MUTUAL AID AMONGST OURSELVES (continued)
Labour-unions grown after the destruction of the guilds by the State.
Their struggles. Mutual Aid in strikes. Co-operation. Free associations
for various purposes. Self-sacrifice. Countless societies for combined
action under all possible aspects. Mutual Aid in slum-life. Personal
aid.
When we examine the every-day life of the rural populations of Europe,
we find that, notwithstanding all that has been done in modern States
for the destruction of the village community, the life of the peasants
remains honeycombed with habits and customs of mutual aid and support;
that important vestiges of the communal possession of the soil are still
retained; and that, as soon as the legal obstacles to rural association
were lately removed, a network of free unions for all sorts of
economical purposes rapidly spread among the peasants--the tendency of
this young movement being to reconstitute some sort of union similar to
the village community of old. Such being the conclusions arrived at in
the preceding chapter, we have now to consider, what institutions for
mutual support can be found at the present time amongst the industrial
populations.
For the last three hundred years, the conditions for the growth of such
institutions have been as unfavourable in the towns as they have been in
the villages. It is well known, indeed, that when the medieval cities
were subdued in the sixteenth century by growing military States, all
institutions which kept the artisans, the masters, and the merchants
together in the guilds and the cities were violently destroyed. 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; the properties of the guilds
were confiscated in the same way as the lands of the village
communities; and the inner and technical organization of each trade was
taken in hand by the State. Laws, gradually growing in severity, were
passed to prevent artisans from combining in any way. For a time, some
shadows of the old guilds were tolerated: merchants' guilds were allowed
to exist under the condition of freely granting subsidies to the kings,
and some artisan guilds were kept in existence as organs of
administration. Some of them still drag on their meaningless existence.
But what formerly was the vital force of medieval life and industry has
long since disappeared under the crushing weight of the centralized
State.
In Great Britain, which may be taken as the best illustration of the
industrial policy of the modern States, we see the Parliament beginning
the destruction of the guilds as early as the fifteenth century; but it
was especially in the next century that decisive measures were taken.
Henry the Eighth not only ruined the organization of the guilds, but
also confiscated their properties, with even less excuse and manners, as
Toulmin Smith wrote, than he had produced for confiscating the estates
of the monasteries.(1) Edward the Sixth completed his work,(2) and
already in the second part of the sixteenth century we find the
Parliament settling all the disputes between craftsmen and merchants,
which formerly were settled in each city separately. The Parliament and
the king not only legislated in all such contests, but, keeping in view
the interests of the Crown in the exports, they soon began to determine
the number of apprentices in each trade and minutely to regulate the
very technics of each fabrication--the weights of the stuffs, the number
of threads in the yard of cloth, and the like. With little success, it
must be said; because contests and technical difficulties which were
arranged for centuries in succession by agreement between
closely-interdependent guilds and federated cities lay entirely beyond
the powers of the centralized State. The continual interference of its
officials paralyzed the trades; bringing most of them to a complete
decay; and the last century economists, when they rose against the State
regulation of industries, only ventilated a widely-felt discontent. The
abolition of that interference by the French Revolution was greeted as
an act of liberation, and the example of France was soon followed
elsewhere.
With the regulation of wages the State had no better success. In the
medieval cities, when the distinction between masters and apprentices or
journeymen became more and more apparent in the fifteenth century,
unions of apprentices (Gesellenverbande), occasionally assuming an
international character, were opposed to the unions of masters and
merchants. Now it was the State which undertook to settle their griefs,
and under the Elizabethan Statute of 1563 the Justices of Peace had to
settle the wages, so as to guarantee a "convenient" livelihood to
journeymen and apprentices. The Justices, however, proved helpless to
conciliate the conflicting interests, and still less to compel the
masters to obey their decisions. The law gradually became a dead letter,
and was repealed by the end of the eighteenth century. But while the
State thus abandoned the function of regulating wages, it continued
severely to prohibit all combinations which were entered upon by
journeymen and workers in order to raise their wages, or to keep them at
a certain level. All through the eighteenth century it legislated
against the workers' unions, and in 1799 it finally prohibited all sorts
of combinations, under the menace of severe punishments. In fact, the
British Parliament only followed in this case the example of the French
Revolutionary Convention, which had issued a draconic law against
coalitions of workers-coalitions between a number of citizens being
considered as attempts against the sovereignty of the State, which was
supposed equally to protect all its subjects. The work of destruction of
the medieval unions was thus completed. 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. These were, then, the
conditions under which the mutual-aid tendency had to make its way in
the nineteenth century.
Need it be said that no such measures could destroy that tendency?
Throughout the eighteenth century, the workers' unions were continually
reconstituted.(3) Nor were they stopped by the cruel prosecutions which
took place under the laws of 1797 and 1799. Every flaw in supervision,
every delay of the masters in denouncing the unions was taken advantage
of. Under the cover of friendly societies, burial clubs, or secret
brotherhoods, the unions spread in the textile industries, among the
Sheffield cutlers, the miners, and vigorous federal organizations were
formed to support the branches during strikes and prosecutions.(4) The
repeal of the Combination Laws in 1825 gave a new impulse to the
movement. Unions and national federations were formed in all trades.(5)
and when Robert Owen started his Grand National Consolidated Trades'
Union, it mustered half a million members in a few months. True that
this period of relative liberty did not last long. Prosecution began
anew in the thirties, and the well-known ferocious condemnations of
1832-1844 followed. The Grand National Union was disbanded, and all over
the country, both the private employers and the Government in its own
workshops began to compel the workers to resign all connection with
unions, and to sign "the Document" to that effect. Unionists were
prosecuted wholesale under the Master and Servant Act--workers being
summarily arrested and condemned upon a mere complaint of misbehaviour
lodged by the master.(6) Strikes were suppressed in an autocratic way,
and the most astounding condemnations took place for merely having
announced a strike or acted as a delegate in it--to say nothing of the
military suppression of strike riots, nor of the condemnations which
followed the frequent outbursts of acts of violence. To practise mutual
support under such circumstances was anything but an easy task. And yet,
notwithstanding all obstacles, of which our own generation hardly can
have an idea, the revival of the unions began again in 1841, and the
amalgamation of the workers has been steadily continued since. After a
long fight, which lasted for over a hundred years, the right of
combining together was conquered, and at the present time nearly
one-fourth part of the regularly-employed workers, i.e. about 1,500,000,
belong to trade unions.(7)
As to the other European States, sufficient to say that up to a very
recent date, all sorts of unions were prosecuted as conspiracies; and
that nevertheless they exist everywhere, even though they must often
take the form of secret societies; while the extension and the force of
labour organizations, and especially of the Knights of Labour, in the
United States and in Belgium, have been sufficiently illustrated by
strikes in the nineties. It must, however, be borne in mind that,
prosecution apart, the mere fact of belonging to a labour union implies
considerable sacrifices in money, in time, and in unpaid work, and
continually implies the risk of losing employment for the mere fact of
being a unionist.(8) There is, moreover, the strike, which a unionist
has continually to face; and 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. For one who lives in close
contact with workers, a protracted strike is the most heartrending
sight; while what a strike meant forty years ago in this country, and
still means in all but the wealthiest parts of the continent, can easily
be conceived. Continually, even now, strikes will end with the total
ruin and the forced emigration of whole populations, while the shooting
down of strikers on the slightest provocation, or even without any
provocation,(9) is quite habitual still on the continent.
And yet, every year there are thousands of strikes and lock-outs in
Europe and America--the most severe and protracted contests being, as a
rule, the so-called "sympathy strikes," which are entered upon to
support locked-out comrades or to maintain the rights of the unions. And
while a portion of the Press is prone to explain strikes by
"intimidation," those who have lived among strikers speak with
admiration of the mutual aid and support which are constantly practised
by them. Every one has heard of the colossal amount of work which was
done by volunteer workers for organizing relief during the London
dock-labourers' strike; of the miners who, after having themselves been
idle for many weeks, paid a levy of four shillings a week to the strike
fund when they resumed work; of the miner widow who, during the
Yorkshire labour war of 1894, brought her husband's life-savings to the
strike-fund; of the last loaf of bread being always shared with
neighbours; of the Radstock miners, favoured with larger
kitchen-gardens, who invited four hundred Bristol miners to take their
share of cabbage and potatoes, and so on. All newspaper correspondents,
during the great strike of miners in Yorkshire in 1894, knew heaps of
such facts, although not all of them could report such "irrelevant"
matters to their respective papers.(10)
Unionism is not, however, the only form in which the worker's need of
mutual support finds its expression. There are, besides, the political
associations, whose activity many workers consider as more conducive to
general welfare than the trade-unions, limited as they are now in their
purposes. Of course the mere fact of belonging to a political body
cannot be taken as a manifestation of the mutual-aid tendency. We all
know that politics are the field in which the purely egotistic elements
of society enter into the most entangled combinations with altruistic
aspirations. But every experienced politician knows that all great
political movements were fought upon large and often distant issues, and
that those of them were the strongest which provoked most disinterested
enthusiasm. All great historical movements have had this character, and
for our own generation Socialism stands in that case. "Paid agitators"
is, no doubt, the favourite refrain of those who know nothing about it.
The truth, however, is that--to speak only of what I know personally--if
I had kept a diary for the last twenty-four years and inscribed in it
all the devotion and self-sacrifice which I came across in the Socialist
movement, the reader of such a diary would have had the word "heroism"
constantly on his lips. But the men I would have spoken of were not
heroes; they were average men, inspired by a grand idea. Every Socialist
newspaper--and there are hundreds of them in Europe alone--has the same
history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward, and, in the
overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal ambition. I
have seen families living without knowing what would be their food
to-morrow, the husband boycotted all round in his little town for his
part in the paper, and the wife supporting the family by sewing, and
such a situation lasting for years, until the family would retire,
without a word of reproach, simply saying: "Continue; we can hold on no
more!" 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. Tell the comrades that I shall be happy if they come
to see me." I have seen facts which would be described as "idealization"
if I told them in this place; and the very names of these men, hardly
known outside a narrow circle of friends, will soon be forgotten when
the friends, too, have passed away. In fact, I don't know myself which
most to admire, the unbounded devotion of these few, or the sum total of
petty acts of devotion of the great number. Every quire of a penny paper
sold, every meeting, every hundred votes which are won at a Socialist
election, represent an amount of energy and sacrifices of which no
outsider has the faintest idea. And what is now done by Socialists has
been done in every popular and advanced party, political and religious,
in the past. All past progress has been promoted by like men and by a
like devotion.
Co-operation, especially in Britain, is often described as "joint-stock
individualism"; and such as it is now, it undoubtedly tends to breed a
co-operative egotism, not only towards the community at large, but also
among the co-operators themselves. It is, nevertheless, certain that at
its origin the movement had an essentially mutual-aid character. Even
now, its most ardent promoters are persuaded that co-operation leads
mankind to a higher harmonic stage of economical relations, and it is
not possible to stay in some of the strongholds of co-operation in the
North without realizing that the great number of the rank and file hold
the same opinion. Most of them would lose interest in the movement if
that faith were gone; and it must be owned that within the last few
years broader ideals of general welfare and of the producers' solidarity
have begun to be current among the co-operators. There is undoubtedly
now a tendency towards establishing better relations between the owners
of the co-operative workshops and the workers.
The importance of co-operation in this country, in Holland and in
Denmark is well known; while in Germany, and especially on the Rhine,
the co-operative societies are already an important factor of industrial
life.(11) It is, however, Russia which offers perhaps the best field for
the study of cooperation under an infinite variety of aspects. In
Russia, it is a natural growth, an inheritance from the middle ages; and
while a formally established co-operative society would have to cope
with many legal difficulties and official suspicion, the informal
co-operation--the artel--makes the very substance of Russian peasant
life. The history of "the making of Russia," and of the colonization of
Siberia, is a history of the hunting and trading artels or guilds,
followed by village communities, and at the present time we find the
artel everywhere; among each group of ten to fifty peasants who come
from the same village to work at a factory, in all the building trades,
among fishermen and hunters, among convicts on their way to and in
Siberia, among railway porters, Exchange messengers, Customs House
labourers, everywhere in the village industries, which give occupation
to 7,000,000 men--from top to bottom of the working world, permanent and
temporary, for production and consumption under all possible aspects.
Until now, many of the fishing-grounds on the tributaries of the Caspian
Sea are held by immense artels, the Ural river belonging to the whole of
the Ural Cossacks, who allot and re-allot the fishing-grounds--perhaps
the richest in the world--among the villages, without any interference
of the authorities. Fishing is always made by artels in the Ural, the
Volga, and all the lakes of Northern Russia. Besides these permanent
organizations, there are the simply countless temporary artels,
constituted for each special purpose. When ten or twenty peasants come
from some locality to a big town, to work as weavers, carpenters,
masons, boat-builders, and so on, they always constitute an artel. They
hire rooms, hire a cook (very often the wife of one of them acts in this
capacity), elect an elder, and take their meals in common, each one
paying his share for food and lodging to the artel. A party of convicts
on its way to Siberia always does the same, and its elected elder is the
officially-recognized intermediary between the convicts and the military
chief of the party. In the hard-labour prisons they have the same
organization. The railway porters, the messengers at the Exchange, the
workers at the Custom House, the town messengers in the capitals, who
are collectively responsible for each member, enjoy such a reputation
that any amount of money or bank-notes is trusted to the artel-member by
the merchants. In the building trades, artels of from 10 to 200 members
are formed; and the serious builders and railway contractors always
prefer to deal with an artel than with separately-hired workers. The
last attempts of the Ministry of War to deal directly with productive
artels, formed ad hoc in the domestic trades, and to give them orders
for boots and all sorts of brass and iron goods, are described as most
satisfactory; while the renting of a Crown iron work, (Votkinsk) to an
artel of workers, which took place seven or eight years ago, has been a
decided success.
We can thus see in Russia how the old medieval institution, having not
been interfered with by the State (in its informal manifestations), has
fully survived until now, and takes the greatest variety of forms in
accordance with the requirements of modern industry and commerce. As to
the Balkan peninsula, the Turkish Empire and Caucasia, the old guilds
are maintained there in full. The esnafs of Servia have fully preserved
their medieval character; they include both masters and journeymen,
regulate the trades, and are institutions for mutual support in labour
and sickness;(12) while the amkari of Caucasia, and especially at
Tiflis, add to these functions a considerable influence in municipal
life.(13)
In connection with co-operation, I ought perhaps to mention also the
friendly societies, the unities of oddfellows, the village and town
clubs organized for meeting the doctors' bills, the dress and burial
clubs, the small clubs very common among factory girls, to which they
contribute a few pence every week, and afterwards draw by lot the sum of
one pound, which can at least be used for some substantial purchase, and
many others. A not inconsiderable amount of sociable or jovial spirit is
alive in all such societies and clubs, even though the "credit and
debit" of each member are closely watched over. But there are so many
associations based on the readiness to sacrifice time, health, and life
if required, that we can produce numbers of illustrations of the best
forms of mutual support.
The Lifeboat Association in this country, and similar institutions on
the Continent, must be mentioned in the first place. The former has now
over three hundred boats along the coasts of these isles, and it would
have twice as many were it not for the poverty of the fisher men, who
cannot afford to buy lifeboats. The crews consist, however, of
volunteers, whose readiness to sacrifice their lives for the rescue of
absolute strangers to them is put every year to a severe test; every
winter the loss of several of the bravest among them stands on record.
And if we ask these men what moves them to risk their lives, even when
there is no reasonable chance of success, their answer is something on
the following lines. A fearful snowstorm, blowing across the Channel,
raged on the flat, sandy coast of a tiny village in Kent, and a small
smack, laden with oranges, stranded on the sands near by. In these
shallow waters only a flat-bottomed lifeboat of a simplified type can be
kept, and to launch it during such a storm was to face an almost certain
disaster. And yet the men went out, fought for hours against the wind,
and the boat capsized twice. One man was drowned, the others were cast
ashore. One of these last, a refined coastguard, was found next morning,
badly bruised and half frozen in the snow. I asked him, how they came to
make that desperate attempt? "I don't know myself," was his reply."
There was the wreck; all the people from the village stood on the beach,
and all said it would be foolish to go out; we never should work through
the surf. We saw five or six men clinging to the mast, making desperate
signals. We all felt that something must be done, but what could we do?
One hour passed, two hours, and we all stood there. We all felt most
uncomfortable. Then, all of a sudden, through the storm, it seemed to us
as if we heard their cries--they had a boy with them. We could not stand
that any longer. All at once we said, "We must go!" The women said so
too; they would have treated us as cowards if we had not gone, although
next day they said we had been fools to go. As one man, we rushed to the
boat, and went. The boat capsized, but we took hold of it. The worst was
to see poor drowning by the side of the boat, and we could do nothing to
save him. Then came a fearful wave, the boat capsized again, and we were
cast ashore. The men were still rescued by the D. boat, ours was caught
miles away. I was found next morning in the snow."
The same feeling moved also the miners of the Rhonda Valley, when they
worked for the rescue of their comrades from the inundated mine. They
had pierced through thirty-two yards of coal in order to reach their
entombed comrades; but when only three yards more remained to be
pierced, fire-damp enveloped them. The lamps went out, and the
rescue-men retired. To work in such conditions was to risk being blown
up at every moment. But the raps of the entombed miners were still
heard, the men were still alive and appealed for help, and several
miners volunteered to work at any risk; and as they went down the mine,
their wives had only silent tears to follow them--not one word to stop
them.
There is the gist of human psychology. Unless men are maddened in the
battlefield, they "cannot stand it" to hear appeals for help, and not to
respond to them. The hero goes; and what the hero does, all feel that
they ought to have done as well. The sophisms of the brain cannot resist
the mutual-aid feeling, because this feeling has been nurtured by
thousands of years of human social life and hundreds of thousands of
years of pre-human life in societies.
"But what about those men who were drowned in the Serpentine in the
presence of a crowd, out of which no one moved for their rescue?" it may
be asked. "What about the child which fell into the Regent's Park
Canal--also in the presence of a holiday crowd--and was only saved
through the presence of mind of a maid who let out a Newfoundland dog to
the rescue?" The answer is plain enough. Man is a result of both his
inherited instincts and his education. Among the miners and the seamen,
their common occupations and their every-day contact with one another
create a feeling of solidarity, while the surrounding dangers maintain
courage and pluck. In the cities, on the contrary, the absence of common
interest nurtures indifference, while courage and pluck, which seldom
find their opportunities, disappear, or take another direction.
Moreover, the tradition of the hero of the mine and the sea lives in the
miners' and fishermen's villages, adorned with a poetical halo. But what
are the traditions of a motley London crowd? The only tradition they
might have in common ought to be created by literature, but a literature
which would correspond to the village epics hardly exists. The clergy
are so anxious to prove that all that comes from human nature is sin,
and that all good in man has a supernatural origin, that they mostly
ignore the facts which cannot be produced as an example of higher
inspiration or grace, coming from above. And as to the lay-writers,
their attention is chiefly directed towards one sort of heroism, the
heroism which promotes the idea of the State. Therefore, they admire the
Roman hero, or the soldier in the battle, while they pass by the
fisherman's heroism, hardly paying attention to it. The poet and the
painter might, of course, be taken by the beauty of the human heart in
itself; but both seldom know the life of the poorer classes, and while
they can sing or paint the Roman or the military hero in conventional
surroundings, they can neither sing nor paint impressively the hero who
acts in those modest surroundings which they ignore. If they venture to
do so, they produce a mere piece of rhetoric.(14)
The countless societies, clubs, and alliances, for the enjoyment of
life, for study and research, for education, and so on, which have
lately grown up in such numbers that it would require many years to
simply tabulate them, are another manifestation of the same everworking
tendency for association and mutual support. Some of them, like the
broods of young birds of different species which come together in the
autumn, are entirely given to share in common the joys of life. Every
village in this country, in Switzerland, Germany, and so on, has its
cricket, football, tennis, nine-pins, pigeon, musical or singing clubs.
Other societies are much more numerous, and some of them, like the
Cyclists' Alliance, have suddenly taken a formidable development.
Although the members of this alliance have nothing in common but the
love of cycling, there is already among them a sort of freemasonry for
mutual help, especially in the remote nooks and corners which are not
flooded by cyclists; they look upon the "C.A.C."--the Cyclists' Alliance
Club--in a village as a sort of home; and at the yearly Cyclists' Camp
many a standing friendship has been established. The Kegelbruder, the
Brothers of the Nine Pins, in Germany, are a similar association; so
also the Gymnasts' Societies (300,000 members in Germany), the informal
brotherhood of paddlers in France, the yacht clubs, and so on. Such
associations certainly do not alter the economical stratification of
society, but, especially in the small towns, they contribute to smooth
social distinctions, and as they all tend to join in large national and
international federations, they certainly aid the growth of personal
friendly intercourse between all sorts of men scattered in different
parts of the globe.
The Alpine Clubs, the Jagdschutzverein in Germany, which has over
100,000 members--hunters, educated foresters, zoologists, and simple
lovers of Nature--and the International Ornithological Society, which
includes zoologists, breeders, and simple peasants in Germany, have the
same character. Not only have they done in a few years a large amount of
very useful work, which large associations alone could do properly
(maps, refuge huts, mountain roads; studies of animal life, of noxious
insects, of migrations of birds, and so on), but they create new bonds
between men. Two Alpinists of different nationalities who meet in a
refuge hut in the Caucasus, or the professor and the peasant
ornithologist who stay in the same house, are no more strangers to each
other; while the Uncle Toby's Society at Newcastle, which has already
induced over 260,000 boys and girls never to destroy birds' nests and to
be kind to all animals, has certainly done more for the development of
human feelings and of taste in natural science than lots of moralists
and most of our schools.
We cannot omit, even in this rapid review, the thousands of scientific,
literary, artistic, and educational societies. Up till now, the
scientific bodies, closely controlled and often subsidized by the State,
have generally moved in a very narrow circle, and they often came to be
looked upon as mere openings for getting State appointments, while the
very narrowness of their circles undoubtedly bred petty jealousies.
Still it is a fact that the distinctions of birth, political parties and
creeds are smoothed to some extent by such associations; while in the
smaller and remote towns the scientific, geographical, or musical
societies, especially those of them which appeal to a larger circle of
amateurs, become small centres of intellectual life, a sort of link
between the little spot and the wide world, and a place where men of
very different conditions meet on a footing of equality. To fully
appreciate the value of such centres, one ought to know them, say, in
Siberia. As to the countless educational societies which only now begin
to break down the State's and the Church's monopoly in education, they
are sure to become before long the leading power in that branch. To the
"Froebel Unions" we already owe the Kindergarten system; and to a number
of formal and informal educational associations we owe the high standard
of women's education in Russia, although all the time these societies
and groups had to act in strong opposition to a powerful government.(15)
As to the various pedagogical societies in Germany, it is well known
that they have done the best part in the working out of the modern
methods of teaching science in popular schools. In such associations the
teacher finds also his best support. How miserable the overworked and
under-paid village teacher would have been without their aid!(16)
All these associations, societies, brotherhoods, alliances, institutes,
and so on, which must now be counted by the ten thousand in Europe
alone, and each of which represents an immense amount of voluntary,
unambitious, and unpaid or underpaid work--what are they but so many
manifestations, under an infinite variety of aspects, of the same
ever-living tendency of man towards mutual aid and support? For nearly
three centuries men were prevented from joining hands even for literary,
artistic, and educational purposes. Societies could only be formed under
the protection of the State, or the Church, or as secret brotherhoods,
like free-masonry. But now that the resistance has been broken, they
swarm in all directions, they extend over all multifarious branches of
human activity, they become international, and they undoubtedly
contribute, to an extent which cannot yet be fully appreciated, to break
down the screens erected by States between different nationalities.
Notwithstanding the jealousies which are bred by commercial competition,
and the provocations to hatred which are sounded by the ghosts of a
decaying past, there is a conscience of international solidarity which
is growing both among the leading spirits of the world and the masses of
the workers, since they also have conquered the right of international
intercourse; and in the preventing of a European war during the last
quarter of a century, this spirit has undoubtedly had its share.
The religious charitable associations, which again represent a whole
world, certainly must be mentioned in this place. There is not the
slightest doubt that the great bulk of their members are moved by the
same mutual-aid feelings which are common to all mankind. Unhappily the
religious teachers of men prefer to ascribe to such feelings a
supernatural origin. Many of them pretend that man does not consciously
obey the mutual-aid inspiration so long as he has not been enlightened
by the teachings of the special religion which they represent, and, with
St. Augustin, most of them do not recognize such feelings in the "pagan
savage." Moreover, while early Christianity, like all other religions,
was an appeal to the broadly human feelings of mutual aid and sympathy,
the Christian Church has aided the State in wrecking all standing
institutions of mutual aid and support which were anterior to it, or
developed outside of it; and, instead of the mutual aid which every
savage considers as due to his kinsman, it has preached charity which
bears a character of inspiration from above, and, accordingly, implies a
certain superiority of the giver upon the receiver. With this
limitation, and without any intention to give offence to those who
consider themselves as a body elect when they accomplish acts simply
humane, we certainly may consider the immense numbers of religious
charitable associations as an outcome of the same mutual-aid tendency.
All these facts show that a reckless prosecution of personal interests,
with no regard to other people's needs, is not the only characteristic
of modern life. By the side of this current which so proudly claims
leadership in human affairs, we perceive a hard struggle sustained by
both the rural and industrial populations in order to reintroduce
standing institutions of mutual aid and support; and we discover, in all
classes of society, a widely-spread movement towards the establishment
of an infinite variety of more or less permanent institutions for the
same purpose. But when we pass from public life to the private life of
the modern individual, we discover another extremely wide world of
mutual aid and support, which only passes unnoticed by most sociologists
because it is limited to the narrow circle of the family and personal
friendship.(17)
Under the present social system, all bonds of union among the
inhabitants of the same street or neighbourhood have been dissolved. In
the richer parts of the large towns, people live without knowing who are
their next-door neighbours. But in the crowded lanes people know each
other perfectly, and are continually brought into mutual contact. Of
course, petty quarrels go their course, in the lanes as elsewhere; but
groupings in accordance with personal affinities grow up, and within
their circle mutual aid is practised to an extent of which the richer
classes have no idea. If we take, for instance, the children of a poor
neighbourhood who play in a street or a churchyard, or on a green, we
notice at once that a close union exists among them, notwithstanding the
temporary fights, and that that union protects them from all sorts of
misfortunes. As soon as a mite bends inquisitively over the opening of a
drain--"Don't stop there," another mite shouts out, "fever sits in the
hole!" "Don't climb over that wall, the train will kill you if you
tumble down! Don't come near to the ditch! Don't eat those
berries--poison! you will die." Such are the first teachings imparted to
the urchin when he joins his mates out-doors. How many of the children
whose play-grounds are the pavements around "model workers' dwellings,"
or the quays and bridges of the canals, would be crushed to death by the
carts or drowned in the muddy waters, were it not for that sort of
mutual support. And when a fair Jack has made a slip into the
unprotected ditch at the back of the milkman's yard, or a cherry-cheeked
Lizzie has, after all, tumbled down into the canal, the young brood
raises such cries that all the neighbourhood is on the alert and rushes
to the rescue.
Then comes in the alliance of the mothers. "You could not imagine" (a
lady-doctor who lives in a poor neighbourhood told me lately) "how much
they help each other. If a woman has prepared nothing, or could prepare
nothing, for the baby which she expected--and how often that
happens!--all the neighbours bring something for the new-comer. One of
the neighbours always takes care of the children, and some other always
drops in to take care of the household, so long as the mother is in
bed." This habit is general. It is mentioned by all those who have lived
among the poor. In a thousand small ways the mothers support each other
and bestow their care upon children that are not their own. Some
training--good or bad, let them decide it for themselves--is required in
a lady of the richer classes to render her able to pass by a shivering
and hungry child in the street without noticing it. But the mothers of
the poorer classes have not that training. They cannot stand the sight
of a hungry child; they must feed it, and so they do. "When the school
children beg bread, they seldom or rather never meet with a refusal"--a
lady-friend, who has worked several years in Whitechapel in connection
with a workers' club, writes to me. But I may, perhaps, as well
transcribe a few more passages from her letter:--
"Nursing neighbours, in cases of illness, without any shade of
remuneration, is quite general among the workers. Also, when a woman has
little children, and goes out for work, another mother always takes care
of them.
"If, in the working classes, they would not help each other, they could
not exist. I know families which continually help each other--with
money, with food, with fuel, for bringing up the little children, in
cases of illness, in cases of death.
"'The mine' and 'thine' is much less sharply observed among the poor
than among the rich. Shoes, dress, hats, and so on,--what may be wanted
on the spot--are continually borrowed from each other, also all sorts of
household things.
"Last winter the members of the United Radical Club had brought together
some little money, and began after Christmas to distribute free soup and
bread to the children going to school. Gradually they had 1,800 children
to attend to. The money came from outsiders, but all the work was done
by the members of the club. Some of them, who were out of work, came at
four in the morning to wash and to peel the vegetables; five women came
at nine or ten (after having done their own household work) for cooking,
and stayed till six or seven to wash the dishes. And at meal time,
between twelve and half-past one, twenty to thirty workers came in to
aid in serving the soup, each one staying what he could spare of his
meal time. This lasted for two months. No one was paid."
My friend also mentions various individual cases, of which the following
are typical:--
"Annie W. was given by her mother to be boarded by an old person in
Wilmot Street. When her mother died, the old woman, who herself was very
poor, kept the child without being paid a penny for that. When the old
lady died too, the child, who was five years old, was of course
neglected during her illness, and was ragged; but she was taken at once
by Mrs. S., the wife of a shoemaker, who herself has six children.
Lately, when the husband was ill, they had not much to eat, all of them.
"The other day, Mrs. M., mother of six children, attended Mrs. M--g
throughout her illness, and took to her own rooms the elder child....
But do you need such facts? They are quite general.... I know also Mrs.
D. (Oval, Hackney Road), who has a sewing machine and continually sews
for others, without ever accepting any remuneration, although she has
herself five children and her husband to look after.... And so on."
For every one who has any idea of the life of the labouring classes it
is evident that without mutual aid being practised among them on a large
scale they never could pull through all their difficulties. It is only
by chance that a worker's family can live its lifetime without having to
face such circumstances as the crisis described by the ribbon weaver,
Joseph Gutteridge, in his autobiography.(18) And if all do not go to the
ground in such cases, they owe it to mutual help. In Gutteridge's case
it was an old nurse, miserably poor herself, who turned up at the moment
when the family was slipping towards a final catastrophe, and brought in
some bread, coal, and bedding, which she had obtained on credit. In
other cases, it will be some one else, or the neighbours will take steps
to save the family. But without some aid from other poor, how many more
would be brought every year to irreparable ruin!(19)
Mr. Plimsoll, after he had lived for some time among the poor, on 7s.
6d. a week, was compelled to recognize that the kindly feelings he took
with him when he began this life "changed into hearty respect and
admiration" when he saw how the relations between the poor are permeated
with mutual aid and support, and learned the simple ways in which that
support is given. After a many years' experience, his conclusion was
that "when you come to think of it, such as these men were, so were the
vast majority of the working classes."(20) As to bringing up orphans,
even by the poorest families, it is so widely-spread a habit, that it
may be described as a general rule; thus among the miners it was found,
after the two explosions at Warren Vale and at Lund Hill, that "nearly
one-third of the men killed, as the respective committees can testify,
were thus supporting relations other than wife and child." "Have you
reflected," Mr. Plimsoll added, "what this is? Rich men, even
comfortably-to-do men do this, I don't doubt. But consider the
difference." Consider what a sum of one shilling, subscribed by each
worker to help a comrade's widow, or 6d. to help a fellow-worker to
defray the extra expense of a funeral, means for one who earns 16s. a
week and has a wife, and in some cases five or six children to
support.(21) But such subscriptions are a general practice among the
workers all over the world, even in much more ordinary cases than a
death in the family, while aid in work is the commonest thing in their
lives.
Nor do the same practices of mutual aid and support fail among the
richer classes. Of course, when one thinks of the harshness which is
often shown by the richer employers towards their employees, one feels
inclined to take the most pessimist view of human nature. Many must
remember the indignation which was aroused during the great Yorkshire
strike of 1894, when old miners who had picked coal from an abandoned
pit were prosecuted by the colliery owners. And, even if we leave aside
the horrors of the periods of struggle and social war, such as the
extermination of thousands of workers' prisoners after the fall of the
Paris Commune--who can read, for instance, revelations of the labour
inquest which was made here in the forties, or what Lord Shaftesbury
wrote about "the frightful waste of human life in the factories, to
which the children taken from the workhouses, or simply purchased all
over this country to be sold as factory slaves, were consigned"(22)--who
can read that without being vividly impressed by the baseness which is
possible in man when his greediness is at stake? But it must also be
said that all fault for such treatment must not be thrown entirely upon
the criminality of human nature. Were not the teachings of men of
science, and even of a notable portion of the clergy, up to a quite
recent time, teachings of distrust, despite and almost hatred towards
the poorer classes? Did not science teach that since serfdom has been
abolished, no one need be poor unless for his own vices? And how few in
the Church had the courage to blame the children-killers, while the
great numbers taught that the sufferings of the poor, and even the
slavery of the negroes, were part of the Divine Plan! Was not
Nonconformism itself largely a popular protest against the harsh
treatment of the poor at the hand of the established Church?
With such spiritual leaders, the feelings of the richer classes
necessarily became, as Mr. Pimsoll remarked, not so much blunted as
"stratified." They seldom went downwards towards the poor, from whom the
well-to-do-people are separated by their manner of life, and whom they
do not know under their best aspects, in their every-day life. But among
themselves--allowance being made for the effects of the
wealth-accumulating passions and the futile expenses imposed by wealth
itself--among themselves, in the circle of family and friends, the rich
practise the same mutual aid and support as the poor. Dr. Ihering and L.
Dargun are perfectly right in saying that if a statistical record could
be taken of all the money which passes from hand to hand in the shape of
friendly loans and aid, the sum total would be enormous, even in
comparison with the commercial transactions of the world's trade. And if
we could add to it, as we certainly ought to, what is spent in
hospitality, petty mutual services, the management of other people's
affairs, gifts and charities, we certainly should be struck by the
importance of such transfers in national economy. Even in the world
which is ruled by commercial egotism, the current expression, "We have
been harshly treated by that firm," shows that there is also the
friendly treatment, as opposed to the harsh, i.e. the legal treatment;
while every commercial man knows how many firms are saved every year
from failure by the friendly support of other firms.
As to the charities and the amounts of work for general well-being which
are voluntarily done by so many well-to-do persons, as well as by
workers, and especially by professional men, every one knows the part
which is played by these two categories of benevolence in modern life.
If the desire of acquiring notoriety, political power, or social
distinction often spoils the true character of that sort of benevolence,
there is no doubt possible as to the impulse coming in the majority of
cases from the same mutual-aid feelings. Men who have acquired wealth
very often do not find in it the expected satisfaction. Others begin to
feel that, whatever economists may say about wealth being the reward of
capacity, their own reward is exaggerated. 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; and then they try to find an outcome for that deeply human
need by giving their fortune, or their forces, to something which, in
their opinion, will promote general welfare.
In short, neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the
teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned
with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and
sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply
lodged in men's understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by
all our preceding evolution. What was the outcome of evolution since its
earliest stages cannot be overpowered by one of the aspects of that same
evolution. And the need of mutual aid and support which had lately taken
refuge in the narrow circle of the family, or the slum neighbours, in
the village, or the secret union of workers, re-asserts itself again,
even in our modern society, and claims its rights to be, as it always
has been, the chief leader towards further progress. Such are the
conclusions which we are necessarily brought to when we carefully ponder
over each of the groups of facts briefly enumerated in the last two
chapters.
NOTES:
1. Toulmin Smith, English Guilds, London, 1870, Introd. p. xliii.
2. The Act of Edward the Sixth--the first of his reign--ordered to hand
over to the Crown "all fraternities, brotherhoods, and guilds being
within the realm of England and Wales and other of the king's dominions;
and all manors, lands, tenements, and other hereditaments belonging to
them or any of them" (English Guilds, Introd. p. xliii). See also
Ockenkowski's Englands wirtschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des
Mittelalters, Jena, 1879, chaps. ii-v.
3. See Sidney and Beatrice Webb, History of Trade-Unionism, London,
1894, pp. 21-38.
4. See in Sidney Webb's work the associations which existed at that
time. The London artisans are supposed to have never been better
organized than in 1810-20.
5. The National Association for the Protection of Labour included about
150 separate unions, which paid high levies, and had a membership of
about 100,000. The Builders' Union and the Miners' Unions also were big
organizations (Webb, l.c. p. 107).
6. I follow in this Mr. Webb's work, which is replete with documents to
confirm his statements.
7. Great changes have taken place since the forties in the attitude of
the richer classes towards the unions. However, even in the sixties, the
employers made a formidable concerted attempt to crush them by locking
out whole populations. Up to 1869 the simple agreement to strike, and
the announcement of a strike by placards, to say nothing of picketing,
were often punished as intimidation. Only in 1875 the Master and Servant
Act was repealed, peaceful picketing was permitted, and "violence and
intimidation" during strikes fell into the domain of common law. Yet,
even during the dock-labourers' strike in 1887, relief money had to be
spent for fighting before the Courts for the right of picketing, while
the prosecutions of the last few years menace once more to render the
conquered rights illusory.
8. A weekly contribution of 6d. out of an 18s. wage, or of 1s. out of
25s., means much more than 9l. out of a 300l. income: it is mostly taken
upon food; and the levy is soon doubled when a strike is declared in a
brother union. The graphic description of trade-union life, by a skilled
craftsman, published by Mr. and Mrs. Webb (pp. 431 seq.), gives an
excellent idea of the amount of work required from a unionist.
9. See the debates upon the strikes of Falkenau in Austria before the
Austrian Reichstag on the 10th of May, 1894, in which debates the fact
is fully recognized by the Ministry and the owner of the colliery. Also
the English Press of that time.
10. Many such facts will be found in the Daily Chronicle and partly the
Daily News for October and November 1894.
11. The 31,473 productive and consumers' associations on the Middle
Rhine showed, about 1890, a yearly expenditure of 18,437,500l.;
3,675,000l. were granted during the year in loans.
12. British Consular Report, April 1889.
13. A capital research on this subject has been published in Russian in
the Zapiski (Memoirs) of the Caucasian Geographical Society, vol. vi. 2,
Tiflis, 1891, by C. Egiazaroff.
14. Escape from a French prison is extremely difficult; nevertheless a
prisoner escaped from one of the French prisons in 1884 or 1885. He even
managed to conceal himself during the whole day, although the alarm was
given and the peasants in the neighbourhood were on the look-out for
him. Next morning found him concealed in a ditch, close by a small
village. Perhaps he intended to steal some food, or some clothes in
order to take off his prison uniform. As he was lying in the ditch a
fire broke out in the village. He saw a woman running out of one of the
burning houses, and heard her desperate appeals to rescue a child in the
upper storey of the burning house. No one moved to do so. 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. Of course he was
arrested on the spot by the village gendarme, who now made his
appearance. He was taken back to the prison. The fact was reported in
all French papers, but none of them bestirred itself to obtain his
release. If he had shielded a warder from a comrade's blow, he would
have been made a hero of. But his act was simply humane, it did not
promote the State's ideal; he himself did not attribute it to a sudden
inspiration of divine grace; and that was enough to let the man fall
into oblivion. Perhaps, six or twelve months were added to his sentence
for having stolen--"the State's property"--the prison's dress.
15. The medical Academy for Women (which has given to Russia a large
portion of her 700 graduated lady doctors), the four Ladies'
Universities (about 1000 pupils in 1887; closed that year, and reopened
in 1895), and the High Commercial School for Women are entirely the work
of such private societies. To the same societies we owe the high
standard which the girls' gymnasia attained since they were opened in
the sixties. The 100 gymnasia now scattered over the Empire (over 70,000
pupils), correspond to the High Schools for Girls in this country; all
teachers are, however, graduates of the universities.
16. The Verein für Verbreitung gemeinnutslicher Kenntnisse, although it
has only 5500 members, has already opened more than 1000 public and
school libraries, organized thousands of lectures, and published most
valuable books.
17. Very few writers in sociology have paid attention to it. Dr. Ihering
is one of them, and his case is very instructive. When the great German
writer on law began his philosophical work, Der Zweck im Rechte
("Purpose in Law"), he intended to analyze "the active forces which call
forth the advance of society and maintain it," and to thus give "the
theory of the sociable man." He analyzed, first, the egotistic forces at
work, including the present wage-system and coercion in its variety of
political and social laws; and in a carefully worked-out scheme of his
work he intended to give the last paragraph to the ethical forces--the
sense of duty and mutual love--which contribute to the same aim. When he
came, however, to discuss the social functions of these two factors, he
had to write a second volume, twice as big as the first; and yet he
treated only of the personal factors which will take in the following
pages only a few lines. L. Dargun took up the same idea in Egoismus und
Altruismus in der Nationalokonomie, Leipzig, 1885, adding some new
facts. Buchner's Love, and the several paraphrases of it published here
and in Germany, deal with the same subject.
18. Light and Shadows in the Life of an Artisan. Coventry, 1893.
19. Many rich people cannot understand how the very poor can help each
other, because they do not realize upon what infinitesimal amounts of
food or money often hangs the life of one of the poorest classes. Lord
Shaftesbury had understood this terrible truth when he started his
Flowers and Watercress Girls' Fund, out of which loans of one pound, and
only occasionally two pounds, were granted, to enable the girls to buy a
basket and flowers when the winter sets in and they are in dire
distress. The loans were given to girls who had "not a sixpence," but
never failed to find some other poor to go bail for them. "Of all the
movements I have ever been connected with," Lord Shaftesbury wrote, "I
look upon this Watercress Girls' movement as the most successful.... It
was begun in 1872, and we have had out 800 to 1,000 loans, and have not
lost 50l. during the whole period.... What has been lost--and it has
been very little, under the circumstances--has been by reason of death
or sickness, not by fraud" (The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of
Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder, vol. iii. p. 322. London, 1885-86).
Several more facts in point in Ch. Booth's Life and Labour in London,
vol. i; in Miss Beatrice Potter's "Pages from a Work Girl's Diary"
(Nineteenth Century, September 1888, p. 310); and so on.
20. Samuel Plimsoll, Our Seamen, cheap edition, London, 1870, p. 110.
21. Our Seamen, u.s., p. 110. Mr. Plimsoll added: "I don't wish to
disparage the rich, but I think it may be reasonably doubted whether
these qualities are so fully developed in them; for, notwithstanding
that not a few of them are not unacquainted with the claims, reasonable
or unreasonable, of poor relatives, these qualities are not in such
constant exercise. 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: they are reserved for the sufferings of
their own class, and also the woes of those above them. They seldom tend
downwards much, and they are far more likely to admire an act of courage
... than to admire the constantly exercised fortitude and the tenderness
which are the daily characteristics of a British workman's life"--and of
the workmen all over the world as well.
22. Life of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder, vol. i.
pp. 137-138.
CONCLUSION
If we take now the teachings which can be borrowed from the analysis of
modern society, in connection with the body of evidence relative to the
importance of mutual aid in the evolution of the animal world and of
mankind, we may sum up our inquiry as follows.
In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live
in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the
struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian
sense--not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a
struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The
animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its
narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the
greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most
prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection
which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and
of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the
further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the
species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The
unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
Going next over to man, we found him living in clans and tribes at the
very dawn of the stone age; we saw a wide series of social institutions
developed already in the lower savage stage, in the clan and the tribe;
and we found that the earliest tribal customs and habits gave to mankind
the embryo of all the institutions which made later on the leading
aspects of further progress. Out of the savage tribe grew up the
barbarian village community; and a new, still wider, circle of social
customs, habits, and institutions, numbers of which are still alive
among ourselves, was developed under the principles of common possession
of a given territory and common defence of it, under the jurisdiction of
the village folkmote, and in the federation of villages belonging, or
supposed to belong, to one stem. And when new requirements induced men
to make a new start, they made it in the city, which represented a
double network of territorial units (village communities), connected
with guilds these latter arising out of the common prosecution of a
given art or craft, or for mutual support and defence.
And finally, in the last two chapters facts were produced to show that
although the growth of the State on the pattern of Imperial Rome had put
a violent end to all medieval institutions for mutual support, this new
aspect of civilization could not last. The State, based upon loose
aggregations of individuals and undertaking to be their only bond of
union, did not answer its purpose. The mutual-aid tendency finally broke
down its iron rules; it reappeared and reasserted itself in an infinity
of associations which now tend to embrace all aspects of life and to
take possession of all that is required by man for life and for
reproducing the waste occasioned by life.
It will probably be remarked that mutual aid, even though it may
represent one of the factors of evolution, covers nevertheless one
aspect only of human relations; that by the side of this current,
powerful though it may be, there is, and always has been, the other
current--the self-assertion of the individual, not only in its efforts
to attain personal or caste superiority, economical, political, and
spiritual, but also in its much more important although less evident
function of breaking through the bonds, always prone to become
crystallized, which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the
State impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the
self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element.
It is evident that no review of evolution can be complete, unless these
two dominant currents are analyzed. However, the self-assertion of the
individual or of groups of individuals, their struggles for superiority,
and the conflicts which resulted therefrom, have already been analyzed,
described, and glorified from time immemorial. In fact, up to the
present time, this current alone has received attention from the epical
poet, the annalist, the historian, and the sociologist. History, such as
it has hitherto been written, is almost entirely a description of the
ways and means by which theocracy, military power, autocracy, and, later
on, the richer classes' rule have been promoted, established, and
maintained. The struggles between these forces make, in fact, the
substance of history. We may thus take the knowledge of the individual
factor in human history as granted--even though there is full room for a
new study of the subject on the lines just alluded to; while, on the
other side, the mutual-aid factor has been hitherto totally lost sight
of; it was simply denied, or even scoffed at, by the writers of the
present and past generation. It was therefore necessary to show, first
of all, the immense part which this factor plays in the evolution of
both the animal world and human societies. Only after this has been
fully recognized will it be possible to proceed to a comparison between
the two factors.
To make even a rough estimate of their relative importance by any method
more or less statistical, is evidently impossible. 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. But when we see that in the animal world,
progressive development and mutual aid go hand in hand, while the inner
struggle within the species is concomitant with retrogressive
development; when we notice that with man, even success in struggle and
war is proportionate to the development of mutual aid in each of the two
conflicting nations, cities, parties, or tribes, and that in the process
of evolution war itself (so far as it can go this way) has been made
subservient to the ends of progress in mutual aid within the nation, the
city or the clan--we already obtain a perception of the dominating
influence of the mutual-aid factor as an element of progress. But we see
also that the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments
have created the very conditions of society life in which man was
enabled to develop his arts, knowledge, and intelligence; and that the
periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their
greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in
arts, industry, and science. In fact, the study of the inner life of the
medieval city and of the ancient Greek cities reveals the fact that the
combination of mutual aid, as it was practised within the guild and the
Greek clan, with a large initiative which was left to the individual and
the group by means of the federative principle, gave to mankind the two
greatest periods of its history--the ancient Greek city and the medieval
city periods; while the ruin of the above institutions during the State
periods of history, which followed, corresponded in both cases to a
rapid decay.
As to the sudden industrial progress which has been achieved during our
own century, and which is usually ascribed to the triumph of
individualism and competition, it certainly has a much deeper origin
than that. Once the great discoveries of the fifteenth century were
made, especially that of the pressure of the atmosphere, supported by a
series of advances in natural philosophy--and they were made under the
medieval city organization,--once these discoveries were made, the
invention of the steam-motor, and all the revolution which the conquest
of a new power implied, had necessarily to follow. If the medieval
cities had lived to bring their discoveries to that point, the ethical
consequences of the revolution effected by steam might have been
different; but the same revolution in technics and science would have
inevitably taken place. It remains, indeed, an open question whether the
general decay of industries which followed the ruin of the free cities,
and was especially noticeable in the first part of the eighteenth
century, did not considerably retard the appearance of the steam-engine
as well as the consequent revolution in arts. When we consider the
astounding rapidity of industrial progress from the twelfth to the
fifteenth centuries--in weaving, working of metals, architecture and
navigation, and ponder over the scientific discoveries which that
industrial progress led to at the end of the fifteenth century--we must
ask ourselves whether mankind was not delayed in its taking full
advantage of these conquests when a general depression of arts and
industries took place in Europe after the decay of medieval
civilization. Surely it was not the disappearance of the artist-artisan,
nor the ruin of large cities and the extinction of intercourse between
them, which could favour the industrial revolution; and we know indeed
that James Watt spent twenty or more years of his life in order to
render his invention serviceable, because he could not find in the last
century what he would have readily found in medieval Florence or Brugge,
that is, the artisans capable of realizing his devices in metal, and of
giving them the artistic finish and precision which the steam-engine
requires.
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. For industrial progress, as for each
other conquest over nature, mutual aid and close intercourse certainly
are, as they have been, much more advantageous than mutual struggle.
However, it is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating
importance of the mutual-aid principle appears in full. That mutual aid
is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough.
But whatever the opinions as to the first origin of the mutual-aid
feeling or instinct may be whether a biological or a supernatural cause
is ascribed to it--we must trace its existence as far back as to the
lowest stages of the animal world; and from these stages we can follow
its uninterrupted evolution, in opposition to a number of contrary
agencies, through all degrees of human development, up to the present
times. Even the new religions which were born from time to time--always
at epochs when the mutual-aid principle was falling into decay in the
theocracies and despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the
Roman Empire--even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same
principle. They found their first supporters among the humble, in the
lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid principle is
the necessary foundation of every-day life; and the new forms of union
which were introduced in the earliest Buddhist and Christian
communities, in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on, took the character
of a return to the best aspects of mutual aid in early tribal life.
Each time, however, that an attempt to return to this old principle was
made, its fundamental idea itself was widened. From the clan it was
extended to the stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and
finally--in ideal, at least--to the whole of mankind. It was also
refined at the same time. In primitive Buddhism, in primitive
Christianity, in the writings of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the
early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and
philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the
total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of "due reward"--of good
for good and evil for evil--is affirmed more and more vigorously. The
higher conception of "no revenge for wrongs," and of freely giving more
than one expects to receive from his neighbours, is proclaimed as being
the real principle of morality--a principle superior to mere
equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness. And
man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which
is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his
oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we
can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the
positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can
affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual
struggle--has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the
present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier
evolution of our race.
End of Project Gutenberg's Mutual Aid, by kniaz' Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin