Mutual Aid

I failed to find -- although I was eagerly looking for it -- that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life.

To admit a pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only had not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation.

It is not love to my neighbour -- whom I often do not know at all -- which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me.

"It is horrible what 'they' have made of Darwin."

In this three-cornered contest, between the two classes of revolted individuals and the supporters of what existed, lies the real tragedy of history.

But he foresaw that the term which he was introducing into science would lose its philosophical and its only true meaning if it were to be used in its narrow sense only -- that of a struggle between separate individuals for the sheer means of existence.

They came to conceive the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another's blood.

The spectator has no need to turn his thumb down, as no quarter is given.

I obviously do not deny the struggle for existence, but I maintain that the progressive development of the animal kingdom, and especially of mankind, is favoured much more by mutual support than by mutual struggle.

Its comrades came to the rescue, and for one hour's time I watched how they endeavoured to help their fellow-prisoner.

If an ant which has its crop full has been selfish enough to refuse feeding a comrade, it will be treated as an enemy, or even worse.

Their force is in mutual support and mutual confidence.

The cunningest and the shrewdest are eliminated in favour of those who understand the advantages of sociable life and mutual support.

The old ones, which, as a rule, begin the meal first -- such are their rules of propriety -already were sitting upon the haystacks of the neighbourhood and kept watch.

The movements of these birds are most interesting, as a vast flock wheels and spreads out or closes up with as much precision as drilled troops.

The strongest birds of prey are powerless in face of the associations of our smallest bird pets.

It picks up small pieces of wood or small stones, throws them in the air and tries to catch them; it bends its neck, opens its wings, dances, jumps, runs about, and tries to manifest by all means its good disposition of mind.

As to their mutual attachment it is known that when a parrot has been killed by a hunter, the others fly over the corpse of their comrade with shrieks of complaints and 'themselves fall the victims of their friendship.'

Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle, and that law will become still more apparent when we have analyzed some other associations of birds and those of the mammalia.

Looking up, he saw a large hawk being buffeted by a flock of sparrows. They kept dashing at him in scores, and from all points at once. The unfortunate hawk was quite powerless.

In the face of an exuberant life, the ideally-armed robber must be satisfied with the off-fall of that life.

Social life is practised at that time chiefly for its own sake -- partly for security, but chiefly for the pleasures derived from it.

One might as well imagine that the whole of human life is nothing but a succession of war massacres.

One fox would climb on its top and throw the food to its comrades beneath.

The young ones scratch one another, they worry one another, and display their gracefulness while standing upright, and in the meantime the old ones keep watch.

Dietrich de Winckell describes them as passionate players, becoming so intoxicated by their play that a hare has been known to take an approaching fox for a playmate.

Thousands were killed every day, and the exodus nevertheless continued.

The little tee-tees, whose childish sweet faces so much struck Humboldt, embrace and protect one another when it rains, rolling their tails over the necks of their shivering comrades.

And while many plays are, so to speak, a school for the proper behaviour of the young in mature life, there are others, which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are, together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of forces -- 'the joy of life.'

Life in societies renders these weapons useless.

If a lazy sparrow intends appropriating the nest which a comrade is building, or even steals from it a few sprays of straw, the group interferes against the lazy comrade.

The struggle between individuals of the same species is not illustrated under that heading by even one single instance: it is taken as granted.

Each species is continually tending to enlarge its abode; migration to new abodes is the rule with the slow snail, as with the swift bird.

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.

The new-comers went away before having grown to be competitors.

One single sudden change can reduce thousands of mice to the number of a few individuals.

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.

"Don't compete! -- competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!"

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.'

Mr. Blyth saw Indian crows feeding two or three blind comrades; and so on.

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'.

Far from being a primitive form of organization, the family is a very late product of human evolution.

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.

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.

Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.

He cannot eat alone, and, however hungry, he calls those who pass by to share his food.

They are sociable and cheerful; they laugh very much.

These poor creatures, who even do not know how to obtain fire, and carefully maintain it in their huts, live under their primitive communism, without any chiefs; and within their villages they have no quarrels worth speaking of.

After that they took off their festival dresses, gave them away, and, putting on old ragged furs, addressed a few words to their kinsfolk, saying that though they are now poorer than any one of them, they have won their friendship.

But the fish was never touched by the starving people, and in January it was sent to its destination.

They hear the cries of the little ones coming from the forest, and maintain that, if heard, they forbode a misfortune for the tribe; and as they have no baby-farming nor crèches for getting rid of the children, every one of them recoils before the necessity of performing the cruel sentence.

The savage so much considers death as part of his duties towards his community, that he not only refuses to be rescued (as Moffat has told), but when a woman who had to be immolated on her husband's grave was rescued by missionaries, and was taken to an island, she escaped in the night, crossed a broad sea-arm, swimming and rejoined her tribe, to die on the grave.

Old people died, convinced that by their death they were rendering a last service to the tribe.

Both the Dayak and the judge would even feel remorse if sympathy moved them to spare the murderer.

If the savage is alone in the woods, he does not begin eating before he has loudly shouted thrice an invitation to anyone who may hear his voice to share his meal.

While warriors exterminated each other, and the priests celebrated their massacres, the masses continued to live their daily life, they prosecuted their daily toil.

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.

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.

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.

The bright and sunny days are lost sight of in the gales and storms.

When the inhabitants of North-West Mongolia and East Turkestan saw that water was abandoning them, they had no course open to them but to move down the broad valleys leading to the lowlands, and to thrust westwards the inhabitants of the plains.

In short, we do not know one single human race or one single nation which has not had its period of village communities.

The community being a continuation of the gens, it inherited all its functions. It was the universitas, the mir -- a world in itself.

The sight of a Russian commune mowing a meadow -- the men rivalling each other in their advance with the scythe, while the women turn the grass over and throw it up into heaps -- is one of the most inspiring sights; it shows what human work might be and ought to be.

The imaginary barbarian -- the man who fights and kills at his mere caprice -- existed no more than the "bloodthirsty" savage.

Noble or ecclesiastic, he had to submit to the folkmote -- Wer daselbst Wasser und Weid genusst, muss gehorsam sein -- 'Who enjoys here the right of water and pasture must obey' -- was the old saying.

The body of a child reddens from the stroke, but the face of him who strikes reddens from shame.

They preferred peaceful toil to war, the very peacefulness of man being the cause of the specialization of the warrior's trade, which specialization resulted later on in serfdom.

Selling and buying cannot take place within the community, and the rule is so severe that when a richer family hires a labourer the labourer must be taken from another clan or from among the Russians.

The discussions continue until all present agree to accept, or to submit to, some decision.

While people died from starvation all over Algeria, there was not one single case of death due to this cause on Kabylian soil.

if a woman rushes out and throws among them the piece of linen which she wears on her head, the swords are at once returned to their sheaths, and the quarrel is appeased.

The more fully the communal possession of land has been maintained, the better and the gentler are the habits.

The old conceptions of justice which were conceptions of mere revenge, slowly underwent a deep modification -- the idea of amends for the wrong done taking the place of revenge.

I conceive the early village communities as slowly originating directly from the gentes, and consisting, according to racial and local circumstances, either of several joint families, or of both joint and simple families.

The Mongol who has refused his roof to a stranger pays the full blood-compensation if the stranger has suffered therefrom.

Far from being the fighting animals they have often been compared to, the barbarians of the first centuries of our era invariably preferred peace to war.

The very peacefulness of the barbarians, certainly not their supposed warlike instincts, thus became the source of their subsequent subjection to the military chieftains.

Even that power which later on became such a source of oppression seems, on the contrary, to have found its origin in the peaceful inclinations of the masses.

The commander of a flotilla of boats, or even of a single pirate boat, was also a konung, and till the present day the commander of fishing in Norway is named Not-kong -- 'the king of the nets.'

In olden times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants received him with flowers in one hand and arms in the other, and asked him -- which law he intended to apply: the one he found in the village, or the one he brought with him?

The whole process of liberation progressed by a series of imperceptible acts of devotion to the common cause, accomplished by men who came out of the masses -- by unknown heroes whose very names have not been preserved by history.

What has happened on board ship, we must pardon to each other and consider as dead (todt und ab sein lassen).

If the relatives of the wronged man wanted to revenge the offence at once by a new aggression, the brotherhood supplied him with a horse to run away, or with a boat, a pair of oars, a knife and a steel for striking light.

Even guilds among beggars, executioners, and lost women, all organized on the same double principle of self-jurisdiction and mutual support.

The Commune is an oath of mutual aid... A new and detestable word. Through it the serfs are freed from all serfdom.

The city was a State and -- what was perhaps still more remarkable -- when the power in the city was usurped by an aristocracy of merchants or even nobles, the inner life of the city and the democratism of its daily life did not disappear.

In short, if a scarcity visited the city, all had to suffer from it more or less; but apart from the calamities, so long as the free cities existed no one could die in their midst from starvation, as is unhappily too often the case in our own times.

It was an attempt at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village community, a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State.

According to the Riparian law, the sword, the spear, and the iron armour of a warrior attained the value of at least twenty-five cows, or two years of a freeman's labour.

It is even certain that Moscow and Paris were chosen by the kings and the Church as the cradles of the future royal authority in the State, because they did not possess the tradition of folkmotes accustomed to act as sovereign in all matters.

The question, 'Who will be my judge?' has no meaning now, since the State has appropriated for its bureaucracy the organization of justice; but it was of primordial importance in mediæval times, the more so as self-jurisdiction meant self-administration.

The remaining cargo could be sold wholesale, but the retailer was allowed to raise a zittlicher profit only, the unzittlicher, or dishonest profit, being strictly forbidden.

Even the lord who had no scruples about robbing a merchant on the high road, respected the Weichbild, that is, the pole which stood in the market-place and bore either the king's arms, or a glove, or the image of the local saint.

Manual labour in a "mystery" was considered as a pious duty towards the citizens: a public function (Amt), as honourable as any other.

We are laughed at when we say that work must be pleasant, but -- 'everyone must be pleased with his work,' a mediæval Kuttenberg ordinance says.

It was, in a word, as independent a unit of the federation as the republic of Uri or Geneva was fifty years ago in the Swiss Confederation.

In addition to three days a week which the peasants had to work for the lord, they had also to bear all sorts of exactions for the right to sow and to crop, to be gay or sad, to live, to marry, or to die.

The burgher could not understand that equal rights of citizenship might be granted to the peasant upon whose food supplies he had to rely, and a deep rent was traced between town and village.

The cities -- not the emperors -- were the real makers of the national unity.

The cathedrals, conceived in a grand style and profusely decorated, lifted their bell-towers to the skies, displaying a purity of form and a boldness of imagination which we now vainly strive to attain.

A cathedral or a communal house symbolized the grandeur of an organism of which every mason and stone-cutter was the builder, and a mediæval building appears -- not as a solitary effort to which thousands of slaves would have contributed the share assigned them by one man's imagination; all the city contributed to it.

No works must be begun by the commune but such as are conceived in response to the grand heart of the commune, composed of the hearts of all citizens, united in one common will.

Cæsarism, supported by the fiction of popular consent and by the force of arms, was their ideal, and they worked hard for those who promised to realize it.

The nobles 'adopted' by the city, and now residing within its walls, simply carried on the old war within the very precincts of the city.

They began to find no authority too extensive, no killing by degrees too cruel, once it was 'for public safety.'

The literature of the subject is immense; but there is no work yet which treats of the mediæval city as of a whole.

The general conclusion is, that the mediæval worker worked less hours, all taken, than the present-day worker.

Total, 223 years of struggles before conquering the right to independence.

A picture was painted, a statue was carved, a bronze decoration was cast to stand in its proper place in a monument of communal art.

Only wholesale massacres by the thousand could put a stop to this widely-spread popular movement, and it was by the sword, the fire, and the rack that the young States secured their first and decisive victory over the masses of the people.

In proportion as the obligations towards the State grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other.

Human society itself could not be maintained for even so much as the lifetime of one single generation.

The peasants still maintained their communal institutions, and until the year 1787 the village folkmotes, composed of all householders, used to come together in the shadow of the bell-tower or a tree.

To speak of the natural death of the village communities in virtue of economical laws is as grim a joke as to speak of the natural death of soldiers slaughtered on a battlefield.

Towards the end of the winter all the young men of each village go to stay a few days in the woods, to fell timber and to bring it down the steep slopes tobogganing way, the timber and the fuel wood being divided among all households or sold for their benefit.

And when we admire the Swiss châlet, the mountain road, the peasants' cattle, the terraces of vineyards, or the school-house in Switzerland, we must keep in mind that without the timber for the châlet being taken from the communal woods and the stone from the communal quarries, without the cows being kept on the communal meadows, and the roads being made and the school-houses built by communal work, there would be little to admire.

These days of hard work become fête days, as the owner stakes his honour on serving a good meal.

The soil was brought on men's backs; terraces were made and planted with chestnut trees, peach trees, and orchards, and water was brought for irrigation in canals two or three miles long.

At the ringing of the village bell all go to the forest to take as much fuel wood as they can carry.

However, for the last twenty years a strong wind of opposition to the individual appropriation of the land blows again through the Middle Russian villages.

Of course there were struggles between the poor, who usually claim for communal possession, and the rich, who usually prefer individual ownership; and the struggles often lasted for years.

Here, as elsewhere, mutual aid is a better leader to progress than the war of each against all, as may be seen from the following facts.

What could isolated men do in that struggle against the dry climate? What could they obtain through individual effort when South Russia was struck with the marmot plague, and all people living on the land, rich and poor, commoners and individualists, had to work with their hands in order to conjure the plague?

The fact is, that the slave-hunters, the ivory robbers, the fighting kings, the Matabele and the Madagascar 'heroes' pass away, leaving their traces marked with blood and fire; but the nucleus of mutual-aid institutions, habits, and customs, grown up in the tribe and the village community, remains.

This procedure is so absurd that one would not believe it possible if the fifty-two different acts were not enumerated in full by a quite authoritative writer.

What especially characterises such associations is that no sort of written agreement is concluded. All is arranged in words.

Hundreds of them spread in Tobolsk and Tomsk, without anyone knowing wherefrom the

The self-government and the self-jurisdiction of both, the guild and the city were abolished; the oath of allegiance between guild-brothers became an act of felony towards the State.

Both in the town and in the village the State reigned over loose aggregations of individuals, and was ready to prevent by the most stringent measures the reconstitution of any sort of separate unions among them.

The grim reality of a strike is, that the limited credit of a worker's family at the baker's and the pawnbroker's is soon exhausted, the strike-pay goes not far even for food, and hunger is soon written on the children's faces.

I have seen men, dying from consumption, and knowing it, and yet knocking about in snow and fog to prepare meetings, speaking at meetings within a few weeks from death, and only then retiring to the hospital with the words: 'Now, friends, I am done; the doctors say I have but a few weeks to live.'

The history of "the making of Russia," and of the colonization of Siberia, is a history of the hunting and trading artéls or guilds, followed by village communities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!'

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.

With such spiritual leaders, the feelings of the richer classes necessarily became, as Mr. Pimsoll remarked, not so much blunted as 'stratified.'

The conscience of human solidarity begins to tell; and, although society life is so arranged as to stifle that feeling by thousands of artful means, it often gets the upper hand.

Then the escaped prisoner dashed out of his retreat, made his way through the fire, and, with a scalded face and burning clothes, brought the child safe out of the fire, and handed it to its mother.

Riches seem in so many cases to smother the manliness of their possessors, and their sympathies become, not so much narrowed as -- so to speak -- stratified.

The State, based upon loose aggregations of individuals and undertaking to be their only bond of union, did not answer its purpose.

One single war -- we all know -- may be productive of more evil, immediate and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the unchecked action of the mutual-aid principle may be productive of good.

To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the man who, knowing not the causes of rain, attributes it to the victim he has immolated before his clay idol.

The beach looked as though variegated with beds of crocuses.

But it was not snow: it was gannets, all calmly seated on their eggs or newly-hatched brood - their heads all turned windwards, almost touching each other, and in regular lines.

The air seems full of them, the ground and bare rocks are crowded; and as our boat finally grates against the rough beach and we eagerly jump ashore all becomes noisy excitement -- a perfect babel of protesting cries.

Of an evening, they are all out swimming and playing in the water, conversing together in strange tunes, which sound like the moans and cries of wounded and suffering men.

Therefore, when other animals are starving, the hairy armadillo is always fat and vigorous.

Sociability and intelligence always go hand in hand.

When we labour to lift the veil that conceals from us ancient institutions, and especially such institutions as have prevailed at the first appearance of beings of the human type, we are bound -- in the necessary absence of direct testimony -- to accomplish a most painstaking work of tracing backwards every institution.

But when we learn that with many savages the mother's sister takes as responsible a part in bringing up a child as the mother itself, and that, if death takes away a beloved child, the other 'mother' (the mother's sister) will sacrifice herself to accompany the child in its journey into the other world -- we surely see in these names something much more profound than a mere façon de parler.

There was in China (as elsewhere) a time when all personal belongings of a dead person were destroyed on his tomb -- his mobiliary goods, his chattels, his slaves, and even friends and vassals, and of course his widow.

It is almost certain, however, that it was not the Roman king who invented, or instituted, the trade-colleges -- they had already existed in ancient Greece.

The guild -- one may say -- is thus modelled upon the clan.

The art of building a large communal house, so as not to offend the spirits of the fallen trees; the art of forging metals, so as to conciliate the hostile spirits.

The bede is altogether a widely-spread custom, and no one, rich or poor, will fail to come with his horse and cart.

I failed to find -- although I was eagerly looking for it -- that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life.

The spectator has no need to turn his thumb down, as no quarter is given.

If an ant which has its crop full has been selfish enough to refuse feeding a comrade, it will be treated as an enemy, or even worse.

Thousands were killed every day, and the exodus nevertheless continued.

The new-comers went away before having grown to be competitors.

Far from being a primitive form of organization, the family is a very late product of human evolution.

After that they took off their festival dresses, gave them away, and, putting on old ragged furs, addressed a few words to their kinsfolk, saying that though they are now poorer than any one of them, they have won their friendship.

Noble or ecclesiastic, he had to submit to the folkmote -- Wer daselbst Wasser und Weid genusst, muss gehorsam sein -- 'Who enjoys here the right of water and pasture must obey' -- was the old saying.

While people died from starvation all over Algeria, there was not one single case of death due to this cause on Kabylian soil.

If the relatives of the wronged man wanted to revenge the offence at once by a new aggression, the brotherhood supplied him with a horse to run away, or with a boat, a pair of oars, a knife and a steel for striking light.

In short, if a scarcity visited the city, all had to suffer from it more or less; but apart from the calamities, so long as the free cities existed no one could die in their midst from starvation, as is unhappily too often the case in our own times.

The cathedrals, conceived in a grand style and profusely decorated, lifted their bell-towers to the skies, displaying a purity of form and a boldness of imagination which we now vainly strive to attain.

In proportion as the obligations towards the State grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other.

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.

To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the man who, knowing not the causes of rain, attributes it to the victim he has immolated before his clay idol.