Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne - "Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v1"

Laurence Hope et al - "India's Love Lyrics"

J. Henri Fabre - "The Mason bees"

Susanna Moodie - "Life in the Clearings versus the Bush"

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Books: Mutual Aid

P >> P. Kropotkin >> Mutual Aid




I will terminate my remarks by mentioning another custom
which also is a source of most erroneous conclusions. I mean the
practice of blood-revenge. All savages are under the impression
that blood shed must be revenged by blood. If any one has been
killed, the murderer must die; if any one has been wounded, the
aggressor's blood must be shed. There is no exception to the
rule, not even for animals; so the hunter's blood is shed on his
return to the village when he has shed the blood of an animal.
That is the savages' conception of justice--a conception which
yet prevails in Western Europe as regards murder. Now, when both
the offender and the offended belong to the same tribe, the tribe
and the offended person settle the affair.(39) But when the
offender belongs to another tribe, and that tribe, for one reason
or another, refuses a compensation, then the offended tribe
decides to take the revenge itself. Primitive folk so much
consider every one's acts as a tribal affair, dependent upon
tribal approval, that they easily think the clan responsible for
every one's acts. Therefore, the due revenge may be taken upon
any member of the offender's clan or relatives.(40) It may often
happen, however, that the retaliation goes further than the
offence. In trying to inflict a wound, they may kill the
offender, or wound him more than they intended to do, and this
becomes a cause for a new feud, so that the primitive legislators
were careful in requiring the retaliation to be limited to an eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and blood for blood.(41)

It is remarkable, however, that with most primitive folk like
feuds are infinitely rarer than might be expected; though with
some of them they may attain abnormal proportions, especially
with mountaineers who have been driven to the highlands by
foreign invaders, such as the mountaineers of Caucasia, and
especially those of Borneo--the Dayaks. With the Dayaks--we
were told lately--the feuds had gone so far that a young man
could neither marry nor be proclaimed of age before he had
secured the head of an enemy. This horrid practice was fully
described in a modern English work.(42) It appears, however,
that this affirmation was a gross exaggeration. Moreover, Dayak
"head-hunting" takes quite another aspect when we learn that the
supposed "headhunter" is not actuated at all by personal passion.
He acts under what he considers as a moral obligation towards his
tribe, just as the European judge who, in obedience to the same,
evidently wrong, principle of "blood for blood," hands over the
condemned murderer to the hangman. Both the Dayak and the judge
would even feel remorse if sympathy moved them to spare the
murderer. That is why the Dayaks, apart from the murders they
commit when actuated by their conception of justice, are
depicted, by all those who know them, as a most sympathetic
people. Thus Carl Bock, the same author who has given such a
terrible picture of head-hunting, writes:

"As regards morality, I am bound to assign to the Dayaks a high
place in the scale of civilization.... Robberies and theft are
entirely unknown among them. They also are very truthful.... If I
did not always get the 'whole truth,' I always got, at least,
nothing but the truth from them. I wish I could say the same of
the Malays" (pp. 209 and 210).

Bock's testimony is fully corroborated by that of Ida
Pfeiffer. "I fully recognized," she wrote, "that I should be
pleased longer to travel among them. I usually found them honest,
good, and reserved... much more so than any other nation I
know."(43) Stoltze used almost the same language when speaking
of them. The Dayaks usually have but one wife, and treat her
well. They are very sociable, and every morning the whole clan
goes out for fishing, hunting, or gardening, in large parties.
Their villages consist of big huts, each of which is inhabited by
a dozen families, and sometimes by several hundred persons,
peacefully living together. They show great respect for their
wives, and are fond of their children; and when one of them falls
ill, the women nurse him in turn. As a rule they are very
moderate in eating and drinking. Such is the Dayak in his real
daily life.

It would be a tedious repetition if more illustrations from
savage life were given. Wherever we go we find the same sociable
manners, the same spirit of solidarity. And when we endeavour to
penetrate into the darkness of past ages, we find the same tribal
life, the same associations of men, however primitive, for mutual
support. Therefore, Darwin was quite right when he saw in man's
social qualities the chief factor for his further evolution, and
Darwin's vulgarizers are entirely wrong when they maintain the
contrary.

The small strength and speed of man (he wrote), his want of
natural weapons, etc., are more than counterbalanced, firstly, by
his intellectual faculties (which, he remarked on another page,
have been chiefly or even exclusively gained for the benefit of
the community). and secondly, by his social qualities, which led
him to give and receive aid from his fellow men.(44)

In the last century the "savage" and his "life in the state
of nature" were idealized. But now men of science have gone to
the opposite extreme, especially since some of them, anxious to
prove the animal origin of man, but not conversant with the
social aspects of animal life, began to charge the savage with
all imaginable "bestial" features. It is evident, however, that
this exaggeration is even more unscientific than Rousseau's
idealization. The savage is not an ideal of virtue, nor is he an
ideal of "savagery." But the primitive man has one quality,
elaborated and maintained by the very necessities of his hard
struggle for life--he identifies his own existence with that of
his tribe; and without that quality mankind never would have
attained the level it has attained now.

Primitive folk, as has been already said, so much identify
their lives with that of the tribe, that each of their acts,
however insignificant, is considered as a tribal affair. Their
whole behaviour is regulated by an infinite series of unwritten
rules of propriety which are the fruit of their common experience
as to what is good or bad--that is, beneficial or harmful for
their own tribe. Of course, the reasonings upon which their rules
of propriety are based sometimes are absurd in the extreme. Many
of them originate in superstition; and altogether, in whatever
the savage does, he sees but the immediate consequences of his
acts; he cannot foresee their indirect and ulterior consequences--
thus simply exaggerating a defect with which Bentham
reproached civilized legislators. But, absurd or not, the savage
obeys the prescriptions of the common law, however inconvenient
they may be. He obeys them even more blindly than the civilized
man obeys the prescriptions of the written law. His common law is
his religion; it is his very habit of living. The idea of the
clan is always present to his mind, and self-restriction and
self-sacrifice in the interest of the clan are of daily
occurrence. If the savage has infringed one of the smaller tribal
rules, he is prosecuted by the mockeries of the women. If the
infringement is grave, he is tortured day and night by the fear
of having called a calamity upon his tribe. If he has wounded by
accident any one of his own clan, and thus has committed the
greatest of all crimes, he grows quite miserable: he runs away in
the woods, and is ready to commit suicide, unless the tribe
absolves him by inflicting upon him a physical pain and sheds
some of his own blood.(45) Within the tribe everything is shared
in common; every morsel of food is divided among all present; and
if the savage is alone in the woods, he does not begin eating
before he has loudly shouted thrice an invitation to any one who
may hear his voice to share his meal.(46)

In short, within the tribe the rule of "each for all" is
supreme, so long as the separate family has not yet broken up the
tribal unity. But that rule is not extended to the neighbouring
clans, or tribes, even when they are federated for mutual
protection. Each tribe, or clan, is a separate unity. Just as
among mammals and birds, the territory is roughly allotted among
separate tribes, and, except in times of war, the boundaries are
respected. On entering the territory of his neighbours one must
show that he has no bad intentions. The louder one heralds his
coming, the more confidence he wins; and if he enters a house, he
must deposit his hatchet at the entrance. But no tribe is bound
to share its food with the others: it may do so or it may not.
Therefore the life of the savage is divided into two sets of
actions, and appears under two different ethical aspects: the
relations within the tribe, and the relations with the outsiders;
and (like our international law) the "inter-tribal" law widely
differs from the common law. Therefore, when it comes to a war
the most revolting cruelties may be considered as so many claims
upon the admiration of the tribe. This double conception of
morality passes through the whole evolution of mankind, and
maintains itself until now. We Europeans have realized some
progress--not immense, at any rate--in eradicating that
double conception of ethics; but it also must be said that while
we have in some measure extended our ideas of solidarity--in
theory, at least--over the nation, and partly over other
nations as well, we have lessened the bonds of solidarity within
our own nations, and even within our own families.

The appearance of a separate family amidst the clan
necessarily disturbs the established unity. A separate family
means separate property and accumulation of wealth. We saw how
the Eskimos obviate its inconveniences; and it is one of the most
interesting studies to follow in the course of ages the different
institutions (village communities, guilds, and so on) by means of
which the masses endeavoured to maintain the tribal unity,
notwithstanding the agencies which were at work to break it down.
On the other hand, the first rudiments of knowledge which
appeared at an extremely remote epoch, when they confounded
themselves with witchcraft, also became a power in the hands of
the individual which could be used against the tribe. They were
carefully kept in secrecy, and transmitted to the initiated only,
in the secret societies of witches, shamans, and priests, which
we find among all savages. By the same time, wars and invasions
created military authority, as also castes of warriors, whose
associations or clubs acquired great powers. However, at no
period of man's life were wars the normal state of existence.
While warriors exterminated each other, and the priests
celebrated their massacres, the masses continued to live their
daily life, they prosecuted their daily toil. And it is one of
the most interesting studies to follow that life of the masses;
to study the means by which they maintained their own social
organization, which was based upon their own conceptions of
equity, mutual aid, and mutual support--of common law, in a
word, even when they were submitted to the most ferocious
theocracy or autocracy in the State.

NOTES:

1. Nineteenth Century, February 1888, p. 165.

2. The Descent of Man, end of ch. ii. pp. 63 and 64 of the 2nd
edition.

3. Anthropologists who fully endorse the above views as regards
man nevertheless intimate, sometimes, that the apes live in
polygamous families, under the leadership of "a strong and
jealous male." I do not know how far that assertion is based upon
conclusive observation. But the passage from Brehm's Life of
Animals, which is sometimes referred to, can hardly be taken as
very conclusive. It occurs in his general description of monkeys;
but his more detailed descriptions of separate species either
contradict it or do not confirm it. Even as regards the
cercopitheques, Brehm is affirmative in saying that they "nearly
always live in bands, and very seldom in families" (French
edition, p. 59). As to other species, the very numbers of their
bands, always containing many males, render the "polygamous
family" more than doubtful further observation is evidently
wanted.

4. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, fifth edition, 1890.

5. That extension of the ice-cap is admitted by most of the
geologists who have specially studied the glacial age. The
Russian Geological Survey already has taken this view as regards
Russia, and most German specialists maintain it as regards
Germany. The glaciation of most of the central plateau of France
will not fail to be recognized by the French geologists, when
they pay more attention to the glacial deposits altogether.

6. Prehistoric Times, pp. 232 and 242.

7. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, 1861; Lewis H. Morgan,
Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress
from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, New York, 1877;
J.F. MacLennan, Studies in Ancient History, 1st series, new
edition, 1886; 2nd series, 1896; L. Fison and A.W. Howitt,
Kamilaroi and Kurnai, Melbourne. These four writers--as has
been very truly remarked by Giraud Teulon,--starting from
different facts and different general ideas, and following
different methods, have come to the same conclusion. To Bachofen
we owe the notion of the maternal family and the maternal
succession; to Morgan--the system of kinship, Malayan and
Turanian, and a highly gifted sketch of the main phases of human
evolution; to MacLennan--the law of exogeny; and to Fison and
Howitt--the cuadro, or scheme, of the conjugal societies in
Australia. All four end in establishing the same fact of the
tribal origin of the family. When Bachofen first drew attention
to the maternal family, in his epoch-making work, and Morgan
described the clan-organization,--both concurring to the almost
general extension of these forms and maintaining that the
marriage laws lie at the very basis of the consecutive steps of
human evolution, they were accused of exaggeration. However, the
most careful researches prosecuted since, by a phalanx of
students of ancient law, have proved that all races of mankind
bear traces of having passed through similar stages of
development of marriage laws, such as we now see in force among
certain savages. See the works of Post, Dargun, Kovalevsky,
Lubbock, and their numerous followers: Lippert, Mucke, etc.

8. None

9. For the Semites and the Aryans, see especially Prof. Maxim
Kovalevsky's Primitive Law (in Russian), Moscow, 1886 and 1887.
Also his Lectures delivered at Stockholm (Tableau des origines et
de l'evolution de la famille et de la propriete, Stockholm,
1890), which represents an admirable review of the whole
question. Cf. also A. Post, Die Geschlechtsgenossenschaft der
Urzeit, Oldenburg 1875.

10. It would be impossible to enter here into a discussion of the
origin of the marriage restrictions. Let me only remark that a
division into groups, similar to Morgan's Hawaian, exists among
birds; the young broods live together separately from their
parents. A like division might probably be traced among some
mammals as well. As to the prohibition of relations between
brothers and sisters, it is more likely to have arisen, not from
speculations about the bad effects of consanguinity, which
speculations really do not seem probable, but to avoid the
too-easy precocity of like marriages. Under close cohabitation it
must have become of imperious necessity. I must also remark that
in discussing the origin of new customs altogether, we must keep
in mind that the savages, like us, have their "thinkers" and
savants-wizards, doctors, prophets, etc.--whose knowledge and
ideas are in advance upon those of the masses. United as they are
in their secret unions (another almost universal feature) they
are certainly capable of exercising a powerful influence, and of
enforcing customs the utility of which may not yet be recognized
by the majority of the tribe.

11. Col. Collins, in Philips' Researches in South Africa, London,
1828. Quoted by Waitz, ii. 334.

12. Lichtenstein's Reisen im sudlichen Afrika, ii. Pp. 92, 97.
Berlin, 1811.

13. Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvolker, ii. pp. 335 seq. See
also Fritsch's Die Eingeboren Afrika's, Breslau, 1872, pp. 386
seq.; and Drei Jahre in Sud Afrika. Also W. Bleck, A Brief
Account of Bushmen Folklore, Capetown, 1875.

14. Elisee Reclus, Geographie Universelle, xiii. 475.

15. P. Kolben, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope,
translated from the German by Mr. Medley, London, 1731, vol. i.
pp. 59, 71, 333, 336, etc.

16. Quoted in Waitz's Anthropologie, ii. 335 seq.

17. The natives living in the north of Sidney, and speaking the
Kamilaroi language, are best known under this aspect, through the
capital work of Lorimer Fison and A.W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and
Kurnaii, Melbourne, 1880. See also A.W. Howitt's "Further Note on
the Australian Class Systems," in Journal of the Anthropological
Institute, 1889, vol. xviii. p. 31, showing the wide extension of
the same organization in Australia.

18. The Folklore, Manners, etc., of Australian Aborigines,
Adelaide, 1879, p. 11.

19. Grey's Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West
and Western Australia, London, 1841, vol. ii. pp. 237, 298.

20. Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropologie, 1888, vol. xi. p.
652. I abridge the answers.

21. Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropologie, 1888, vol. xi. p.
386.

22. The same is the practice with the Papuas of Kaimani Bay, who
have a high reputation of honesty. "It never happens that the
Papua be untrue to his promise," Finsch says in Neuguinea und
seine Bewohner, Bremen, 1865, p. 829.

23. Izvestia of the Russian Geographical Society, 1880, pp. 161
seq. Few books of travel give a better insight into the petty
details of the daily life of savages than these scraps from
Maklay's notebooks.

24. L.F. Martial, in Mission Scientifique au Cap Horn, Paris,
1883, vol. i. pp. 183-201.

25. Captain Holm's Expedition to East Greenland.

26. In Australia whole clans have been seen exchanging all their
wives, in order to conjure a calamity (Post, Studien zur
Entwicklungsgeschichte des Familienrechts, 1890, p. 342). More
brotherhood is their specific against calamities.

27. Dr. H. Rink, The Eskimo Tribes, p. 26 (Meddelelser om
Gronland, vol. xi. 1887).

28. Dr. Rink, loc. cit. p. 24. Europeans, grown in the respect of
Roman law, are seldom capable of understanding that force of
tribal authority. "In fact," Dr. Rink writes, "it is not the
exception, but the rule, that white men who have stayed for ten
or twenty years among the Eskimo, return without any real
addition to their knowledge of the traditional ideas upon which
their social state is based. The white man, whether a missionary
or a trader, is firm in his dogmatic opinion that the most vulgar
European is better than the most distinguished native."--The
Eskimo Tribes, p. 31.

29. Dall, Alaska and its Resources, Cambridge, U.S., 1870.

30. Dall saw it in Alaska, Jacobsen at Ignitok in the vicinity of
the Bering Strait. Gilbert Sproat mentions it among the Vancouver
indians; and Dr. Rink, who describes the periodical exhibitions
just mentioned, adds: "The principal use of the accumulation of
personal wealth is for periodically distributing it." He also
mentions (loc. cit. p. 31) "the destruction of property for the
same purpose," (of maintaining equality).

31. See Appendix VIII.

32. Veniaminoff, Memoirs relative to the District of Unalashka
(Russian), 3 vols. St. Petersburg, 1840. Extracts, in English,
from the above are given in Dall's Alaska. A like description of
the Australians' morality is given in Nature, xlii. p. 639.

33. It is most remarkable that several writers (Middendorff,
Schrenk, O. Finsch) described the Ostyaks and Samoyedes in almost
the same words. Even when drunken, their quarrels are
insignificant. "For a hundred years one single murder has been
committed in the tundra;" "their children never fight;" "anything
may be left for years in the tundra, even food and gin, and
nobody will touch it;" and so on. Gilbert Sproat "never witnessed
a fight between two sober natives" of the Aht Indians of
Vancouver Island. "Quarrelling is also rare among their
children." (Rink, loc. cit.) And so on.

34. Gill, quoted in Gerland and Waitz's Anthropologie, v. 641.
See also pp. 636-640, where many facts of parental and filial
love are quoted.

35. Primitive Folk, London, 1891.

36. Gerland, loc. cit. v. 636.

37. Erskine, quoted in Gerland and Waitz's Anthropologie, v. 640.

38. W.T. Pritchard, Polynesian Reminiscences, London, 1866, p.
363.

39. It is remarkable, however, that in case of a sentence of
death, nobody will take upon himself to be the executioner. Every
one throws his stone, or gives his blow with the hatchet,
carefully avoiding to give a mortal blow. At a later epoch, the
priest will stab the victim with a sacred knife. Still later, it
will be the king, until civilization invents the hired hangman.
See Bastian's deep remarks upon this subject in Der Mensch in der
Geschichte, iii. Die Blutrache, pp. 1-36. A remainder of this
tribal habit, I am told by Professor E. Nys, has survived in
military executions till our own times. In the middle portion of
the nineteenth century it was the habit to load the rifles of the
twelve soldiers called out for shooting the condemned victim,
with eleven ball-cartridges and one blank cartridge. As the
soldiers never knew who of them had the latter, each one could
console his disturbed conscience by thinking that he was not one
of the murderers.

40. In Africa, and elsewhere too, it is a widely-spread habit,
that if a theft has been committed, the next clan has to restore
the equivalent of the stolen thing, and then look itself for the
thief. A. H. Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Leipzig, 1887, vol.
i. p. 77.

41. See Prof. M. Kovalevsky's Modern Customs and Ancient Law
(Russian), Moscow, 1886, vol. ii., which contains many important
considerations upon this subject.

42. See Carl Bock, The Head Hunters of Borneo, London, 1881. I am
told, however, by Sir Hugh Law, who was for a long time Governor
of Borneo, that the "head-hunting" described in this book is
grossly exaggerated. Altogether, my informant speaks of the
Dayaks in exactly the same sympathetic terms as Ida Pfeiffer. Let
me add that Mary Kingsley speaks in her book on West Africa in
the same sympathetic terms of the Fans, who had been represented
formerly as the most "terrible cannibals."

43. Ida Pfeiffer, Meine zweite Weltrieze, Wien, 1856, vol. i. pp.
116 seq. See also Muller and Temminch's Dutch Possessions in
Archipelagic India, quoted by Elisee Reclus, in Geographie
Universelle, xiii.

44. Descent of Man, second ed., pp. 63, 64.

45. See Bastian's Mensch in der Geschichte, iii. p. 7. Also Grey,
loc. cit. ii. p. 238.

46. Miklukho-Maclay, loc. cit. Same habit with the Hottentots.






CHAPTER IV

MUTUAL AID AMONG THE BARBARIANS

The great migrations. New organization rendered necessary.
The village community. Communal work. Judicial procedure.
Inter-tribal law. Illustrations from the life of our contemporaries.
Buryates. Kabyles. Caucasian mountaineers. African stems.





It is not possible to study primitive mankind without being
deeply impressed by the sociability it has displayed since its
very first steps in life. Traces of human societies are found in
the relics of both the oldest and the later stone age; and, when
we come to observe the savages whose manners of life are still
those of neolithic man, we find them closely bound together by an
extremely ancient clan organization which enables them to combine
their individually weak forces, to enjoy life in common, and to
progress. Man is no exception in nature. He also is subject to
the great principle of Mutual Aid which grants the best chances
of survival to those who best support each other in the struggle
for life. These were the conclusions arrived at in the previous
chapters.

However, as soon as we come to a higher stage of civilization, and
refer to history which already has something to say about that
stage, we are bewildered by the struggles and conflicts which it
reveals. The old bonds seem entirely to be broken. Stems are seen
to fight against stems, tribes against tribes, individuals against
individuals; and out of this chaotic contest of hostile forces,
mankind issues divided into castes, enslaved to despots, separated
into States always ready to wage war against each other. And, with
this history of mankind in his hands, the pessimist philosopher
triumphantly concludes that warfare and oppression are the very
essence of human nature; that the warlike and predatory instincts
of man can only be restrained within certain limits by a strong
authority which enforces peace and thus gives an opportunity to
the few and nobler ones to prepare a better life for humanity in
times to come.

And yet, as soon as the every-day life of man during the historical
period is submitted to a closer analysis and so it has been, of
late, by many patient students of very early institutions--it
appears at once under quite a different aspect. Leaving aside the
preconceived ideas of most historians and their pronounced
predilection for the dramatic aspects of history, we see that the
very documents they habitually peruse are such as to exaggerate the
part of human life given to struggles and to underrate its peaceful
moods. The bright and sunny days are lost sight of in the gales and
storms. Even in our own time, the cumbersome records which we
prepare for the future historian, in our Press, our law courts, our
Government offices, and even in our fiction and poetry, suffer from
the same one-sidedness. They hand down to posterity the most minute
descriptions of every war, every battle and skirmish, every contest
and act of violence, every kind of individual suffering; but they
hardly bear any trace of the countless acts of mutual support and
devotion which every one of us knows from his own experience; they
hardly. take notice of what makes the very essence of our daily
life--our social instincts and manners. No wonder, then, if the
records of the past were so imperfect. The annalists of old never
failed to chronicle the petty wars and calamities which harassed
their contemporaries; but they paid no attention whatever to the
life of the masses, although the masses chiefly used to toil
peacefully while the few indulged in fighting. The epic poems, the
inscriptions on monuments, the treaties of peace--nearly all
historical documents bear the same character; they deal with
breaches of peace, not with peace itself. So that the
best-intentioned historian unconsciously draws a distorted picture
of the times he endeavours to depict; and, to restore the real
proportion between conflict and union, we are now bound to enter
into a minute analysis of thousands of small facts and faint
indications accidentally preserved in the relics of the past; to
interpret them with the aid of comparative ethnology; and, after
having heard so much about what used to divide men, to reconstruct
stone by stone the institutions which used to unite them.