it is sufficient to say that
when a European wished to secure a Bushman woman as a slave, he
stole her child: the mother was sure to come into slavery to
share the fate of her child.(14)
The same social manners characterize the Hottentots, who are
but a little more developed than the Bushmen. Lubbock describes
them as "the filthiest animals," and filthy they really are. A
fur suspended to the neck and worn till it falls to pieces is all
their dress; their huts are a few sticks assembled together and
covered with mats, with no kind of furniture within. And though
they kept oxen and sheep, and seem to have known the use of iron
before they made acquaintance with the Europeans, they still
occupy one of the lowest degrees of the human scale. And yet
those who knew them highly praised their sociability and
readiness to aid each other. If anything is given to a Hottentot,
he at once divides it among all present--a habit which, as is
known, so much struck Darwin among the Fuegians. He cannot eat
alone, and, however hungry, he calls those who pass by to share
his food. And when Kolben expressed his astonishment thereat, he
received the answer. "That is Hottentot manner." But this is not
Hottentot manner only: it is an all but universal habit among the
"savages." Kolben, who knew the Hottentots well and did not pass
by their defects in silence, could not praise their tribal
morality highly enough.
"Their word is sacred," he wrote. They know "nothing of the
corruptness and faithless arts of Europe." "They live in great
tranquillity and are seldom at war with their neighbours." They
are "all kindness and goodwill to one another.. One of the
greatest pleasures of the Hottentots certainly lies in their
gifts and good offices to one another." "The integrity of the
Hottentots, their strictness and celerity in the exercise of
justice, and their chastity, are things in which they excel all
or most nations in the world."(15)
Tachart, Barrow, and Moodie(16) fully confirm Kolben's
testimony. Let me only remark that when Kolben wrote that "they
are certainly the most friendly, the most liberal and the most
benevolent people to one another that ever appeared on the earth"
(i. 332), he wrote a sentence which has continually appeared
since in the description of savages. When first meeting with
primitive races, the Europeans usually make a caricature of their
life; but when an intelligent man has stayed among them for a
longer time, he generally describes them as the "kindest" or "the
gentlest" race on the earth. These very same words have been
applied to the Ostyaks, the Samoyedes, the Eskimos, the Dayaks,
the Aleoutes, the Papuas, and so on, by the highest authorities.
I also remember having read them applied to the Tunguses, the
Tchuktchis, the Sioux, and several others. The very frequency of
that high commendation already speaks volumes in itself.
The natives of Australia do not stand on a higher level of
development than their South African brothers. Their huts are of
the same character. very often simple screens are the only
protection against cold winds. In their food they are most
indifferent: they devour horribly putrefied corpses, and
cannibalism is resorted to in times of scarcity. When first
discovered by Europeans, they had no implements but in stone or
bone, and these were of the roughest description. Some tribes had
even no canoes, and did not know barter-trade. And yet, when
their manners and customs were carefully studied, they proved to
be living under that elaborate clan organization which I have
mentioned on a preceding page.(17)
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