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

is now known that the primitive Semites, the Greeks of Homer, the prehistoric Romans, the Germans of Tacitus, the early Celts and the early Slavonians, all have had their own period of clan organization, closely analogous to that of the Australians, the Red Indians, the Eskimos, and other inhabitants of the “savage girdle.”76 So we must admit that either the evolution of marriage laws went on on the same lines among all human races, or the rudiments of the clan rules were developed among some common ancestors of the Semites, the Aryans, the Polynesians, etc., before their differentiation into separate races took place, and that these rules were maintained, until now, among races long ago separated from the common stock. Both alternatives imply, however, an equally striking tenacity of the institution⁠—such a tenacity that no assaults of the individual could break it down through the scores of thousands of years that it was in existence. The very persistence of the clan organization shows how utterly false it is to represent primitive mankind as a disorderly agglomeration of individuals, who only obey their individual passions, and take advantage of their personal force and cunningness against all other representatives of the species. Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.77

Going now over to the existing savages, we may begin with the Bushmen, who stand at a very low level of development⁠—so low indeed that they have no dwellings and sleep in holes dug in the soil, occasionally protected by some screens. It is known that when Europeans settled in their territory and destroyed deer, the Bushmen began stealing the settlers’ cattle, whereupon a war of extermination, too horrible to be related here, was waged against them. 500 Bushmen were slaughtered in 1774, 3,000 in 1808 and 1809 by the Farmers’ Alliance, and so on. They were poisoned like rats, killed by hunters lying in ambush before the carcass of some animal, killed wherever met with.78 So that our knowledge of the Bushmen, being chiefly borrowed from those same people who exterminated them, is necessarily limited. But still we know that when the Europeans came, the Bushmen lived in small tribes (or clans), sometimes federated together; that they used to hunt in common, and divided the spoil without quarrelling; that they never abandoned their wounded, and displayed strong affection to their comrades. Lichtenstein has a most touching story about a Bushman, nearly drowned in a river, who was rescued by his companions. They took off their furs to cover him, and shivered themselves; they dried him, rubbed him before the fire, and smeared his body with warm grease till they brought him back to life. And when the Bushmen found, in Johan van der Walt, a man who treated them well, they expressed their thankfulness by a most touching attachment to that man.79 Burchell and Moffat both represent them as goodhearted, disinterested, true to their promises, and grateful,80 all qualities which could develop only by being practised within the tribe. As to their love to children, it is sufficient to say that when a European wished to secure a Bushman woman as a slave, he stole her child: the mother was sure to come into slavery to share the fate of her child.81

The same social manners characterize the Hottentots, who are but a little more developed than the Bushmen. Lubbock describes them as “the filthiest animals,” and filthy they really are. A fur suspended to the neck and worn till it falls to pieces is all their dress; their huts are a few sticks assembled together and covered with mats, with no kind of furniture within. And though they kept oxen and sheep, and seem to have known the use of iron before they made acquaintance with the Europeans, they still occupy one of the lowest degrees of the human scale. And yet those who knew them highly praised their sociability and readiness to aid each other. If anything is given to a Hottentot, he at once divides it among all present⁠—a habit which, as is known, so much struck Darwin among the Fuegians. He cannot eat alone, and, however hungry, he calls those who pass by to share his food. And when Kolben expressed his astonishment thereat, he received the answer: “That is Hottentot manner.” But this is not Hottentot manner only: it is an all but universal habit among the “savages.” Kolben, who knew the Hottentots well and did not pass by their defects in silence, could not praise their tribal morality highly enough.

“Their word is sacred,” he wrote. They know “nothing of the corruptness and faithless arts of Europe.” “They live in great tranquillity and are seldom at war with their neighbours.” They are “all kindness and goodwill to one another⁠ ⁠… One of the greatest pleasures of the Hottentots certainly lies in their gifts and good offices to one another.” “The integrity of the Hottentots, their strictness and celerity in the exercise of justice, and their chastity, are things in which they excel all or most nations in the world.”82

Tachart, Barrow, and Moodie83 fully confirm Kolben’s testimony. Let me only remark that when Kolben wrote that “they are certainly the most friendly, the most liberal and the most benevolent people to one another that ever appeared on the earth” (i, 332), he wrote a sentence which has continually appeared since in the description of savages. When first meeting with primitive races, the Europeans usually make a caricature of their life; but when an intelligent man has stayed among them for a longer time, he generally describes them as the “kindest” or “the gentlest” race on the earth. These very same words have been applied to the Ostyaks, the Samoyedes, the Eskimos, the Dayaks, the Aleuts, the Papuas, and so on, by the highest authorities. I also remember having read