Mutual Aid - Peter Kropotkin (ereader that reads to you .TXT) 📗

debates the fact is fully recognized by the Ministry and the owner of the colliery. Also the English Press of that time. ↩

Many such facts will be found in the Daily Chronicle and partly the Daily News for October and November 1894. ↩

The 31,473 productive and consumers’ associations on the Middle Rhine showed, about 1890, a yearly expenditure of £18,437,500; £3,675,000 were granted during the year in loans. ↩

British Consular Report, April 1889. ↩

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. ↩

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 lookout 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. ↩

The medical Academy for Women (which has given to Russia a large portion of her 700 graduated lady doctors), the four Ladies’ Universities (about 1,000 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. ↩

The Verein für Verbreitung gemeinnütslicher Kenntnisse, although it has only 5,500 members, has already opened more than 1,000 public and school libraries, organized thousands of lectures, and published most valuable books. ↩

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. Büchner’s Love, and the several paraphrases of it published here and in Germany, deal with the same subject. ↩

Light and Shadows in the Life of an Artisan. Coventry, 1893. ↩

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 £50 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