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Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin · English · Gutenberg #4341 · 587,313 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Author: kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin


        
Release date: August 1, 2003 [eBook #4341]
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Language: English

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MUTUAL AID

A FACTOR OF EVOLUTION

BY P. KROPOTKIN

1902




INTRODUCTION


Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I
made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them
was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most
species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the
enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural
agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory
which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those
few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, 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 (though not always by Darwin
himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the
main factor of evolution.

The terrible snow-storms which sweep over the northern portion of
Eurasia in the later part of the winter, and the glazed frost that often
follows them; the frosts and the snow-storms which return every year in
the second half of May, when the trees are already in full blossom and
insect life swarms everywhere; the early frosts and, occasionally, the
heavy snowfalls in July and August, which suddenly destroy myriads of
insects, as well as the second broods of the birds in the prairies; the
torrential rains, due to the monsoons, which fall in more temperate
regions in August and September--resulting in inundations on a scale
which is only known in America and in Eastern Asia, and swamping, on the
plateaus, areas as wide as European States; and finally, the heavy
snowfalls, early in October, which eventually render a territory as
large as France and Germany, absolutely impracticable for ruminants, and
destroy them by the thousand--these were the conditions under which I
saw animal life struggling in Northern Asia. They made me realize at an
early date the overwhelming importance in Nature of what Darwin
described as "the natural checks to over-multiplication," in comparison
to the struggle between individuals of the same species for the means of
subsistence, which may go on here and there, to some limited extent, but
never attains the importance of the former. Paucity of life,
under-population--not over-population--being the distinctive feature of
that immense part of the globe which we name Northern Asia, I conceived
since then serious doubts--which subsequent study has only confirmed--as
to the reality of that fearful competition for food and life within each
species, which was an article of faith with most Darwinists, and,
consequently, as to the dominant part which this sort of competition was
supposed to play in the evolution of new species.

On the other hand, wherever I saw animal life in abundance, as, for
instance, on the lakes where scores of species and millions of
individuals came together to rear their progeny; in the colonies of
rodents; in the migrations of birds which took place at that time on a
truly American scale along the Usuri; and especially in a migration of
fallow-deer which I witnessed on the Amur, and during which scores of
thousands of these intelligent animals came together from an immense
territory, flying before the coming deep snow, in order to cross the
Amur where it is narrowest--in all these scenes of animal life which
passed before my eyes, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to
an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest
importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each
species, and its further evolution.

And finally, I saw among the semi-wild cattle and horses in
Transbaikalia, among the wild ruminants everywhere, the squirrels, and
so on, that when animals have to struggle against scarcity of food, in
consequence of one of the above-mentioned causes, the whole of that
portion of the species which is affected by the calamity, comes out of
the ordeal so much impoverished in vigour and health, that no
progressive evolution of the species can be based upon such periods of
keen competition.

Consequently, when my attention was drawn, later on, to the relations
between Darwinism and Sociology, I could agree with none of the works
and pamphlets that had been written upon this important subject. They
all endeavoured to prove that Man, owing to his higher intelligence and
knowledge, may mitigate the harshness of the struggle for life between
men; but they all recognized at the same time that the struggle for the
means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners, and of
every man against all other men, was "a law of Nature." This view,
however, I could not accept, because I was persuaded that 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.

On the contrary, a lecture "On the Law of Mutual Aid," which was
delivered at a Russian Congress of Naturalists, in January 1880, by the
well-known zoologist, Professor Kessler, the then Dean of the St.
Petersburg University, struck me as throwing a new light on the whole
subject. Kessler's idea was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle
there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the
struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the
species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest. This
suggestion--which was, in reality, nothing but a further development of
the ideas expressed by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man--seemed to
me so correct and of so great an importance, that since I became
acquainted with it (in 1883) I began to collect materials for further
developing the idea, which Kessler had only cursorily sketched in his
lecture, but had not lived to develop. He died in 1881.

In one point only I could not entirely endorse Kessler's views. Kessler
alluded to "parental feeling" and care for progeny (see below, Chapter
I) as to the source of mutual inclinations in animals. However, to
determine how far these two feelings have really been at work in the
evolution of sociable instincts, and how far other instincts have been
at work in the same direction, seems to me a quite distinct and a very
wide question, which we hardly can discuss yet. It will be only after we
have well established the facts of mutual aid in different classes of
animals, and their importance for evolution, that we shall be able to
study what belongs in the evolution of sociable feelings, to parental
feelings, and what to sociability proper--the latter having evidently
its origin at the earliest stages of the evolution of the animal world,
perhaps even at the "colony-stages." I consequently directed my chief
attention to establishing first of all, the importance of the Mutual Aid
factor of evolution, leaving to ulterior research the task of
discovering the origin of the Mutual Aid instinct in Nature.

The importance of the Mutual Aid factor--"if its generality could only
be demonstrated"--did not escape the naturalist's genius so manifest in
Goethe. When Eckermann told once to Goethe--it was in 1827--that two
little wren-fledglings, which had run away from him, were found by him
next day in the nest of robin redbreasts (Rothkehlchen), which fed the
little ones, together with their own youngsters, Goethe grew quite
excited about this fact. He saw in it a confirmation of his pantheistic
views, and said:--"If it be true that this feeding of a stranger goes
through all Nature as something having the character of a general
law--then many an enigma would be solved." He returned to this matter on
the next day, and most earnestly entreated Eckermann (who was, as is
known, a zoologist) to make a special study of the subject, adding that
he would surely come "to quite invaluable treasuries of results"
(Gespräche, edition of 1848, vol. iii. pp. 219, 221). Unfortunately,
this study was never made, although it is very possible that Brehm, who
has accumulated in his works such rich materials relative to mutual aid
among animals, might have been inspired by Goethe's remark.

Several works of importance were published in the years 1872-1886,
dealing with the intelligence and the mental life of animals (they are
mentioned in a footnote in Chapter I of this book), and three of them
dealt more especially with the subject under consideration; namely, Les
Societes animales, by Espinas (Paris, 1877); La Lutte pour l'existence
et l'association pout la lutte, a lecture by J.L. Lanessan (April 1881);
and Louis Buchner's book, Liebe und Liebes-Leben in der Thierwelt, of
which the first edition appeared in 1882 or 1883, and a second, much
enlarged, in 1885. But excellent though each of these works is, they
leave ample room for a work in which Mutual Aid would be considered, not
only as an argument in favour of a pre-human origin of moral instincts,
but also as a law of Nature and a factor of evolution. Espinas devoted
his main attention to such animal societies (ants, bees) as are
established upon a physiological division of labour, and though his work
is full of admirable hints in all possible directions, it was written at
a time when the evolution of human societies could not yet be treated
with the knowledge we now possess. Lanessan's lecture has more the
character of a brilliantly laid-out general plan of a work, in which
mutual support would be dealt with, beginning with rocks in the sea, and
then passing in review the world of plants, of animals and men. As to
Buchner's work, suggestive though it is and rich in facts, I could not
agree with its leading idea. The book begins with a hymn to Love, and
nearly all its illustrations are intended to prove the existence of love
and sympathy among animals. However, to reduce animal sociability to
love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance,
just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have
contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole.
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. So it is
also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in
its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form
a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces
wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or
lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days
together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy
which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as
large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching
towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling
infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy--an instinct that has
been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an
extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the
force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and
the joys they can find in social life.

The importance of this distinction will be easily appreciated by the
student of animal psychology, and the more so by the student of human
ethics. Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part
in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love
and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the
conscience--be it only at the stage of an instinct--of human solidarity.
It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each
man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every
one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice,
or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every
other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary
foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed. But this
subject lies outside the scope of the present work, and I shall only
indicate here a lecture, "Justice and Morality" which I delivered in
reply to Huxley's Ethics, and in which the subject has been treated at
some length.

Consequently I thought that a book, written on Mutual Aid as a Law of
Nature and a factor of evolution, might fill an important gap. When
Huxley issued, in 1888, his "Struggle-for-life" manifesto (Struggle for
Existence and its Bearing upon Man), which to my appreciation was a very
incorrect representation of the facts of Nature, as one sees them in the
bush and in the forest, I communicated with the editor of the Nineteenth
Century, asking him whether he would give the hospitality of his review
to an elaborate reply to the views of one of the most prominent
Darwinists; and Mr. James Knowles received the proposal with fullest
sympathy. I also spoke of it to W. Bates. "Yes, certainly; that is true
Darwinism," was his reply. "It is horrible what 'they' have made of
Darwin. Write these articles, and when they are printed, I will write to
you a letter which you may publish." Unfortunately, it took me nearly
seven years to write these articles, and when the last was published,
Bates was no longer living.

After having discussed the importance of mutual aid in various classes
of animals, I was evidently bound to discuss the importance of the same
factor in the evolution of Man. This was the more necessary as there are
a number of evolutionists who may not refuse to admit the importance of
mutual aid among animals, but who, like Herbert Spencer, will refuse to
admit it for Man. For primitive Man--they maintain--war of each against
all was the law of life. In how far this assertion, which has been too
willingly repeated, without sufficient criticism, since the times of
Hobbes, is supported by what we know about the early phases of human
development, is discussed in the chapters given to the Savages and the
Barbarians.

The number and importance of mutual-aid institutions which were
developed by the creative genius of the savage and half-savage masses,
during the earliest clan-period of mankind and still more during the
next village-community period, and the immense influence which these
early institutions have exercised upon the subsequent development of
mankind, down to the present times, induced me to extend my researches
to the later, historical periods as well; especially, to study that most
interesting period--the free medieval city republics, of which the
universality and influence upon our modern civilization have not yet
been duly appreciated. And finally, I have tried to indicate in brief
the immense importance which the mutual-support instincts, inherited by
mankind from its extremely long evolution, play even now in our modern
society, which is supposed to rest upon the principle: "every one for
himself, and the State for all," but which it never has succeeded, nor
will succeed in realizing.

It may be objected to this book that both animals and men are
represented in it under too favourable an aspect; that their sociable
qualities are insisted upon, while their anti-social and self-asserting
instincts are hardly touched upon. This was, however, unavoidable. We
have heard so much lately of the "harsh, pitiless struggle for life,"
which was said to be carried on by every animal against all other
animals, every "savage" against all other "savages," and every civilized
man against all his co-citizens--and these assertions have so much
become an article of faith--that it was necessary, first of all, to
oppose to them a wide series of facts showing animal and human life
under a quite different aspect. It was necessary to indicate the
overwhelming importance which sociable habits play in Nature and in the
progressive evolution of both the animal species and human beings: to
prove that they secure to animals a better protection from their
enemies, very often facilities for getting food and (winter provisions,
migrations, etc.), longevity, therefore a greater facility for the
development of intellectual faculties; and that they have given to men,
in addition to the same advantages, the possibility of working out those
institutions which have enabled mankind to survive in its hard struggle
against Nature, and to progress, notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of
its history. It is a book on the law of Mutual Aid, viewed at as one of
the chief factors of evolution--not on all factors of evolution and
their respective values; and this first book had to be written, before
the latter could become possible.

I should certainly be the last to underrate the part which the
self-assertion of the individual has played in the evolution of mankind.
However, this subject requires, I believe, a much deeper treatment than
the one it has hitherto received. In the history of mankind, individual
self-assertion has often been, and continually is, something quite
different from, and far larger and deeper than, the petty, unintelligent
narrow-mindedness, which, with a large class of writers, goes for
"individualism" and "self-assertion." Nor have history-making
individuals been limited to those whom historians have represented as
heroes. My intention, consequently, is, if circumstances permit it, to
discuss separately the part taken by the self-assertion of the
individual in the progressive evolution of mankind. I can only make in
this place the following general remark:--When the Mutual Aid
institutions--the tribe, the village community, the guilds, the medieval
city--began, in the course of history, to lose their primitive
character, to be invaded by parasitic growths, and thus to become
hindrances to progress, the revolt of individuals against these
institutions took always two different aspects. Part of those who rose
up strove to purify the old institutions, or to work out a higher form
of commonwealth, based upon the same Mutual Aid principles; they tried,
for instance, to introduce the principle of "compensation," instead of
the lex talionis, and later on, the pardon of offences, or a still
higher ideal of equality before the human conscience, in lieu of
"compensation," according to class-value. But at the very same time,
another portion of the same individual rebels endeavoured to break down
the protective institutions of mutual support, with no other intention
but to increase their own wealth and their own powers. 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 to delineate that contest, and honestly to study the part played in
the evolution of mankind by each one of these three forces, would
require at least as many years as it took me to write this book.

Of works dealing with nearly the same subject, which have been published
since the publication of my articles on Mutual Aid among Animals, I must
mention The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man, by Henry Drummond
(London, 1894), and The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, by A.
Sutherland (London, 1898). Both are constructed chiefly on the lines
taken in Buchner's Love, and in the second work the parental and
familial feeling as the sole influence at work in the development of the
moral feelings has been dealt with at some length. A third work dealing
with man and written on similar lines is The Principles of Sociology, by
Prof. F.A. Giddings, the first edition of which was published in 1896 at
New York and London, and the leading ideas of which were sketched by the
author in a pamphlet in 1894. I must leave, however, to literary critics
the task of discussing the points of contact, resemblance, or divergence
between these works and mine.

The different chapters of this book were published first in the
Nineteenth Century ("Mutual Aid among Animals," in September and
November 1890; "Mutual Aid among Savages," in April 1891; "Mutual Aid
among the Barbarians," in January 1892; "Mutual Aid in the Medieval
City," in August and September 1894; and "Mutual Aid amongst Modern
Men," in January and June 1896). In bringing them out in a book form my
first intention was to embody in an Appendix the mass of materials, as
well as the discussion of several secondary points, which had to be
omitted in the review articles. It appeared, however, that the Appendix
would double the size of the book, and I was compelled to abandon, or,
at least, to postpone its publication. The present Appendix includes the
discussion of only a few points which have been the matter of scientific
controversy during the last few years; and into the text I have
introduced only such matter as could be introduced without altering the
structure of the work.

I am glad of this opportunity for expressing to the editor of the
Nineteenth Century, Mr. James Knowles, my very best thanks, both for the
kind hospitality which he offered to these papers in his review, as soon
as he knew their general idea, and the permission he kindly gave me to
reprint them.

Bromley, Kent, 1902.




CHAPTER I

MUTUAL AID AMONG ANIMALS

Struggle for existence. Mutual Aid a law of Nature and chief factor of
progressive evolution. Invertebrates. Ants and Bees. Birds, hunting and
fishing associations. Sociability. Mutual protection among small birds.
Cranes, parrots.


The conception of struggle for existence as a factor of evolution,
introduced into science by Darwin and Wallace, has permitted us to
embrace an immensely wide range of phenomena in one single
generalization, which soon became the very basis of our philosophical,
biological, and sociological speculations. An immense variety of
facts:--adaptations of function and structure of organic beings to their
surroundings; physiological and anatomical evolution; intellectual
progress, and moral development itself, which we formerly used to
explain by so many different causes, were embodied by Darwin in one
general conception. We understood them as continued endeavours--as a
struggle against adverse circumstances--for such a development of
individuals, races, species and societies, as would result in the
greatest possible fulness, variety, and intensity of life. It may be
that at the outset Darwin himself was not fully aware of the generality
of the factor which he first invoked for explaining one series only of
facts relative to the accumulation of individual variations in incipient
species. 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. And at the very
beginning of his memorable work he insisted upon the term being taken in
its "large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on
another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of
the individual, but success in leaving progeny."(1)

While he himself was chiefly using the term in its narrow sense for his
own special purpose, he warned his followers against committing the
error (which he seems once to have committed himself) of overrating its
narrow meaning. In The Descent of Man he gave some powerful pages to
illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless
animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the
means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation,
and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and
moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for
survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the
physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine
so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the
welfare of the community. "Those communities," he wrote, "which included
the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best,
and rear the greatest number of offspring" (2nd edit., p. 163). The
term, which originated from the narrow Malthusian conception of
competition between each and all, thus lost its narrowness in the mind
of one who knew Nature.

Unhappily, these remarks, which might have become the basis of most
fruitful researches, were overshadowed by the masses of facts gathered
for the purpose of illustrating the consequences of a real competition
for life. Besides, Darwin never attempted to submit to a closer
investigation the relative importance of the two aspects under which the
struggle for existence appears in the animal world, and he never wrote
the work he proposed to write upon the natural checks to
over-multiplication, although that work would have been the crucial test
for appreciating the real purport of individual struggle. Nay, on the
very pages just mentioned, amidst data disproving the narrow Malthusian
conception of struggle, the old Malthusian leaven reappeared--namely, in
Darwin's remarks as to the alleged inconveniences of maintaining the
"weak in mind and body" in our civilized societies (ch. v). As if
thousands of weak-bodied and infirm poets, scientists, inventors, and
reformers, together with other thousands of so-called "fools" and
"weak-minded enthusiasts," were not the most precious weapons used by
humanity in its struggle for existence by intellectual and moral arms,
which Darwin himself emphasized in those same chapters of Descent of
Man.

It happened with Darwin's theory as it always happens with theories
having any bearing upon human relations. Instead of widening it
according to his own hints, his followers narrowed it still more. And
while Herbert Spencer, starting on independent but closely allied lines,
attempted to widen the inquiry into that great question, "Who are the
fittest?" especially in the appendix to the third edition of the Data of
Ethics, the numberless followers of Darwin reduced the notion of
struggle for existence to its narrowest limits. They came to conceive
the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved
individuals, thirsting for one another's blood. They made modern
literature resound with the war-cry of woe to the vanquished, as if it
were the last word of modern biology. They raised the "pitiless"
struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle
which man must submit to as well, under the menace of otherwise
succumbing in a world based upon mutual extermination. Leaving aside the
economists who know of natural science but a few words borrowed from
second-hand vulgarizers, we must recognize that even the most authorized
exponents of Darwin's views did their best to maintain those false
ideas. In fact, if we take Huxley, who certainly is considered as one of
the ablest exponents of the theory of evolution, were we not taught by
him, in a paper on the 'Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon
Man,' that,

     "from the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on
     about the same level as a gladiators' show. The creatures are
     fairly well treated, and set to, fight hereby the strongest, the
     swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The
     spectator has no need to turn his thumb down, as no quarter is
     given."

Or, further down in the same article, did he not tell us that, as among
animals, so among primitive men,

     "the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and
     shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their
     circumstances, but not the best in another way, survived. Life was
     a continuous free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary
     relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was
     the normal state of existence."(2)

In how far this view of nature is supported by fact, will be seen from
the evidence which will be here submitted to the reader as regards the
animal world, and as regards primitive man. But it may be remarked at
once that Huxley's view of nature had as little claim to be taken as a
scientific deduction as the opposite view of Rousseau, who saw in nature
but love, peace, and harmony destroyed by the accession of man. In fact,
the first walk in the forest, the first observation upon any animal
society, or even the perusal of any serious work dealing with animal
life (D'Orbigny's, Audubon's, Le Vaillant's, no matter which), cannot
but set the naturalist thinking about the part taken by social life in
the life of animals, and prevent him from seeing in Nature nothing but a
field of slaughter, just as this would prevent him from seeing in Nature
nothing but harmony and peace. Rousseau had committed the error of
excluding the beak-and-claw fight from his thoughts; and Huxley
committed the opposite error; but neither Rousseau's optimism nor
Huxley's pessimism can be accepted as an impartial interpretation of
nature.

As soon as we study animals--not in laboratories and museums only, but
in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains--we at
once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and
extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst
various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or
perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence
amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same
society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of
course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the
relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we
resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those
who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one
another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of
mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to
survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest
development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless
facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into
account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal
life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most
probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the
development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and
further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of
welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste
of energy.

Of the scientific followers of Darwin, the first, as far as I know, who
understood the full purport of Mutual Aid as a law of Nature and the
chief factor of evolution, was a well-known Russian zoologist, the late
Dean of the St. Petersburg University, Professor Kessler. He developed
his ideas in an address which he delivered in January 1880, a few months
before his death, at a Congress of Russian naturalists; but, like so
many good things published in the Russian tongue only, that remarkable
address remains almost entirely unknown.(3)

"As a zoologist of old standing," he felt bound to protest against the
abuse of a term--the struggle for existence--borrowed from zoology, or,
at least, against overrating its importance. Zoology, he said, and those
sciences which deal with man, continually insist upon what they call the
pitiless law of struggle for existence. But they forget the existence of
another law which may be described as the law of mutual aid, which law,
at least for the animals, is far more essential than the former. He
pointed out how the need of leaving progeny necessarily brings animals
together, and, "the more the individuals keep together, the more they
mutually support each other, and the more are the chances of the species
for surviving, as well as for making further progress in its
intellectual development." "All classes of animals," he continued, "and
especially the higher ones, practise mutual aid," and he illustrated his
idea by examples borrowed from the life of the burying beetles and the
social life of birds and some mammalia. The examples were few, as might
have been expected in a short opening address, but the chief points were
clearly stated; and, after mentioning that in the evolution of mankind
mutual aid played a still more prominent part, Professor Kessler
concluded as follows:--

"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.... All organic beings have two essential needs: that of
nutrition, and that of propagating the species. The former brings them
to a struggle and to mutual extermination, while the needs of
maintaining the species bring them to approach one another and to
support one another. But I am inclined to think that in the evolution of
the organic world--in the progressive modification of organic
beings--mutual support among individuals plays a much more important
part than their mutual struggle."(4)

The correctness of the above views struck most of the Russian zoologists
present, and Syevertsoff, whose work is well known to ornithologists and
geographers, supported them and illustrated them by a few more examples.
He mentioned sone of the species of falcons which have "an almost ideal
organization for robbery," and nevertheless are in decay, while other
species of falcons, which practise mutual help, do thrive. "Take, on the
other side, a sociable bird, the duck," he said; "it is poorly organized
on the whole, but it practises mutual support, and it almost invades the
earth, as may be judged from its numberless varieties and species."

The readiness of the Russian zoologists to accept Kessler's views seems
quite natural, because nearly all of them have had opportunities of
studying the animal world in the wide uninhabited regions of Northern
Asia and East Russia; and it is impossible to study like regions without
being brought to the same ideas. I recollect myself the impression
produced upon me by the animal world of Siberia when I explored the
Vitim regions in the company of so accomplished a zoologist as my friend
Polyakoff was. We both were under the fresh impression of the Origin of
Species, but we vainly looked for the keen competition between animals
of the same species which the reading of Darwin's work had prepared us
to expect, even after taking into account the remarks of the third
chapter (p. 54). We saw plenty of adaptations for struggling, very often
in common, against the adverse circumstances of climate, or against
various enemies, and Polyakoff wrote many a good page upon the mutual
dependency of carnivores, ruminants, and rodents in their geographical
distribution; we witnessed numbers of facts of mutual support,
especially during the migrations of birds and ruminants; but even in the
Amur and Usuri regions, where animal life swarms in abundance, facts of
real competition and struggle between higher animals of the same species
came very seldom under my notice, though I eagerly searched for them.
The same impression appears in the works of most Russian zoologists, and
it probably explains why Kessler's ideas were so welcomed by the Russian
Darwinists, whilst like ideas are not in vogue amidst the followers of
Darwin in Western Europe.

The first thing which strikes us as soon as we begin studying the
struggle for existence under both its aspects--direct and
metaphorical--is the abundance of facts of mutual aid, not only for
rearing progeny, as recognized by most evolutionists, but also for the
safety of the individual, and for providing it with the necessary food.
With many large divisions of the animal kingdom mutual aid is the rule.
Mutual aid is met with even amidst the lowest animals, and we must be
prepared to learn some day, from the students of microscopical
pond-life, facts of unconscious mutual support, even from the life of
micro-organisms. Of course, our knowledge of the life of the
invertebrates, save the termites, the ants, and the bees, is extremely
limited; and yet, even as regards the lower animals, we may glean a few
facts of well-ascertained cooperation. The numberless associations of
locusts, vanessae, cicindelae, cicadae, and so on, are practically quite
unexplored; but the very fact of their existence indicates that they
must be composed on about the same principles as the temporary
associations of ants or bees for purposes of migration. As to the
beetles, we have quite well-observed facts of mutual help amidst the
burying beetles (Necrophorus). They must have some decaying organic
matter to lay their eggs in, and thus to provide their larvae with food;
but that matter must not decay very rapidly. So they are wont to bury in
the ground the corpses of all kinds of small animals which they
occasionally find in their rambles. As a rule, they live an isolated
life, but when one of them has discovered the corpse of a mouse or of a
bird, which it hardly could manage to bury itself, it calls four, six,
or ten other beetles to perform the operation with united efforts; if
necessary, they transport the corpse to a suitable soft ground; and they
bury it in a very considerate way, without quarrelling as to which of
them will enjoy the privilege of laying its eggs in the buried corpse.
And when Gleditsch attached a dead bird to a cross made out of two
sticks, or suspended a toad to a stick planted in the soil, the little
beetles would in the same friendly way combine their intelligences to
overcome the artifice of Man. The same combination of efforts has been
noticed among the dung-beetles.

Even among animals standing at a somewhat lower stage of organization we
may find like examples. Some land-crabs of the West Indies and North
America combine in large swarms in order to travel to the sea and to
deposit therein their spawn; and each such migration implies concert,
co-operation, and mutual support. As to the big Molucca crab (Limulus),
I was struck (in 1882, at the Brighton Aquarium) with the extent of
mutual assistance which these clumsy animals are capable of bestowing
upon a comrade in case of need. One of them had fallen upon its back in
a corner of the tank, and its heavy saucepan-like carapace prevented it
from returning to its natural position, the more so as there was in the
corner an iron bar which rendered the task still more difficult. Its
comrades came to the rescue, and for one hour's time I watched how they
endeavoured to help their fellow-prisoner. They came two at once, pushed
their friend from beneath, and after strenuous efforts succeeded in
lifting it upright; but then the iron bar would prevent them from
achieving the work of rescue, and the crab would again heavily fall upon
its back. After many attempts, one of the helpers would go in the depth
of the tank and bring two other crabs, which would begin with fresh
forces the same pushing and lifting of their helpless comrade. We stayed
in the Aquarium for more than two hours, and, when leaving, we again
came to cast a glance upon the tank: the work of rescue still continued!
Since I saw that, I cannot refuse credit to the observation quoted by
Dr. Erasmus Darwin--namely, that "the common crab during the moulting
season stations as sentinel an unmoulted or hard-shelled individual to
prevent marine enemies from injuring moulted individuals in their
unprotected state."(5)

Facts illustrating mutual aid amidst the termites, the ants, and the
bees are so well known to the general reader, especially through the
works of Romanes, L. Buchner, and Sir John Lubbock, that I may limit my
remarks to a very few hints.(6) If we take an ants' nest, we not only
see that every description of work-rearing of progeny, foraging,
building, rearing of aphides, and so on--is performed according to the
principles of voluntary mutual aid; we must also recognize, with Forel,
that the chief, the fundamental feature of the life of many species of
ants is the fact and the obligation for every ant of sharing its food,
already swallowed and partly digested, with every member of the
community which may apply for it. Two ants belonging to two different
species or to two hostile nests, when they occasionally meet together,
will avoid each other. But two ants belonging to the same nest or to the
same colony of nests will approach each other, exchange a few movements
with the antennae, and "if one of them is hungry or thirsty, and
especially if the other has its crop full ... it immediately asks for
food." The individual thus requested never refuses; it sets apart its
mandibles, takes a proper position, and regurgitates a drop of
transparent fluid which is licked up by the hungry ant. Regurgitating
food for other ants is so prominent a feature in the life of ants (at
liberty), and it so constantly recurs both for feeding hungry comrades
and for feeding larvae, that Forel considers the digestive tube of the
ants as consisting of two different parts, one of which, the posterior,
is for the special use of the individual, and the other, the anterior
part, is chiefly for the use of the community. 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. If the refusal has been made
while its kinsfolk were fighting with some other species, they will fall
back upon the greedy individual with greater vehemence than even upon
the enemies themselves. And if an ant has not refused to feed another
ant belonging to an enemy species, it will be treated by the kinsfolk of
the latter as a friend. All this is confirmed by most accurate
observation and decisive experiments.(7)

In that immense division of the animal kingdom which embodies more than
one thousand species, and is so numerous that the Brazilians pretend
that Brazil belongs to the ants, not to men, competition amidst the
members of the same nest, or the colony of nests, does not exist.
However terrible the wars between different species, and whatever the
atrocities committed at war-time, mutual aid within the community,
self-devotion grown into a habit, and very often self-sacrifice for the
common welfare, are the rule. The ants and termites have renounced the
"Hobbesian war," and they are the better for it. Their wonderful nests,
their buildings, superior in relative size to those of man; their paved
roads and overground vaulted galleries; their spacious halls and
granaries; their corn-fields, harvesting and "malting" of grain;(8)
their, rational methods of nursing their eggs and larvae, and of
building special nests for rearing the aphides whom Linnaeus so
picturesquely described as "the cows of the ants"; and, finally, their
courage, pluck, and, superior intelligence--all these are the natural
outcome of the mutual aid which they practise at every stage of their
busy and laborious lives. That mode of life also necessarily resulted in
the development of another essential feature of the life of ants: the
immense development of individual initiative which, in its turn,
evidently led to the development of that high and varied intelligence
which cannot but strike the human observer.(9)

If we knew no other facts from animal life than what we know about the
ants and the termites, we already might safely conclude that mutual aid
(which leads to mutual confidence, the first condition for courage) and
individual initiative (the first condition for intellectual progress)
are two factors infinitely more important than mutual struggle in the
evolution of the animal kingdom. In fact, the ant thrives without having
any of the "protective" features which cannot be dispensed with by
animals living an isolated life. Its colour renders it conspicuous to
its enemies, and the lofty nests of many species are conspicuous in the
meadows and forests. It is not protected by a hard carapace, and its
stinging apparatus, however dangerous when hundreds of stings are
plunged into the flesh of an animal, is not of a great value for
individual defence; while the eggs and larvae of the ants are a dainty
for a great number of the inhabitants of the forests. And yet the ants,
in their thousands, are not much destroyed by the birds, not even by the
ant-eaters, and they are dreaded by most stronger insects. When Forel
emptied a bagful of ants in a meadow, he saw that "the crickets ran
away, abandoning their holes to be sacked by the ants; the grasshoppers
and the crickets fled in all directions; the spiders and the beetles
abandoned their prey in order not to become prey themselves;" even the
nests of the wasps were taken by the ants, after a battle during which
many ants perished for the safety of the commonwealth. Even the swiftest
insects cannot escape, and Forel often saw butterflies, gnats, flies,
and so on, surprised and killed by the ants. Their force is in mutual
support and mutual confidence. And if the ant--apart from the still
higher developed termites--stands at the very top of the whole class of
insects for its intellectual capacities; if its courage is only equalled
by the most courageous vertebrates; and if its brain--to use Darwin's
words--"is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world,
perhaps more so than the brain of man," is it not due to the fact that
mutual aid has entirely taken the place of mutual struggle in the
communities of ants?

The same is true as regards the bees. These small insects, which so
easily might become the prey of so many birds, and whose honey has so
many admirers in all classes of animals from the beetle to the bear,
also have none of the protective features derived from mimicry or
otherwise, without which an isolatedly living insect hardly could escape
wholesale destruction; and yet, owing to the mutual aid they practise,
they obtain the wide extension which we know and the intelligence we
admire, By working in common they multiply their individual forces; by
resorting to a temporary division of labour combined with the capacity
of each bee to perform every kind of work when required, they attain
such a degree of well-being and safety as no isolated animal can ever
expect to achieve however strong or well armed it may be. In their
combinations they are often more successful than man, when he neglects
to take advantage of a well-planned mutual assistance. Thus, when a new
swarm of bees is going to leave the hive in search of a new abode, a
number of bees will make a preliminary exploration of the neighbourhood,
and if they discover a convenient dwelling-place--say, an old basket, or
anything of the kind--they will take possession of it, clean it, and
guard it, sometimes for a whole week, till the swarm comes to settle
therein. But how many human settlers will perish in new countries simply
for not having understood the necessity of combining their efforts! By
combining their individual intelligences they succeed in coping with
adverse circumstances, even quite unforeseen and unusual, like those
bees of the Paris Exhibition which fastened with their resinous propolis
the shutter to a glass-plate fitted in the wall of their hive. Besides,
they display none of the sanguinary proclivities and love of useless
fighting with which many writers so readily endow animals. The sentries
which guard the entrance to the hive pitilessly put to death the robbing
bees which attempt entering the hive; but those stranger bees which come
to the hive by mistake are left unmolested, especially if they come
laden with pollen, or are young individuals which can easily go astray.
There is no more warfare than is strictly required.

The sociability of the bees is the more instructive as predatory
instincts and laziness continue to exist among the bees as well, and
reappear each time that their growth is favoured by some circumstances.
It is well known that there always are a number of bees which prefer a
life of robbery to the laborious life of a worker; and that both periods
of scarcity and periods of an unusually rich supply of food lead to an
increase of the robbing class. When our crops are in and there remains
but little to gather in our meadows and fields, robbing bees become of
more frequent occurrence; while, on the other side, about the sugar
plantations of the West Indies and the sugar refineries of Europe,
robbery, laziness, and very often drunkenness become quite usual with
the bees. We thus see that anti-social instincts continue to exist
amidst the bees as well; but natural selection continually must
eliminate them, because in the long run the practice of solidarity
proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of
individuals endowed with predatory inclinations. The cunningest and the
shrewdest are eliminated in favour of those who understand the
advantages of sociable life and mutual support.

Certainly, neither the ants, nor the bees, nor even the termites, have
risen to the conception of a higher solidarity embodying the whole of
the species. In that respect they evidently have not attained a degree
of development which we do not find even among our political,
scientific, and religious leaders. Their social instincts hardly extend
beyond the limits of the hive or the nest. However, colonies of no less
than two hundred nests, belonging to two different species (Formica
exsecta and F. pressilabris) have been described by Forel on Mount
Tendre and Mount Saleve; and Forel maintains that each member of these
colonies recognizes every other member of the colony, and that they all
take part in common defence; while in Pennsylvania Mr. MacCook saw a
whole nation of from 1,600 to 1,700 nests of the mound-making ant, all
living in perfect intelligence; and Mr. Bates has described the hillocks
of the termites covering large surfaces in the "campos"--some of the
nests being the refuge of two or three different species, and most of
them being connected by vaulted galleries or arcades.(10) Some steps
towards the amalgamation of larger divisions of the species for purposes
of mutual protection are thus met with even among the invertebrate
animals.

Going now over to higher animals, we find far more instances of
undoubtedly conscious mutual help for all possible purposes, though we
must recognize at once that our knowledge even of the life of higher
animals still remains very imperfect. A large number of facts have been
accumulated by first-rate observers, but there are whole divisions of
the animal kingdom of which we know almost nothing. Trustworthy
information as regards fishes is extremely scarce, partly owing to the
difficulties of observation, and partly because no proper attention has
yet been paid to the subject. As to the mammalia, Kessler already
remarked how little we know about their manners of life. Many of them
are nocturnal in their habits; others conceal themselves underground;
and those ruminants whose social life and migrations offer the greatest
interest do not let man approach their herds. It is chiefly upon birds
that we have the widest range of information, and yet the social life of
very many species remains but imperfectly known. Still, we need not
complain about the lack of well-ascertained facts, as will be seen from
the following.

I need not dwell upon the associations of male and female for rearing
their offspring, for providing it with food during their first steps in
life, or for hunting in common; though it may be mentioned by the way
that such associations are the rule even with the least sociable
carnivores and rapacious birds; and that they derive a special interest
from being the field upon which tenderer feelings develop even amidst
otherwise most cruel animals. It may also be added that the rarity of
associations larger than that of the family among the carnivores and the
birds of prey, though mostly being the result of their very modes of
feeding, can also be explained to some extent as a consequence of the
change produced in the animal world by the rapid increase of mankind. At
any rate it is worthy of note that there are species living a quite
isolated life in densely-inhabited regions, while the same species, or
their nearest congeners, are gregarious in uninhabited countries.
Wolves, foxes, and several birds of prey may be quoted as instances in
point.

However, associations which do not extend beyond the family bonds are of
relatively small importance in our case, the more so as we know numbers
of associations for more general purposes, such as hunting, mutual
protection, and even simple enjoyment of life. Audubon already mentioned
that eagles occasionally associate for hunting, and his description of
the two bald eagles, male and female, hunting on the Mississippi, is
well known for its graphic powers. But one of the most conclusive
observations of the kind belongs to Syevertsoff. Whilst studying the
fauna of the Russian Steppes, he once saw an eagle belonging to an
altogether gregarious species (the white-tailed eagle, Haliactos
albicilla) rising high in the air for half an hour it was describing its
wide circles in silence when at once its piercing voice was heard. Its
cry was soon answered by another eagle which approached it, and was
followed by a third, a fourth, and so on, till nine or ten eagles came
together and soon disappeared. In the afternoon, Syevertsoff went to the
place whereto he saw the eagles flying; concealed by one of the
undulations of the Steppe, he approached them, and discovered that they
had gathered around the corpse of a horse. 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,
while the younger ones were continuing the meal, surrounded by bands of
crows. From this and like observations, Syevertsoff concluded that the
white-tailed eagles combine for hunting; when they all have risen to a
great height they are enabled, if they are ten, to survey an area of at
least twenty-five miles square; and as soon as any one has discovered
something, he warns the others.(11) Of course, it might be argued that a
simple instinctive cry of the first eagle, or even its movements, would
have had the same effect of bringing several eagles to the prey. But in
this case there is strong evidence in favour of mutual warning, because
the ten eagles came together before descending towards the prey, and
Syevertsoff had later on several opportunities of ascertaining that the
whitetailed eagles always assemble for devouring a corpse, and that some
of them (the younger ones first) always keep watch while the others are
eating. In fact, the white-tailed eagle--one of the bravest and best
hunters--is a gregarious bird altogether, and Brehm says that when kept
in captivity it very soon contracts an attachment to its keepers.

Sociability is a common feature with very many other birds of prey. The
Brazilian kite, one of the most "impudent" robbers, is nevertheless a
most sociable bird. Its hunting associations have been described by
Darwin and other naturalists, and it is a fact that when it has seized
upon a prey which is too big, it calls together five or six friends to
carry it away. After a busy day, when these kites retire for their
night-rest to a tree or to the bushes, they always gather in bands,
sometimes coming together from distances of ten or more miles, and they
often are joined by several other vultures, especially the percnopters,
"their true friends," D'Orbigny says. In another continent, in the
Transcaspian deserts, they have, according to Zarudnyi, the same habit
of nesting together. The sociable vulture, one of the strongest
vultures, has received its very name from its love of society. They live
in numerous bands, and decidedly enjoy society; numbers of them join in
their high flights for sport. "They live in very good friendship," Le
Vaillant says, "and in the same cave I sometimes found as many as three
nests close together."(12) The Urubu vultures of Brazil are as, or
perhaps even more, sociable than rooks.(13) The little Egyptian vultures
live in close friendship. They play in bands in the air, they come
together to spend the night, and in the morning they all go together to
search for their food, and never does the slightest quarrel arise among
them; such is the testimony of Brehm, who had plenty of opportunities of
observing their life. The red-throated falcon is also met with in
numerous bands in the forests of Brazil, and the kestrel (Tinnunculus
cenchris), when it has left Europe, and has reached in the winter the
prairies and forests of Asia, gathers in numerous societies. In the
Steppes of South Russia it is (or rather was) so sociable that Nordmann
saw them in numerous bands, with other falcons (Falco tinnunculus, F.
oesulon, and F. subbuteo), coming together every fine afternoon about
four o'clock, and enjoying their sports till late in the night. They set
off flying, all at once, in a quite straight line, towards some
determined point, and, having reached it, immediately returned over the
same line, to repeat the same flight.(14)

To take flights in flocks for the mere pleasure of the flight, is quite
common among all sorts of birds. "In the Humber district especially,"
Ch. Dixon writes, "vast flights of dunlins often appear upon the
mud-flats towards the end of August, and remain for the winter.... 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.
Scattered among them are many odd stints and sanderlings and
ringed-plovers."(15)

It would be quite impossible to enumerate here the various hunting
associations of birds; but the fishing associations of the pelicans are
certainly worthy of notice for the remarkable order and intelligence
displayed by these clumsy birds. They always go fishing in numerous
bands, and after having chosen an appropriate bay, they form a wide
half-circle in face of the shore, and narrow it by paddling towards the
shore, catching all fish that happen to be enclosed in the circle. On
narrow rivers and canals they even divide into two parties, each of
which draws up on a half-circle, and both paddle to meet each other,
just as if two parties of men dragging two long nets should advance to
capture all fish taken between the nets when both parties come to meet.
As the night comes they fly to their resting-places--always the same for
each flock--and no one has ever seen them fighting for the possession of
either the bay or the resting place. In South America they gather in
flocks of from forty to fifty thousand individuals, part of which enjoy
sleep while the others keep watch, and others again go fishing.(16) And
finally, I should be doing an injustice to the much-calumniated
house-sparrows if I did not mention how faithfully each of them shares
any food it discovers with all members of the society to which it
belongs. The fact was known to the Greeks, and it has been transmitted
to posterity how a Greek orator once exclaimed (I quote from
memory):--"While I am speaking to you a sparrow has come to tell to
other sparrows that a slave has dropped on the floor a sack of corn, and
they all go there to feed upon the grain." The more, one is pleased to
find this observation of old confirmed in a recent little book by Mr.
Gurney, who does not doubt that the house sparrows always inform each
other as to where there is some food to steal; he says, "When a stack
has been thrashed ever so far from the yard, the sparrows in the yard
have always had their crops full of the grain."(17) True, the sparrows
are extremely particular in keeping their domains free from the
invasions of strangers; thus the sparrows of the Jardin du Luxembourg
bitterly fight all other sparrows which may attempt to enjoy their turn
of the garden and its visitors; but within their own communities they
fully practise mutual support, though occasionally there will be of
course some quarrelling even amongst the best friends.

Hunting and feeding in common is so much the habit in the feathered
world that more quotations hardly would be needful: it must be
considered as an established fact. As to the force derived from such
associations, it is self-evident. The strongest birds of prey are
powerless in face of the associations of our smallest bird pets. Even
eagles--even the powerful and terrible booted eagle, and the martial
eagle, which is strong enough to carry away a hare or a young antelope
in its claws--are compelled to abandon their prey to bands of those
beggars the kites, which give the eagle a regular chase as soon as they
see it in possession of a good prey. The kites will also give chase to
the swift fishing-hawk, and rob it of the fish it has captured; but no
one ever saw the kites fighting together for the possession of the prey
so stolen. On the Kerguelen Island, Dr. Coues saw the gulls to
Buphogus--the sea-hen of the sealers--pursue make them disgorge their
food, while, on the other side, the gulls and the terns combined to
drive away the sea-hen as soon as it came near to their abodes,
especially at nesting-time.(18) The little, but extremely swift lapwings
(Vanellus cristatus) boldly attack the birds of prey. "To see them
attacking a buzzard, a kite, a crow, or an eagle, is one of the most
amusing spectacles. One feels that they are sure of victory, and one
sees the anger of the bird of prey. In such circumstances they perfectly
support one another, and their courage grows with their numbers."(19)
The lapwing has well merited the name of a "good mother" which the
Greeks gave to it, for it never fails to protect other aquatic birds
from the attacks of their enemies. But even the little white wagtails
(Motacilla alba), whom we well know in our gardens and whose whole
length hardly attains eight inches, compel the sparrow-hawk to abandon
its hunt. "I often admired their courage and agility," the old Brehm
wrote, "and I am persuaded that the falcon alone is capable of capturing
any of them.... When a band of wagtails has compelled a bird of prey to
retreat, they make the air resound with their triumphant cries, and
after that they separate." They thus come together for the special
purpose of giving chase to their enemy, just as we see it when the whole
bird-population of a forest has been raised by the news that a nocturnal
bird has made its appearance during the day, and all together--birds of
prey and small inoffensive singers--set to chase the stranger and make
it return to its concealment.

What an immense difference between the force of a kite, a buzzard or a
hawk, and such small birds as the meadow-wagtail; and yet these little
birds, by their common action and courage, prove superior to the
powerfully-winged and armed robbers! In Europe, the wagtails not only
chase the birds of prey which might be dangerous to them, but they chase
also the fishing-hawk "rather for fun than for doing it any harm;" while
in India, according to Dr. Jerdon's testimony, the jackdaws chase the
gowinda-kite "for simple matter of amusement." Prince Wied saw the
Brazilian eagle urubitinga surrounded by numberless flocks of toucans
and cassiques (a bird nearly akin to our rook), which mocked it. "The
eagle," he adds, "usually supports these insults very quietly, but from
time to time it will catch one of these mockers." In all such cases the
little birds, though very much inferior in force to the bird of prey,
prove superior to it by their common action.(20)

However, the most striking effects of common life for the security of
the individual, for its enjoyment of life, and for the development of
its intellectual capacities, are seen in two great families of birds,
the cranes and the parrots. The cranes are extremely sociable and live
in most excellent relations, not only with their congeners, but also
with most aquatic birds. Their prudence is really astonishing, so also
their intelligence; they grasp the new conditions in a moment, and act
accordingly. Their sentries always keep watch around a flock which is
feeding or resting, and the hunters know well how difficult it is to
approach them. If man has succeeded in surprising them, they will never
return to the same place without having sent out one single scout first,
and a party of scouts afterwards; and when the reconnoitring party
returns and reports that there is no danger, a second group of scouts is
sent out to verify the first report, before the whole band moves. With
kindred species the cranes contract real friendship; and in captivity
there is no bird, save the also sociable and highly intelligent parrot,
which enters into such real friendship with man. "It sees in man, not a
master, but a friend, and endeavours to manifest it," Brehm concludes
from a wide personal experience. The crane is in continual activity from
early in the morning till late in the night; but it gives a few hours
only in the morning to the task of searching its food, chiefly
vegetable. All the remainder of the day is given to society life. "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, and always it remains graceful and beautiful."(21)
As it lives in society it has almost no enemies, and though Brehm
occasionally saw one of them captured by a crocodile, he wrote that
except the crocodile he knew no enemies of the crane. It eschews all of
them by its proverbial prudence; and it attains, as a rule, a very old
age. No wonder that for the maintenance of the species the crane need
not rear a numerous offspring; it usually hatches but two eggs. As to
its superior intelligence, it is sufficient to say that all observers
are unanimous in recognizing that its intellectual capacities remind one
very much of those of man.

The other extremely sociable bird, the parrot, stands, as known, at the
very top of the whole feathered world for the development of its
intelligence. Brehm has so admirably summed up the manners of life of
the parrot, that I cannot do better than translate the following
sentence:--

"Except in the pairing season, they live in very numerous societies or
bands. They choose a place in the forest to stay there, and thence they
start every morning for their hunting expeditions. The members of each
band remain faithfully attached to each other, and they share in common
good or bad luck. All together they repair in the morning to a field, or
to a garden, or to a tree, to feed upon fruits. They post sentries to
keep watch over the safety of the whole band, and are attentive to their
warnings. In case of danger, all take to flight, mutually supporting
each other, and all simultaneously return to their resting-place. In a
word, they always live closely united."

They enjoy society of other birds as well. In India, the jays and crows
come together from many miles round, to spend the night in company with
the parrots in the bamboo thickets. When the parrots start hunting, they
display the most wonderful intelligence, prudence, and capacity of
coping with circumstances. Take, for instance, a band of white cacadoos
in Australia. Before starting to plunder a corn-field, they first send
out a reconnoitring party which occupies the highest trees in the
vicinity of the field, while other scouts perch upon the intermediate
trees between the field and the forest and transmit the signals. If the
report runs "All right," a score of cacadoos will separate from the bulk
of the band, take a flight in the air, and then fly towards the trees
nearest to the field. They also will scrutinize the neighbourhood for a
long while, and only then will they give the signal for general advance,
after which the whole band starts at once and plunders the field in no
time. The Australian settlers have the greatest difficulties in
beguiling the prudence of the parrots; but if man, with all his art and
weapons, has succeeded in killing some of them, the cacadoos become so
prudent and watchful that they henceforward baffle all stratagems.(22)

There can be no doubt that it is the practice of life in society which
enables the parrots to attain that very high level of almost human
intelligence and almost human feelings which we know in them. Their high
intelligence has induced the best naturalists to describe some species,
namely the grey parrot, as the "birdman." 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," as Audubon said; and
when two captive parrots, though belonging to two different species,
have contracted mutual friendship, the accidental death of one of the
two friends has sometimes been followed by the death from grief and
sorrow of the other friend. It is no less evident that in their
societies they find infinitely more protection than they possibly might
find in any ideal development of beak and claw. Very few birds of prey
or mammals dare attack any but the smaller species of parrots, and Brehm
is absolutely right in saying of the parrots, as he also says of the
cranes and the sociable monkeys, that they hardly have any enemies
besides men; and he adds: "It is most probable that the larger parrots
succumb chiefly to old age rather than die from the claws of any
enemies." Only man, owing to his still more superior intelligence and
weapons, also derived from association, succeeds in partially destroying
them. Their very longevity would thus appear as a result of their social
life. Could we not say the same as regards their wonderful memory, which
also must be favoured in its development by society--life and by
longevity accompanied by a full enjoyment of bodily and mental faculties
till a very old age?

As seen from the above, the war of each against all is not the law of
nature. 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. A few hints as to
the importance of the law of mutual aid for the evolution of the animal
kingdom have already been given in the preceding pages; but their
purport will still better appear when, after having given a few more
illustrations, we shall be enabled presently to draw therefrom our
conclusions.

NOTES:

1. Origin of Species, chap. iii, p. 62 of first edition.

2. Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1888, p. 165.

3. Leaving aside the pre-Darwinian writers, like Toussenel, Fee, and
many others, several works containing many striking instances of mutual
aid--chiefly, however, illustrating animal intelligence were issued
previously to that date. I may mention those of Houzeau, Les facultes
etales des animaux, 2 vols., Brussels, 1872; L. Buchner's Aus dem
Geistesleben der Thiere, 2nd ed. in 1877; and Maximilian Perty's Ueber
das Seelenleben der Thiere, Leipzig, 1876. Espinas published his most
remarkable work, Les Societes animales, in 1877, and in that work he
pointed out the importance of animal societies, and their bearing upon
the preservation of species, and entered upon a most valuable discussion
of the origin of societies. In fact, Espinas's book contains all that
has been written since upon mutual aid, and many good things besides. If
I nevertheless make a special mention of Kessler's address, it is
because he raised mutual aid to the height of a law much more important
in evolution than the law of mutual struggle. The same ideas were
developed next year (in April 1881) by J. Lanessan in a lecture
published in 1882 under this title: La lutte pour l'existence et
l'association pour la lutte. G. Romanes's capital work, Animal
Intelligence, was issued in 1882, and followed next year by the Mental
Evolution in Animals. About the same time (1883), Buchner published
another work, Liebe und Liebes-Leben in der Thierwelt, a second edition
of which was issued in 1885. The idea, as seen, was in the air.

4. Memoirs (Trudy) of the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists, vol.
xi. 1880.

5. George J. Romanes's Animal Intelligence, 1st ed. p. 233.

6. Pierre Huber's Les fourmis indigees, Geneve, 1861; Forel's Recherches
sur les fourmis de la Suisse, Zurich, 1874, and J.T. Moggridge's
Harvesting Ants and Trapdoor Spiders, London, 1873 and 1874, ought to be
in the hands of every boy and girl. See also: Blanchard's Metamorphoses
des Insectes, Paris, 1868; J.H. Fabre's Souvenirs entomologiques, Paris,
1886; Ebrard's Etudes des moeurs des fourmis, Geneve, 1864; Sir John
Lubbock's Ants, Bees, and Wasps, and so on.

7. Forel's Recherches, pp. 244, 275, 278. Huber's description of the
process is admirable. It also contains a hint as to the possible origin
of the instinct (popular edition, pp. 158, 160). See Appendix II.

8. The agriculture of the ants is so wonderful that for a long time it
has been doubted. The fact is now so well proved by Mr. Moggridge, Dr.
Lincecum, Mr. MacCook, Col. Sykes, and Dr. Jerdon, that no doubt is
possible. See an excellent summary of evidence in Mr. Romanes's work.
See also Die Pilzgaerten einiger Sud-Amerikanischen Ameisen, by Alf.
Moeller, in Schimper's Botan. Mitth. aus den Tropen, vi. 1893.

9. This second principle was not recognized at once. Former observers
often spoke of kings, queens, managers, and so on; but since Huber and
Forel have published their minute observations, no doubt is possible as
to the free scope left for every individual's initiative in whatever the
ants do, including their wars.

10. H.W. Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons, ii. 59 seq.

11. N. Syevertsoff, Periodical Phenomena in the Life of Mammalia, Birds,
and Reptiles of Voroneje, Moscow, 1855 (in Russian).

12. A. Brehm, Life of Animals, iii. 477; all quotations after the French
edition.

13. Bates, p. 151.

14. Catalogue raisonne des oiseaux de la faune pontique, in Demidoff's
Voyage; abstracts in Brehm, iii. 360. During their migrations birds of
prey often associate. One flock, which H. Seebohm saw crossing the
Pyrenees, represented a curious assemblage of "eight kites, one crane,
and a peregrine falcon" (The Birds of Siberia, 1901, p. 417).

15. Birds in the Northern Shires, p. 207.

16. Max. Perty, Ueber das Seelenleben der Thiere (Leipzig, 1876), pp.
87, 103.

17. G. H. Gurney, The House-Sparrow (London, 1885), p. 5.

18. Dr. Elliot Coues, Birds of the Kerguelen Island, in Smithsonian
Miscellaneous Collections, vol. xiii. No. 2, p. 11.

19. Brehm, iv. 567.

20. As to the house-sparrows, a New Zealand observer, Mr. T.W. Kirk,
described as follows the attack of these "impudent" birds upon an
"unfortunate" hawk.--"He heard one day a most unusual noise, as though
all the small birds of the country had joined in one grand quarrel.
Looking up, he saw a large hawk (C. gouldi--a carrion feeder) 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. At
last, approaching some scrub, the hawk dashed into it and remained
there, while the sparrows congregated in groups round the bush, keeping
up a constant chattering and noise" (Paper read before the New Zealand
Institute; Nature, Oct. 10, 1891).

21. Brehm, iv. 671 seq.

22. R. Lendenfeld, in Der zoologische Garten, 1889.




CHAPTER II

MUTUAL AID AMONG ANIMALS (continued)

Migrations of birds. Breeding associations. Autumn societies. Mammals:
small number of unsociable species. Hunting associations of wolves,
lions, etc. Societies of rodents; of ruminants; of monkeys. Mutual Aid
in the struggle for life. Darwin's arguments to prove the struggle for
life within the species. Natural checks to over-multiplication. Supposed
extermination of intermediate links. Elimination of competition in
Nature.


As soon as spring comes back to the temperate zone, myriads and myriads
of birds which are scattered over the warmer regions of the South come
together in numberless bands, and, full of vigour and joy, hasten
northwards to rear their offspring. Each of our hedges, each grove, each
ocean cliff, and each of the lakes and ponds with which Northern
America, Northern Europe, and Northern Asia are dotted tell us at that
time of the year the tale of what mutual aid means for the birds; what
force, energy, and protection it confers to every living being, however
feeble and defenceless it otherwise might be. Take, for instance, one of
the numberless lakes of the Russian and Siberian Steppes. Its shores are
peopled with myriads of aquatic birds, belonging to at least a score of
different species, all living in perfect peace--all protecting one
another.

"For several hundred yards from the shore the air is filled with gulls
and terns, as with snow-flakes on a winter day. Thousands of plovers and
sand-coursers run over the beach, searching their food, whistling, and
simply enjoying life. Further on, on almost each wave, a duck is
rocking, while higher up you notice the flocks of the Casarki ducks.
Exuberant life swarms everywhere."(1)

And here are the robbers--the strongest, the most cunning ones, those
"ideally organized for robbery." And you hear their hungry, angry,
dismal cries as for hours in succession they watch the opportunity of
snatching from this mass of living beings one single unprotected
individual. But as soon as they approach, their presence is signalled by
dozens of voluntary sentries, and hundreds of gulls and terns set to
chase the robber. Maddened by hunger, the robber soon abandons his usual
precautions: he suddenly dashes into the living mass; but, attacked from
all sides, he again is compelled to retreat. From sheer despair he falls
upon the wild ducks; but the intelligent, social birds rapidly gather in
a flock and fly away if the robber is an erne; they plunge into the lake
if it is a falcon; or they raise a cloud of water-dust and bewilder the
assailant if it is a kite.(2) And while life continues to swarm on the
lake, the robber flies away with cries of anger, and looks out for
carrion, or for a young bird or a field-mouse not yet used to obey in
time the warnings of its comrades. In the face of an exuberant life, the
ideally-armed robber must be satisfied with the off-fall of that life.

Further north, in the Arctic archipelagoes,

"you may sail along the coast for many miles and see all the ledges, all
the cliffs and corners of the mountain-sides, up to a height of from two
to five hundred feet, literally covered with sea-birds, whose white
breasts show against the dark rocks as if the rocks were closely
sprinkled with chalk specks. The air, near and far, is, so to say, full
with fowls."(3)

Each of such "bird-mountains" is a living illustration of mutual aid, as
well as of the infinite variety of characters, individual and specific,
resulting from social life. The oyster-catcher is renowned for its
readiness to attack the birds of prey. The barge is known for its
watchfulness, and it easily becomes the leader of more placid birds. The
turnstone, when surrounded by comrades belonging to more energetic
species, is a rather timorous bird; but it undertakes to keep watch for
the security of the commonwealth when surrounded by smaller birds. Here
you have the dominative swans; there, the extremely sociable
kittiwake-gulls, among whom quarrels are rare and short; the
prepossessing polar guillemots, which continually caress each other; the
egoist she-goose, who has repudiated the orphans of a killed comrade;
and, by her side, another female who adopts any one's orphans, and now
paddles surrounded by fifty or sixty youngsters, whom she conducts and
cares for as if they all were her own breed. Side by side with the
penguins, which steal one another's eggs, you have the dotterels, whose
family relations are so "charming and touching" that even passionate
hunters recoil from shooting a female surrounded by her young ones; or
the eider-ducks, among which (like the velvet-ducks, or the coroyas of
the Savannahs) several females hatch together in the same nest, or the
lums, which sit in turn upon a common covey. Nature is variety itself,
offering all possible varieties of characters, from the basest to the
highest: and that is why she cannot be depicted by any sweeping
assertion. Still less can she be judged from the moralist's point of
view, because the views of the moralist are themselves a result--mostly
unconscious--of the observation of Nature.

Coming together at nesting-time is so common with most birds that more
examples are scarcely needed. Our trees are crowned with groups of
crows' nests; our hedges are full of nests of smaller birds; our
farmhouses give shelter to colonies of swallows; our old towers are the
refuge of hundreds of nocturnal birds; and pages might be filled with
the most charming descriptions of the peace and harmony which prevail in
almost all these nesting associations. As to the protection derived by
the weakest birds from their unions, it is evident. That excellent
observer, Dr. Coues, saw, for instance, the little cliff-swallows
nesting in the immediate neighbourhood of the prairie falcon (Falco
polyargus). The falcon had its nest on the top of one of the minarets of
clay which are so common in the canons of Colorado, while a colony of
swallows nested just beneath. The little peaceful birds had no fear of
their rapacious neighbour; they never let it approach to their colony.
They immediately surrounded it and chased it, so that it had to make off
at once.(4)

Life in societies does not cease when the nesting period is over; it
begins then in a new form. The young broods gather in societies of
youngsters, generally including several species. Social life is
practised at that time chiefly for its own sake--partly for security,
but chiefly for the pleasures derived from it. So we see in our forests
the societies formed by the young nuthatchers (Sitta caesia), together
with tit-mouses, chaffinches, wrens, tree-creepers, or some
wood-peckers.(5) In Spain the swallow is met with in company with
kestrels, fly-catchers, and even pigeons. In the Far West of America the
young horned larks live in large societies, together with another lark
(Sprague's), the skylark, the Savannah sparrow, and several species of
buntings and longspurs.(6) In fact, it would be much easier to describe
the species which live isolated than to simply name those species which
join the autumnal societies of young birds--not for hunting or nesting
purposes, but simply to enjoy life in society and to spend their time in
plays and sports, after having given a few hours every day to find their
daily food.

And, finally, we have that immense display of mutual aid among
birds-their migrations--which I dare not even enter upon in this place.
Sufficient to say that birds which have lived for months in small bands
scattered over a wide territory gather in thousands; they come together
at a given place, for several days in succession, before they start, and
they evidently discuss the particulars of the journey. Some species will
indulge every afternoon in flights preparatory to the long passage. All
wait for their tardy congeners, and finally they start in a certain well
chosen direction--a fruit of accumulated collective experience--the
strongest flying at the head of the band, and relieving one another in
that difficult task. They cross the seas in large bands consisting of
both big and small birds, and when they return next spring they repair
to the same spot, and, in most cases, each of them takes possession of
the very same nest which it had built or repaired the previous year.(7)

This subject is so vast, and yet so imperfectly studied; it offers so
many striking illustrations of mutual-aid habits, subsidiary to the main
fact of migration--each of which would, however, require a special
study--that I must refrain from entering here into more details. I can
only cursorily refer to the numerous and animated gatherings of birds
which take place, always on the same spot, before they begin their long
journeys north or south, as also those which one sees in the north,
after the birds have arrived at their breeding-places on the Yenisei or
in the northern counties of England. For many days in
succession--sometimes one month--they will come together every morning
for one hour, before flying in search of food--perhaps discussing the
spot where they are going to build their nests.(8) And if, during the
migration, their columns are overtaken by a storm, birds of the most
different species will be brought together by common misfortune. The
birds which are not exactly migratory, but slowly move northwards and
southwards with the seasons, also perform these peregrinations in
flocks. So far from migrating isolately, in order to secure for each
separate individual the advantages of better food or shelter which are
to be found in another district--they always wait for each other, and
gather in flocks, before they move north or south, in accordance with
the season.(9)

Going now over to mammals, the first thing which strikes us is the
overwhelming numerical predominance of social species over those few
carnivores which do not associate. The plateaus, the Alpine tracts, and
the Steppes of the Old and New World are stocked with herds of deer,
antelopes, gazelles, fallow deer, buffaloes, wild goats and sheep, all
of which are sociable animals. When the Europeans came to settle in
America, they found it so densely peopled with buffaloes, that pioneers
had to stop their advance when a column of migrating buffaloes came to
cross the route they followed; the march past of the dense column
lasting sometimes for two and three days. And when the Russians took
possession of Siberia they found it so densely peopled with deer,
antelopes, squirrels, and other sociable animals, that the very conquest
of Siberia was nothing but a hunting expedition which lasted for two
hundred years; while the grass plains of Eastern Africa are still
covered with herds composed of zebra, the hartebeest, and other
antelopes.

Not long ago the small streams of Northern America and Northern Siberia
were peopled with colonies of beavers, and up to the seventeenth century
like colonies swarmed in Northern Russia. The flat lands of the four
great continents are still covered with countless colonies of mice,
ground-squirrels, marmots, and other rodents. In the lower latitudes of
Asia and Africa the forests are still the abode of numerous families of
elephants, rhinoceroses, and numberless societies of monkeys. In the far
north the reindeer aggregate in numberless herds; while still further
north we find the herds of the musk-oxen and numberless bands of polar
foxes. The coasts of the ocean are enlivened by flocks of seals and
morses; its waters, by shoals of sociable cetaceans; and even in the
depths of the great plateau of Central Asia we find herds of wild
horses, wild donkeys, wild camels, and wild sheep. All these mammals
live in societies and nations sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands
of individuals, although now, after three centuries of gunpowder
civilization, we find but the debris of the immense aggregations of old.
How trifling, in comparison with them, are the numbers of the
carnivores! And how false, therefore, is the view of those who speak of
the animal world as if nothing were to be seen in it but lions and
hyenas plunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of their victims!
One might as well imagine that the whole of human life is nothing but a
succession of war massacres.

Association and mutual aid are the rule with mammals. We find social
habits even among the carnivores, and we can only name the cat tribe
(lions, tigers, leopards, etc.) as a division the members of which
decidedly prefer isolation to society, and are but seldom met with even
in small groups. And yet, even among lions "this is a very common
practice to hunt in company."(10) The two tribes of the civets
(Viverridae) and the weasels (Mustelidae) might also be characterized by
their isolated life, but it is a fact that during the last century the
common weasel was more sociable than it is now; it was seen then in
larger groups in Scotland and in the Unterwalden canton of Switzerland.
As to the great tribe of the dogs, it is eminently sociable, and
association for hunting purposes may be considered as eminently
characteristic of its numerous species. It is well known, in fact, that
wolves gather in packs for hunting, and Tschudi left an excellent
description of how they draw up in a half-circle, surround a cow which
is grazing on a mountain slope, and then, suddenly appearing with a loud
barking, make it roll in the abyss.(11) Audubon, in the thirties, also
saw the Labrador wolves hunting in packs, and one pack following a man
to his cabin, and killing the dogs. During severe winters the packs of
wolves grow so numerous as to become a danger for human settlements, as
was the case in France some five-and-forty years ago. In the Russian
Steppes they never attack the horses otherwise than in packs; and yet
they have to sustain bitter fights, during which the horses (according
to Kohl's testimony) sometimes assume offensive warfare, and in such
cases, if the wolves do not retreat promptly, they run the risk of being
surrounded by the horses and killed by their hoofs. The prairie-wolves
(Canis latrans) are known to associate in bands of from twenty to thirty
individuals when they chase a buffalo occasionally separated from its
herd.(12) Jackals, which are most courageous and may be considered as
one of the most intelligent representatives of the dog tribe, always
hunt in packs; thus united, they have no fear of the bigger
carnivores.(13) As to the wild dogs of Asia (the Kholzuns, or Dholes),
Williamson saw their large packs attacking all larger animals save
elephants and rhinoceroses, and overpowering bears and tigers. Hyenas
always live in societies and hunt in packs, and the hunting
organizations of the painted lycaons are highly praised by Cumming. Nay,
even foxes, which, as a rule, live isolated in our civilized countries,
have been seen combining for hunting purposes.(14) As to the polar fox,
it is--or rather was in Steller's time--one of the most sociable
animals; and when one reads Steller's description of the war that was
waged by Behring's unfortunate crew against these intelligent small
animals, one does not know what to wonder at most: the extraordinary
intelligence of the foxes and the mutual aid they displayed in digging
out food concealed under cairns, or stored upon a pillar (one fox would
climb on its top and throw the food to its comrades beneath), or the
cruelty of man, driven to despair by the numerous packs of foxes. Even
some bears live in societies where they are not disturbed by man. Thus
Steller saw the black bear of Kamtchatka in numerous packs, and the
polar bears are occasionally found in small groups. Even the
unintelligent insectivores do not always disdain association.

However, it is especially with the rodents, the ungulata, and the
ruminants that we find a highly developed practice of mutual aid. The
squirrels are individualist to a great extent. Each of them builds its
own comfortable nest, and accumulates its own provision. Their
inclinations are towards family life, and Brehm found that a family of
squirrels is never so happy as when the two broods of the same year can
join together with their parents in a remote corner of a forest. And yet
they maintain social relations. The inhabitants of the separate nests
remain in a close intercourse, and when the pine-cones become rare in
the forest they inhabit, they emigrate in bands. As to the black
squirrels of the Far West, they are eminently sociable. Apart from the
few hours given every day to foraging, they spend their lives in playing
in numerous parties. And when they multiply too rapidly in a region,
they assemble in bands, almost as numerous as those of locusts, and move
southwards, devastating the forests, the fields, and the gardens; while
foxes, polecats, falcons, and nocturnal birds of prey follow their thick
columns and live upon the individuals remaining behind. The
ground-squirrel--a closely-akin genus--is still more sociable. It is
given to hoarding, and stores up in its subterranean halls large amounts
of edible roots and nuts, usually plundered by man in the autumn.
According to some observers, it must know something of the joys of a
miser. And yet it remains sociable. It always lives in large villages,
and Audubon, who opened some dwellings of the hackee in the winter,
found several individuals in the same apartment; they must have stored
it with common efforts.

The large tribe, of the marmots, which includes the three large genuses
of Arctomys, Cynomys, and Spermophilus, is still more sociable and still
more intelligent. They also prefer having each one its own dwelling; but
they live in big villages. That terrible enemy of the crops of South
Russia--the souslik--of which some ten millions are exterminated every
year by man alone, lives in numberless colonies; and while the Russian
provincial assemblies gravely discuss the means of getting rid of this
enemy of society, it enjoys life in its thousands in the most joyful
way. Their play is so charming that no observer could refrain from
paying them a tribute of praise, and from mentioning the melodious
concerts arising from the sharp whistlings of the males and the
melancholic whistlings of the females, before--suddenly returning to his
citizen's duties--he begins inventing the most diabolic means for the
extermination of the little robbers. All kinds of rapacious birds and
beasts of prey having proved powerless, the last word of science in this
warfare is the inoculation of cholera! The villages of the prairie-dogs
in America are one of the loveliest sights. As far as the eye can
embrace the prairie, it sees heaps of earth, and on each of them a
prairie-dog stands, engaged in a lively conversation with its neighbours
by means of short barkings. As soon as the approach of man is signalled,
all plunge in a moment into their dwellings; all have disappeared as by
enchantment. But if the danger is over, the little creatures soon
reappear. Whole families come out of their galleries and indulge in
play. 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. They go visiting one another, and the beaten
footpaths which connect all their heaps testify to the frequency of the
visitations. In short, the best naturalists have written some of their
best pages in describing the associations of the prairie-dogs of
America, the marmots of the Old World, and the polar marmots of the
Alpine regions. And yet, I must make, as regards the marmots, the same
remark as I have made when speaking of the bees. They have maintained
their fighting instincts, and these instincts reappear in captivity. But
in their big associations, in the face of free Nature, the unsociable
instincts have no opportunity to develop, and the general result is
peace and harmony.

Even such harsh animals as the rats, which continually fight in our
cellars, are sufficiently intelligent not to quarrel when they plunder
our larders, but to aid one another in their plundering expeditions and
migrations, and even to feed their invalids. As to the beaver-rats or
musk-rats of Canada, they are extremely sociable. Audubon could not but
admire "their peaceful communities, which require only being left in
peace to enjoy happiness." Like all sociable animals, they are lively
and playful, they easily combine with other species, and they have
attained a very high degree of intellectual development. In their
villages, always disposed on the shores of lakes and rivers, they take
into account the changing level of water; their domeshaped houses, which
are built of beaten clay interwoven with reeds, have separate corners
for organic refuse, and their halls are well carpeted at winter time;
they are warm, and, nevertheless, well ventilated. As to the beavers,
which are endowed, as known, with a most sympathetic character, their
astounding dams and villages, in which generations live and die without
knowing of any enemies but the otter and man, so wonderfully illustrate
what mutual aid can achieve for the security of the species, the
development of social habits, and the evolution of intelligence, that
they are familiar to all interested in animal life. Let me only remark
that with the beavers, the muskrats, and some other rodents, we already
find the feature which will also be distinctive of human
communities--that is, work in common.

I pass in silence the two large families which include the jerboa, the
chinchilla, the biscacha, and the tushkan, or underground hare of South
Russia, though all these small rodents might be taken as excellent
illustrations of the pleasures derived by animals from social life.(15)
Precisely, the pleasures; because it is extremely difficult to say what
brings animals together--the needs of mutual protection, or simply the
pleasure of feeling surrounded by their congeners. At any rate, our
common hares, which do not gather in societies for life in common, and
which are not even endowed with intense parental feelings, cannot live
without coming together for play. Dietrich de Winckell, who is
considered to be among the best acquainted with the habits of hares,
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.(16) As to the rabbit, it lives in societies, and its family
life is entirely built upon the image of the old patriarchal family; the
young ones being kept in absolute obedience to the father and even the
grandfather.(17) And here we have the example of two very closely-allied
species which cannot bear each other--not because they live upon nearly
the same food, as like cases are too often explained, but most probably
because the passionate, eminently-individualist hare cannot make friends
with that placid, quiet, and submissive creature, the rabbit. Their
tempers are too widely different not to be an obstacle to friendship.

Life in societies is again the rule with the large family of horses,
which includes the wild horses and donkeys of Asia, the zebras, the
mustangs, the cimarrones of the Pampas, and the half-wild horses of
Mongolia and Siberia. They all live in numerous associations made up of
many studs, each of which consists of a number of mares under the
leadership of a male. These numberless inhabitants of the Old and the
New World, badly organized on the whole for resisting both their
numerous enemies and the adverse conditions of climate, would soon have
disappeared from the surface of the earth were it not for their sociable
spirit. When a beast of prey approaches them, several studs unite at
once; they repulse the beast and sometimes chase it: and neither the
wolf nor the bear, not even the lion, can capture a horse or even a
zebra as long as they are not detached from the herd. When a drought is
burning the grass in the prairies, they gather in herds of sometimes
10,000 individuals strong, and migrate. And when a snow-storm rages in
the Steppes, each stud keeps close together, and repairs to a protected
ravine. But if confidence disappears, or the group has been seized by
panic, and disperses, the horses perish and the survivors are found
after the storm half dying from fatigue. Union is their chief arm in the
struggle for life, and man is their chief enemy. Before his increasing
numbers the ancestors of our domestic horse (the Equus Przewalskii, so
named by Polyakoff) have preferred to retire to the wildest and least
accessible plateaus on the outskirts of Thibet, where they continue to
live, surrounded by carnivores, under a climate as bad as that of the
Arctic regions, but in a region inaccessible to man.(18)

Many striking illustrations of social life could be taken from the life
of the reindeer, and especially of that large division of ruminants
which might include the roebucks, the fallow deer, the antelopes, the
gazelles, the ibex, and, in fact, the whole of the three numerous
families of the Antelopides, the Caprides, and the Ovides. Their
watchfulness over the safety of their herds against attacks of
carnivores; the anxiety displayed by all individuals in a herd of
chamois as long as all of them have not cleared a difficult passage over
rocky cliffs, the adoption of orphans; the despair of the gazelle whose
mate, or even comrade of the same sex, has been killed; the plays of the
youngsters, and many other features, could be mentioned. But perhaps the
most striking illustration of mutual support is given by the occasional
migrations of fallow deer, such as I saw once on the Amur. When I
crossed the high plateau and its border ridge, the Great Khingan, on my
way from Transbaikalia to Merghen, and further travelled over the high
prairies on my way to the Amur, I could ascertain how thinly-peopled
with fallow deer these mostly uninhabited regions are.(19) Two years
later I was travelling up the Amur, and by the end of October reached
the lower end of that picturesque gorge which the Amur pierces in the
Dousse-alin (Little Khingan) before it enters the lowlands where it
joins the Sungari. I found the Cossacks in the villages of that gorge in
the greatest excitement, because thousands and thousands of fallow deer
were crossing the Amur where it is narrowest, in order to reach the
lowlands. For several days in succession, upon a length of some forty
miles up the river, the Cossacks were butchering the deer as they
crossed the Amur, in which already floated a good deal of ice. Thousands
were killed every day, and the exodus nevertheless continued. Like
migrations were never seen either before or since, and this one must
have been called for by an early and heavy snow-fall in the Great
Khingan, which compelled the deer to make a desperate attempt at
reaching the lowlands in the east of the Dousse mountains. Indeed, a few
days later the Dousse-alin was also buried under snow two or three feet
deep. Now, when one imagines the immense territory (almost as big as
Great Britain) from which the scattered groups of deer must have
gathered for a migration which was undertaken under the pressure of
exceptional circumstances, and realizes the difficulties which had to be
overcome before all the deer came to the common idea of crossing the
Amur further south, where it is narrowest, one cannot but deeply admire
the amount of sociability displayed by these intelligent animals. The
fact is not the less striking if we remember that the buffaloes of North
America displayed the same powers of combination. One saw them grazing
in great numbers in the plains, but these numbers were made up by an
infinity of small groups which never mixed together. And yet, when
necessity arose, all groups, however scattered over an immense
territory, came together and made up those immense columns, numbering
hundreds of thousands of individuals, which I mentioned on a preceding
page.

I also ought to say a few words at least about the "compound families"
of the elephants, their mutual attachment, their deliberate ways in
posting sentries, and the feelings of sympathy developed by such a life
of close mutual support.(20) I might mention the sociable feelings of
those disreputable creatures the wild boars, and find a word of praise
for their powers of association in the case of an attack by a beast of
prey.(21) The hippopotamus and the rhinoceros, too, would occupy a place
in a work devoted to animal sociability. Several striking pages might be
given to the sociability and mutual attachment of the seals and the
walruses; and finally, one might mention the most excellent feelings
existing among the sociable cetaceans. But I have to say yet a few words
about the societies of monkeys, which acquire an additional interest
from their being the link which will bring us to the societies of
primitive men.

It is hardly needful to say that those mammals, which stand at the very
top of the animal world and most approach man by their structure and
intelligence, are eminently sociable. Evidently we must be prepared to
meet with all varieties of character and habits in so great a division
of the animal kingdom which includes hundreds of species. But, all
things considered, it must be said that sociability, action in common,
mutual protection, and a high development of those feelings which are
the necessary outcome of social life, are characteristic of most monkeys
and apes. From the smallest species to the biggest ones, sociability is
a rule to which we know but a few exceptions. The nocturnal apes prefer
isolated life; the capuchins (Cebus capucinus), the monos, and the
howling monkeys live but in small families; and the orang-outans have
never been seen by A.R. Wallace otherwise than either solitary or in
very small groups of three or four individuals, while the gorillas seem
never to join in bands. But all the remainder of the monkey tribe--the
chimpanzees, the sajous, the sakis, the mandrills, the baboons, and so
on--are sociable in the highest degree. They live in great bands, and
even join with other species than their own. Most of them become quite
unhappy when solitary. The cries of distress of each one of the band
immediately bring together the whole of the band, and they boldly
repulse the attacks of most carnivores and birds of prey. Even eagles do
not dare attack them. They plunder our fields always in bands--the old
ones taking care for the safety of the commonwealth. 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. Several species display the greatest
solicitude for their wounded, and do not abandon a wounded comrade
during a retreat till they have ascertained that it is dead and that
they are helpless to restore it to life. Thus James Forbes narrated in
his Oriental Memoirs a fact of such resistance in reclaiming from his
hunting party the dead body of a female monkey that one fully
understands why "the witnesses of this extraordinary scene resolved
never again to fire at one of the monkey race."(22) In some species
several individuals will combine to overturn a stone in order to search
for ants' eggs under it. The hamadryas not only post sentries, but have
been seen making a chain for the transmission of the spoil to a safe
place; and their courage is well known. Brehm's description of the
regular fight which his caravan had to sustain before the hamadryas
would let it resume its journey in the valley of the Mensa, in
Abyssinia, has become classical.(23) The playfulness of the tailed apes
and the mutual attachment which reigns in the families of chimpanzees
also are familiar to the general reader. And if we find among the
highest apes two species, the orang-outan and the gorilla, which are not
sociable, we must remember that both--limited as they are to very small
areas, the one in the heart of Africa, and the other in the two islands
of Borneo and Sumatra have all the appearance of being the last remnants
of formerly much more numerous species. The gorilla at least seems to
have been sociable in olden times, if the apes mentioned in the Periplus
really were gorillas.


We thus see, even from the above brief review, that life in societies is
no exception in the animal world; it is the rule, the law of Nature, and
it reaches its fullest development with the higher vertebrates. Those
species which live solitary, or in small families only, are relatively
few, and their numbers are limited. Nay, it appears very probable that,
apart from a few exceptions, those birds and mammals which are not
gregarious now, were living in societies before man multiplied on the
earth and waged a permanent war against them, or destroyed the sources
from which they formerly derived food. "On ne s'associe pas pour
mourir," was the sound remark of Espinas; and Houzeau, who knew the
animal world of some parts of America when it was not yet affected by
man, wrote to the same effect.

Association is found in the animal world at all degrees of evolution;
and, according to the grand idea of Herbert Spencer, so brilliantly
developed in Perrier's Colonies Animales, colonies are at the very
origin of evolution in the animal kingdom. But, in proportion as we
ascend the scale of evolution, we see association growing more and more
conscious. It loses its purely physical character, it ceases to be
simply instinctive, it becomes reasoned. With the higher vertebrates it
is periodical, or is resorted to for the satisfaction of a given
want--propagation of the species, migration, hunting, or mutual defence.
It even becomes occasional, when birds associate against a robber, or
mammals combine, under the pressure of exceptional circumstances, to
emigrate. In this last case, it becomes a voluntary deviation from
habitual moods of life. The combination sometimes appears in two or more
degrees--the family first, then the group, and finally the association
of groups, habitually scattered, but uniting in case of need, as we saw
it with the bisons and other ruminants. It also takes higher forms,
guaranteeing more independence to the individual without depriving it of
the benefits of social life. With most rodents the individual has its
own dwelling, which it can retire to when it prefers being left alone;
but the dwellings are laid out in villages and cities, so as to
guarantee to all inhabitants the benefits and joys of social life. And
finally, in several species, such as rats, marmots, hares, etc.,
sociable life is maintained notwithstanding the quarrelsome or otherwise
egotistic inclinations of the isolated individual. Thus it is not
imposed, as is the case with ants and bees, by the very physiological
structure of the individuals; it is cultivated for the benefits of
mutual aid, or for the sake of its pleasures. And this, of course,
appears with all possible gradations and with the greatest variety of
individual and specific characters--the very variety of aspects taken by
social life being a consequence, and for us a further proof, of its
generality.(24)

Sociability--that is, the need of the animal of associating with its
like--the love of society for society's sake, combined with the "joy of
life," only now begins to receive due attention from the zoologists.(25)
We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants,
going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of
plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each
other, teasing each other, and so on. 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," and a desire to communicate in some way or
another with other individuals of the same or of other species--in
short, a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive
feature of all the animal world.(26) Whether the feeling be fear,
experienced at the appearance of a bird of prey, or "a fit of gladness"
which bursts out when the animals are in good health and especially when
young, or merely the desire of giving play to an excess of impressions
and of vital power--the necessity of communicating impressions, of
playing, of chattering, or of simply feeling the proximity of other
kindred living beings pervades Nature, and is, as much as any other
physiological function, a distinctive feature of life and
impressionability. This need takes a higher development and attains a
more beautiful expression in mammals, especially amidst their young, and
still more among the birds; but it pervades all Nature, and has been
fully observed by the best naturalists, including Pierre Huber, even
amongst the ants, and it is evidently the same instinct which brings
together the big columns of butterflies which have been referred to
already.

The habit of coming together for dancing and of decorating the places
where the birds habitually perform their dances is, of course, well
known from the pages that Darwin gave to this subject in The Descent of
Man (ch. xiii). Visitors of the London Zoological Gardens also know the
bower of the satin bower-bird. But this habit of dancing seems to be
much more widely spread than was formerly believed, and Mr. W. Hudson
gives in his master-work on La Plata the most interesting description,
which must be read in the original, of complicated dances, performed by
quite a number of birds: rails, jacanas, lapwings, and so on.

The habit of singing in concert, which exists in several species of
birds, belongs to the same category of social instincts. It is most
strikingly developed with the chakar (Chauna chavarris), to which the
English have given the most unimaginative misnomer of "crested
screamer." These birds sometimes assemble in immense flocks, and in such
cases they frequently sing all in concert. W.H. Hudson found them once
in countless numbers, ranged all round a pampas lake in well-defined
flocks, of about 500 birds in each flock.

"Presently," he writes, "one flock near me began singing, and continued
their powerful chant for three or four minutes; when they ceased the
next flock took up the strains, and after it the next, and so on, until
once more the notes of the flocks on the opposite shore came floating
strong and clear across the water--then passed away, growing fainter and
fainter, until once more the sound approached me travelling round to my
side again."

On another occasion the same writer saw a whole plain covered with an
endless flock of chakars, not in close order, but scattered in pairs and
small groups. About nine o'clock in the evening, "suddenly the entire
multitude of birds covering the marsh for miles around burst forth in a
tremendous evening song.... It was a concert well worth riding a hundred
miles to hear."(27) It may be added that like all sociable animals, the
chakar easily becomes tame and grows very attached to man. "They are
mild-tempered birds, and very rarely quarrel"--we are told--although
they are well provided with formidable weapons. Life in societies
renders these weapons useless.

That life in societies is the most powerful weapon in the struggle for
life, taken in its widest sense, has been illustrated by several
examples on the foregoing pages, and could be illustrated by any amount
of evidence, if further evidence were required. Life in societies
enables the feeblest insects, the feeblest birds, and the feeblest
mammals to resist, or to protect themselves from, the most terrible
birds and beasts of prey; it permits longevity; it enables the species
to rear its progeny with the least waste of energy and to maintain its
numbers albeit a very slow birth-rate; it enables the gregarious animals
to migrate in search of new abodes. Therefore, while fully admitting
that force, swiftness, protective colours, cunningness, and endurance to
hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many
qualities making the individual, or the species, the fittest under
certain circumstances, we maintain that under any circumstances
sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those
species which willingly or unwillingly abandon it are doomed to decay;
while those animals which know best how to combine, have the greatest
chances of survival and of further evolution, although they may be
inferior to others in each of the faculties enumerated by Darwin and
Wallace, save the intellectual faculty. The highest vertebrates, and
especially mankind, are the best proof of this assertion. As to the
intellectual faculty, while every Darwinist will agree with Darwin that
it is the most powerful arm in the struggle for life, and the most
powerful factor of further evolution, he also will admit that
intelligence is an eminently social faculty. Language, imitation, and
accumulated experience are so many elements of growing intelligence of
which the unsociable animal is deprived. Therefore we find, at the top
of each class of animals, the ants, the parrots, and the monkeys, all
combining the greatest sociability with the highest development of
intelligence. The fittest are thus the most sociable animals, and
sociability appears as the chief factor of evolution, both directly, by
securing the well-being of the species while diminishing the waste of
energy, and indirectly, by favouring the growth of intelligence.

Moreover, it is evident that life in societies would be utterly
impossible without a corresponding development of social feelings, and,
especially, of a certain collective sense of justice growing to become a
habit. If every individual were constantly abusing its personal
advantages without the others interfering in favour of the wronged, no
society--life would be possible. And feelings of justice develop, more
or less, with all gregarious animals. Whatever the distance from which
the swallows or the cranes come, each one returns to the nest it has
built or repaired last year. 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; and it is evident
that without such interference being the rule, no nesting associations
of birds could exist. Separate groups of penguins have separate
resting-places and separate fishing abodes, and do not fight for them.
The droves of cattle in Australia have particular spots to which each
group repairs to rest, and from which it never deviates; and so on.(28)
We have any numbers of direct observations of the peace that prevails in
the nesting associations of birds, the villages of the rodents, and the
herds of grass-eaters; while, on the other side, we know of few sociable
animals which so continually quarrel as the rats in our cellars do, or
as the morses, which fight for the possession of a sunny place on the
shore. Sociability thus puts a limit to physical struggle, and leaves
room for the development of better moral feelings. The high development
of parental love in all classes of animals, even with lions and tigers,
is generally known. As to the young birds and mammals whom we
continually see associating, sympathy--not love--attains a further
development in their associations. Leaving aside the really touching
facts of mutual attachment and compassion which have been recorded as
regards domesticated animals and with animals kept in captivity, we have
a number of well certified facts of compassion between wild animals at
liberty. Max Perty and L. Buchner have given a number of such facts.(29)
J.C. Wood's narrative of a weasel which came to pick up and to carry
away an injured comrade enjoys a well-merited popularity.(30) So also
the observation of Captain Stansbury on his journey to Utah which is
quoted by Darwin; he saw a blind pelican which was fed, and well fed, by
other pelicans upon fishes which had to be brought from a distance of
thirty miles.(31) And when a herd of vicunas was hotly pursued by
hunters, H.A. Weddell saw more than once during his journey to Bolivia
and Peru, the strong males covering the retreat of the herd and lagging
behind in order to protect the retreat. As to facts of compassion with
wounded comrades, they are continually mentioned by all field
zoologists. Such facts are quite natural. Compassion is a necessary
outcome of social life. But compassion also means a considerable advance
in general intelligence and sensibility. It is the first step towards
the development of higher moral sentiments. It is, in its turn, a
powerful factor of further evolution.

If the views developed on the preceding pages are correct, the question
necessarily arises, in how far are they consistent with the theory of
struggle for life as it has been developed by Darwin, Wallace, and their
followers? and I will now briefly answer this important question. First
of all, no naturalist will doubt that the idea of a struggle for life
carried on through organic nature is the greatest generalization of our
century. Life is struggle; and in that struggle the fittest survive. But
the answers to the questions, "By which arms is this struggle chiefly
carried on?" and "Who are the fittest in the struggle?" will widely
differ according to the importance given to the two different aspects of
the struggle: the direct one, for food and safety among separate
individuals, and the struggle which Darwin described as
"metaphorical"--the struggle, very often collective, against adverse
circumstances. No one will deny that there is, within each species, a
certain amount of real competition for food--at least, at certain
periods. But the question is, whether competition is carried on to the
extent admitted by Darwin, or even by Wallace; and whether this
competition has played, in the evolution of the animal kingdom, the part
assigned to it.

The idea which permeates Darwin's work is certainly one of real
competition going on within each animal group for food, safety, and
possibility of leaving an offspring. He often speaks of regions being
stocked with animal life to their full capacity, and from that
overstocking he infers the necessity of competition. But when we look in
his work for real proofs of that competition, we must confess that we do
not find them sufficiently convincing. If we refer to the paragraph
entitled "Struggle for Life most severe between Individuals and
Varieties of the same Species," we find in it none of that wealth of
proofs and illustrations which we are accustomed to find in whatever
Darwin wrote. The struggle between individuals of the same species is
not illustrated under that heading by even one single instance: it is
taken as granted; and the competition between closely-allied animal
species is illustrated by but five examples, out of which one, at least
(relating to the two species of thrushes), now proves to be
doubtful.(32) But when we look for more details in order to ascertain
how far the decrease of one species was really occasioned by the
increase of the other species, Darwin, with his usual fairness, tells
us:

"We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between
allied forms which fill nearly the same place in nature; but probably in
no case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over
another in the great battle of life."

As to Wallace, who quotes the same facts under a slightly-modified
heading ("Struggle for Life between closely-allied Animals and Plants
often most severe"), he makes the following remark (italics are mine),
which gives quite another aspect to the facts above quoted. He says:

"In some cases, no doubt, there is actual war between the two, the
stronger killing the weaker. But this is by no means necessary, and
there may be cases in which the weaker species, physically, may prevail
by its power of more rapid multiplication, its better withstanding
vicissitudes of climate, or its greater cunning in escaping the attacks
of common enemies."

In such cases what is described as competition may be no competition at
all. One species succumbs, not because it is exterminated or starved out
by the other species, but because it does not well accommodate itself to
new conditions, which the other does. The term "struggle for life" is
again used in its metaphorical sense, and may have no other. As to the
real competition between individuals of the same species, which is
illustrated in another place by the cattle of South America during a
period of drought, its value is impaired by its being taken from among
domesticated animals. Bisons emigrate in like circumstances in order to
avoid competition. However severe the struggle between plants--and this
is amply proved--we cannot but repeat Wallace's remark to the effect
that "plants live where they can," while animals have, to a great
extent, the power of choice of their abode. So that we again are asking
ourselves, To what extent does competition really exist within each
animal species? Upon what is the assumption based? The same remark must
be made concerning the indirect argument in favour of a severe
competition and struggle for life within each species, which may be
derived from the "extermination of transitional varieties," so often
mentioned by Darwin. It is known that for a long time Darwin was worried
by the difficulty which he saw in the absence of a long chain of
intermediate forms between closely-allied species, and that he found the
solution of this difficulty in the supposed extermination of the
intermediate forms.(33) However, an attentive reading of the different
chapters in which Darwin and Wallace speak of this subject soon brings
one to the conclusion that the word "extermination" does not mean real
extermination; the same remark which Darwin made concerning his
expression: "struggle for existence," evidently applies to the word
"extermination" as well. It can by no means be understood in its direct
sense, but must be taken "in its metaphoric sense." If we start from the
supposition that a given area is stocked with animals to its fullest
capacity, and that a keen competition for the sheer means of existence
is consequently going on between all the inhabitants--each animal being
compelled to fight against all its congeners in order to get its daily
food--then the appearance of a new and successful variety would
certainly mean in many cases (though not always) the appearance of
individuals which are enabled to seize more than their fair share of the
means of existence; and the result would be that those individuals would
starve both the parental form which does not possess the new variation
and the intermediate forms which do not possess it in the same degree.
It may be that at the outset, Darwin understood the appearance of new
varieties under this aspect; at least, the frequent use of the word
"extermination" conveys such an impression. But both he and Wallace knew
Nature too well not to perceive that this is by no means the only
possible and necessary course of affairs.

If the physical and the biological conditions of a given area, the
extension of the area occupied by a given species, and the habits of all
the members of the latter remained unchanged--then the sudden appearance
of a new variety might mean the starving out and the extermination of
all the individuals which were not endowed in a sufficient degree with
the new feature by which the new variety is characterized. But such a
combination of conditions is precisely what we do not see in Nature.
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;
physical changes are continually going on in every given area; and new
varieties among animals consist in an immense number of cases-perhaps in
the majority--not in the growth of new weapons for snatching the food
from the mouth of its congeners--food is only one out of a hundred of
various conditions of existence--but, as Wallace himself shows in a
charming paragraph on the "divergence of characters" (Darwinism, p.
107), in forming new habits, moving to new abodes, and taking to new
sorts of food. In all such cases there will be no extermination, even no
competition--the new adaptation being a relief from competition, if it
ever existed; and yet there will be, after a time, an absence of
intermediate links, in consequence of a mere survival of those which are
best fitted for the new conditions--as surely as under the hypothesis of
extermination of the parental form. It hardly need be added that if we
admit, with Spencer, all the Lamarckians, and Darwin himself, the
modifying influence of the surroundings upon the species, there remains
still less necessity for the extermination of the intermediate forms.

The importance of migration and of the consequent isolation of groups of
animals, for the origin of new varieties and ultimately of new species,
which was indicated by Moritz Wagner, was fully recognized by Darwin
himself. Consequent researches have only accentuated the importance of
this factor, and they have shown how the largeness of the area occupied
by a given species--which Darwin considered with full reason so
important for the appearance of new varieties--can be combined with the
isolation of parts of the species, in consequence of local geological
changes, or of local barriers. It would be impossible to enter here into
the discussion of this wide question, but a few remarks will do to
illustrate the combined action of these agencies. It is known that
portions of a given species will often take to a new sort of food. The
squirrels, for instance, when there is a scarcity of cones in the larch
forests, remove to the fir-tree forests, and this change of food has
certain well-known physiological effects on the squirrels. If this
change of habits does not last--if next year the cones are again
plentiful in the dark larch woods--no new variety of squirrels will
evidently arise from this cause. But if part of the wide area occupied
by the squirrels begins to have its physical characters altered--in
consequence of, let us say, a milder climate or desiccation, which both
bring about an increase of the pine forests in proportion to the larch
woods--and if some other conditions concur to induce the squirrels to
dwell on the outskirts of the desiccating region--we shall have then a
new variety, i.e. an incipient new species of squirrels, without there
having been anything that would deserve the name of extermination among
the squirrels. 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. This is exactly what we see going on during the
great physical changes which are accomplished over large areas in
Central Asia, owing to the desiccation which is going on there since the
glacial period.

To take another example, it has been proved by geologists that the
present wild horse (Equus Przewalski) has slowly been evolved during the
later parts of the Tertiary and the Quaternary period, but that during
this succession of ages its ancestors were not confined to some given,
limited area of the globe. They wandered over both the Old and New
World, returning, in all probability, after a time to the pastures which
they had, in the course of their migrations, formerly left.(34)
Consequently, if we do not find now, in Asia, all the intermediate links
between the present wild horse and its Asiatic Post-Tertiary ancestors,
this does not mean at all that the intermediate links have been
exterminated. No such extermination has ever taken place. No exceptional
mortality may even have occurred among the ancestral species: the
individuals which belonged to intermediate varieties and species have
died in the usual course of events--often amidst plentiful food, and
their remains were buried all over the globe.

In short, if we carefully consider this matter, and, carefully re-read
what Darwin himself wrote upon this subject, we see that if the word
"extermination" be used at all in connection with transitional
varieties, it must be used in its metaphoric sense. As to "competition,"
this expression, too, is continually used by Darwin (see, for instance,
the paragraph "On Extinction") as an image, or as a way-of-speaking,
rather than with the intention of conveying the idea of a real
competition between two portions of the same species for the means of
existence. At any rate, the absence of intermediate forms is no argument
in favour of it.

In reality, the chief argument in favour of a keen competition for the
means of existence continually going on within every animal species
is--to use Professor Geddes' expression--the "arithmetical argument"
borrowed from Malthus.

But this argument does not prove it at all. We might as well take a
number of villages in South-East Russia, the inhabitants of which enjoy
plenty of food, but have no sanitary accommodation of any kind; and
seeing that for the last eighty years the birth-rate was sixty in the
thousand, while the population is now what it was eighty years ago, we
might conclude that there has been a terrible competition between the
inhabitants. But the truth is that from year to year the population
remained stationary, for the simple reason that one-third of the
new-born died before reaching their sixth month of life; one-half died
within the next four years, and out of each hundred born, only seventeen
or so reached the age of twenty. The new-comers went away before having
grown to be competitors. It is evident that if such is the case with
men, it is still more the case with animals. In the feathered world the
destruction of the eggs goes on on such a tremendous scale that eggs are
the chief food of several species in the early summer; not to, say a
word of the storms, the inundations which destroy nests by the million
in America, and the sudden changes of weather which are fatal to the
young mammals. Each storm, each inundation, each visit of a rat to a
bird's nest, each sudden change of temperature, take away those
competitors which appear so terrible in theory.

As to the facts of an extremely rapid increase of horses and cattle in
America, of pigs and rabbits in New Zealand, and even of wild animals
imported from Europe (where their numbers are kept down by man, not by
competition), they rather seem opposed to the theory of over-population.
If horses and cattle could so rapidly multiply in America, it simply
proved that, however numberless the buffaloes and other ruminants were
at that time in the New World, its grass-eating population was far below
what the prairies could maintain. If millions of intruders have found
plenty of food without starving out the former population of the
prairies, we must rather conclude that the Europeans found a want of
grass-eaters in America, not an excess. And we have good reasons to
believe that want of animal population is the natural state of things
all over the world, with but a few temporary exceptions to the rule. The
actual numbers of animals in a given region are determined, not by the
highest feeding capacity of the region, but by what it is every year
under the most unfavourable conditions. So that, for that reason alone,
competition hardly can be a normal condition. But other causes intervene
as well to cut, down the animal population below even that low standard.
If we take the horses and cattle which are grazing all the winter
through in the Steppes of Transbaikalia, we find them very lean and
exhausted at the end of the winter. But they grow exhausted not because
there is not enough food for all of them--the grass buried under a thin
sheet of snow is everywhere in abundance--but because of the difficulty
of getting it from beneath the snow, and this difficulty is the same for
all horses alike. Besides, days of glazed frost are common in early
spring, and if several such days come in succession the horses grow
still more exhausted. But then comes a snow-storm, which compels the
already weakened animals to remain without any food for several days,
and very great numbers of them die. The losses during the spring are so
severe that if the season has been more inclement than usual they are
even not repaired by the new breeds--the more so as all horses are
exhausted, and the young foals are born in a weaker condition. The
numbers of horses and cattle thus always remain beneath what they
otherwise might be; all the year round there is food for five or ten
times as many animals, and yet their population increases extremely
slowly. But as soon as the Buriate owner makes ever so small a provision
of hay in the steppe, and throws it open during days of glazed frost, or
heavier snow-fall, he immediately sees the increase of his herd. Almost
all free grass-eating animals and many rodents in Asia and America being
in very much the same conditions, we can safely say that their numbers
are not kept down by competition; that at no time of the year they can
struggle for food, and that if they never reach anything approaching to
over-population, the cause is in the climate, not in competition.

The importance of natural checks to over-multiplication, and especially
their bearing upon the competition hypothesis, seems never to have been
taken into due account. The checks, or rather some of them, are
mentioned, but their action is seldom studied in detail. However, if we
compare the action of the natural checks with that of competition, we
must recognize at once that the latter sustains no comparison whatever
with the other checks. Thus, Mr. Bates mentions the really astounding
numbers of winged ants which are destroyed during their exodus. The dead
or half-dead bodies of the formica de fuego (Myrmica saevissima) which
had been blown into the river during a gale "were heaped in a line an
inch or two in height and breadth, the line continuing without
interruption for miles at the edge of the water."(35) Myriads of ants
are thus destroyed amidst a nature which might support a hundred times
as many ants as are actually living. Dr. Altum, a German forester, who
wrote a very interesting book about animals injurious to our forests,
also gives many facts showing the immense importance of natural checks.
He says, that a succession of gales or cold and damp weather during the
exodus of the pine-moth (Bombyx pini) destroy it to incredible amounts,
and during the spring of 1871 all these moths disappeared at once,
probably killed by a succession of cold nights.(36) Many like examples
relative to various insects could be quoted from various parts of
Europe. Dr. Altum also mentions the bird-enemies of the pine-moth, and
the immense amount of its eggs destroyed by foxes; but he adds that the
parasitic fungi which periodically infest it are a far more terrible
enemy than any bird, because they destroy the moth over very large areas
at once. As to various species of mice (Mus sylvaticus, Arvicola
arvalis, and A. agrestis), the same author gives a long list of their
enemies, but he remarks: "However, the most terrible enemies of mice are
not other animals, but such sudden changes of weather as occur almost
every year." Alternations of frost and warm weather destroy them in
numberless quantities; "one single sudden change can reduce thousands of
mice to the number of a few individuals." On the other side, a warm
winter, or a winter which gradually steps in, make them multiply in
menacing proportions, notwithstanding every enemy; such was the case in
1876 and 1877.(37) Competition, in the case of mice, thus appears a
quite trifling factor when compared with weather. Other facts to the
same effect are also given as regards squirrels.

As to birds, it is well known how they suffer from sudden changes of
weather. Late snow-storms are as destructive of bird-life on the English
moors, as they are in Siberia; and Ch. Dixon saw the red grouse so
pressed during some exceptionally severe winters, that they quitted the
moors in numbers, "and we have then known them actually to be taken in
the streets of Sheffield. Persistent wet," he adds, "is almost as fatal
to them."

On the other side, the contagious diseases which continually visit most
animal species destroy them in such numbers that the losses often cannot
be repaired for many years, even with the most rapidly-multiplying
animals. Thus, some sixty years ago, the sousliks suddenly disappeared
in the neighbourhood of Sarepta, in South-Eastern Russia, in consequence
of some epidemics; and for years no sousliks were seen in that
neighbourhood. It took many years before they became as numerous as they
formerly were.(38)

Like facts, all tending to reduce the importance given to competition,
could be produced in numbers. Of course, it might be replied, in
Darwin's words, that nevertheless each organic being "at some period of
its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at
intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction,"
and that the fittest survive during such periods of hard struggle for
life. But if the evolution of the animal world were based exclusively,
or even chiefly, upon the survival of the fittest during periods of
calamities; if natural selection were limited in its action to periods
of exceptional drought, or sudden changes of temperature, or
inundations, retrogression would be the rule in the animal world. 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. No progress
could be based on those survivals--the less so as all survivors usually
come out of the ordeal with an impaired health, like the Transbaikalian
horses just mentioned, or the Arctic crews, or the garrison of a
fortress which has been compelled to live for a few months on half
rations, and comes out of its experience with a broken health, and
subsequently shows a quite abnormal mortality. All that natural
selection can do in times of calamities is to spare the individuals
endowed with the greatest endurance for privations of all kinds. So it
does among the Siberian horses and cattle. They are enduring; they can
feed upon the Polar birch in case of need; they resist cold and hunger.
But no Siberian horse is capable of carrying half the weight which a
European horse carries with ease; no Siberian cow gives half the amount
of milk given by a Jersey cow, and no natives of uncivilized countries
can bear a comparison with Europeans. They may better endure hunger and
cold, but their physical force is very far below that of a well-fed
European, and their intellectual progress is despairingly slow. "Evil
cannot be productive of good," as Tchernyshevsky wrote in a remarkable
essay upon Darwinism.(39)

Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world
or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and
natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better
conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of
mutual aid and mutual Support.(40) In the great struggle for life--for
the greatest possible fulness and intensity of life with the least waste
of energy--natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely
for avoiding competition as much as possible. The ants combine in nests
and nations; they pile up their stores, they rear their cattle--and thus
avoid competition; and natural selection picks out of the ants' family
the species which know best how to avoid competition, with its
unavoidably deleterious consequences. Most of our birds slowly move
southwards as the winter comes, or gather in numberless societies and
undertake long journeys--and thus avoid competition. Many rodents fall
asleep when the time comes that competition should set in; while other
rodents store food for the winter, and gather in large villages for
obtaining the necessary protection when at work. The reindeer, when the
lichens are dry in the interior of the continent, migrate towards the
sea. Buffaloes cross an immense continent in order to find plenty of
food. And the beavers, when they grow numerous on a river, divide into
two parties, and go, the old ones down the river, and the young ones up
the river and avoid competition. And when animals can neither fall
asleep, nor migrate, nor lay in stores, nor themselves grow their food
like the ants, they do what the titmouse does, and what Wallace
(Darwinism, ch. v) has so charmingly described: they resort to new kinds
of food--and thus, again, avoid competition.

"Don't compete!--competition is always injurious to the species, and you
have plenty of resources to avoid it!" That is the tendency of nature,
not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword
which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean.
"Therefore combine--practise mutual aid! That is the surest means for
giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of
existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral." That is what
Nature teaches us; and that is what all those animals which have
attained the highest position in their respective classes have done.
That is also what man--the most primitive man--has been doing; and that
is why man has reached the position upon which we stand now, as we shall
see in the subsequent chapters devoted to mutual aid in human societies.

NOTES:

1. Syevettsoff's Periodical Phenomena, p. 251.

2. Seyfferlitz, quoted by Brehm, iv. 760.

3. The Arctic Voyages of A.E. Nordenskjold, London, 1879, p. 135. See
also the powerful description of the St. Kilda islands by Mr. Dixon
(quoted by Seebohm), and nearly all books of Arctic travel.

4. Elliot Coues, in Bulletin U.S. Geol. Survey of Territories, iv. No.
7, pp. 556, 579, etc. Among the gulls (Larus argentatus), Polyakoff saw
on a marsh in Northern Russia, that the nesting grounds of a very great
number of these birds were always patrolled by one male, which warned
the colony of the approach of danger. All birds rose in such case and
attacked the enemy with great vigour. The females, which had five or six
nests together on each knoll of the marsh, kept a certain order in
leaving their nests in search of food. The fledglings, which otherwise
are extremely unprotected and easily become the prey of the rapacious
birds, were never left alone ("Family Habits among the Aquatic Birds,"
in Proceedings of the Zool. Section of St. Petersburg Soc. of Nat., Dec.
17, 1874).

5. Brehm Father, quoted by A. Brehm, iv. 34 seq. See also White's
Natural History of Selborne, Letter XI.

6. Dr. Coues, Birds of Dakota and Montana, in Bulletin U.S. Survey of
Territories, iv. No. 7.

7. It has often been intimated that larger birds may occasionally
transport some of the smaller birds when they cross together the
Mediterranean, but the fact still remains doubtful. On the other side,
it is certain that some smaller birds join the bigger ones for
migration. The fact has been noticed several times, and it was recently
confirmed by L. Buxbaum at Raunheim. He saw several parties of cranes
which had larks flying in the midst and on both sides of their migratory
columns (Der zoologische Garten, 1886, p. 133).

8. H. Seebohm and Ch. Dixon both mention this habit.

9. The fact is well known to every field-naturalist, and with reference
to England several examples may be found in Charles Dixon's Among the
Birds in Northern Shires. The chaffinches arrive during winter in vast
flocks; and about the same time, i.e. in November, come flocks of
bramblings; redwings also frequent the same places "in similar large
companies," and so on (pp. 165, 166).

10. S.W. Baker, Wild Beasts, etc., vol. i. p. 316.

11. Tschudi, Thierleben der Alpenwelt, p. 404.

12. Houzeau's Etudes, ii. 463.

13. For their hunting associations see Sir E. Tennant's Natural History
of Ceylon, quoted in Romanes's Animal Intelligence, p. 432.

14. See Emil Huter's letter in L. Buchner's Liebe.

15. With regard to the viscacha it is very interesting to note that
these highly-sociable little animals not only live peaceably together in
each village, but that whole villages visit each other at nights.
Sociability is thus extended to the whole species--not only to a given
society, or to a nation, as we saw it with the ants. 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" (l.c., p. 311). This is a
widely-known fact in La Plata, verified by the author.

16. Handbuch für Jäger und Jagdberechtigte, quoted by Brehm, ii. 223.

17. Buffon's Histoire Naturelle.

18. In connection with the horses it is worthy of notice that the quagga
zebra, which never comes together with the dauw zebra, nevertheless
lives on excellent terms, not only with ostriches, which are very good
sentries, but also with gazelles, several species of antelopes, and
gnus. We thus have a case of mutual dislike between the quagga and the
dauw which cannot be explained by competition for food. The fact that
the quagga lives together with ruminants feeding on the same grass as
itself excludes that hypothesis, and we must look for some
incompatibility of character, as in the case of the hare and the rabbit.
Cf., among others, Clive Phillips-Wolley's Big Game Shooting (Badminton
Library), which contains excellent illustrations of various species
living together in East Africa.

19. Our Tungus hunter, who was going to marry, and therefore was
prompted by the desire of getting as many furs as he possibly could, was
beating the hill-sides all day long on horseback in search of deer. His
efforts were not rewarded by even so much as one fallow deer killed
every day; and he was an excellent hunter.

20. According to Samuel W. Baker, elephants combine in larger groups
than the "compound family." "I have frequently observed," he wrote, "in
the portion of Ceylon known as the Park Country, the tracks of elephants
in great numbers which have evidently been considerable herds that have
joined together in a general retreat from a ground which they considered
insecure" (Wild Beasts and their Ways, vol. i. p. 102).

21. Pigs, attacked by wolves, do the same (Hudson, l.c.).

22. Romanes's Animal Intelligence, p. 472.

23. Brehm, i. 82; Darwin's Descent of Man, ch. iii. The Kozloff
expedition of 1899-1901 have also had to sustain in Northern Thibet a
similar fight.

24. The more strange was it to read in the previously-mentioned article
by Huxley the following paraphrase of a well-known sentence of Rousseau:
"The first men who substituted mutual peace for that of mutual
war--whatever the motive which impelled them to take that step--created
society" (Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1888, p. 165). Society has not been
created by man; it is anterior to man.

25. Such monographs as the chapter on "Music and Dancing in Nature"
which we have in Hudson's Naturalist on the La Plata, and Carl Gross'
Play of Animals, have already thrown a considerable light upon an
instinct which is absolutely universal in Nature.

26. Not only numerous species of birds possess the habit of assembling
together--in many cases always at the same spot--to indulge in antics
and dancing performances, but W.H. Hudson's experience is that nearly
all mammals and birds ("probably there are really no exceptions")
indulge frequently in more or less regular or set performances with or
without sound, or composed of sound exclusively (p. 264).

27. For the choruses of monkeys, see Brehm.

28. Haygarth, Bush Life in Australia, p. 58.

29. To quote but a few instances, a wounded badger was carried away by
another badger suddenly appearing on the scene; rats have been seen
feeding a blind couple (Seelenleben der Thiere, p. 64 seq.). Brehm
himself saw two crows feeding in a hollow tree a third crow which was
wounded; its wound was several weeks old (Hausfreund, 1874, 715;
Buchner's Liebe, 203). Mr. Blyth saw Indian crows feeding two or three
blind comrades; and so on.

30. Man and Beast, p. 344.

31. L.H. Morgan, The American Beaver, 1868, p. 272; Descent of Man, ch.
iv.

32. One species of swallow is said to have caused the decrease of
another swallow species in North America; the recent increase of the
missel-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush;
the brown rat has taken the place of the black rat in Europe; in Russia
the small cockroach has everywhere driven before it its greater
congener; and in Australia the imported hive-bee is rapidly
exterminating the small stingless bee. Two other cases, but relative to
domesticated animals, are mentioned in the preceding paragraph. While
recalling these same facts, A.R. Wallace remarks in a footnote relative
to the Scottish thrushes: "Prof. A. Newton, however, informs me that
these species do not interfere in the way here stated" (Darwinism, p.
34). As to the brown rat, it is known that, owing to its amphibian
habits, it usually stays in the lower parts of human dwellings (low
cellars, sewers, etc.), as also on the banks of canals and rivers; it
also undertakes distant migrations in numberless bands. The black rat,
on the contrary, prefers staying in our dwellings themselves, under the
floor, as well as in our stables and barns. It thus is much more exposed
to be exterminated by man; and we cannot maintain, with any approach to
certainty, that the black rat is being either exterminated or starved
out by the brown rat and not by man.

33. "But it may be urged that when several closely-allied species
inhabit the same territory, we surely ought to find at the present time
many transitional forms.... By my theory these allied species are
descended from a common parent; and during the process of modification,
each has become adapted to the conditions of life of its own region, and
has supplanted and exterminated its original parent-form and all the
transitional varieties between its past and present states" (Origin of
Species, 6th ed. p. 134); also p. 137, 296 (all paragraph "On
Extinction").

34. According to Madame Marie Pavloff, who has made a special study of
this subject, they migrated from Asia to Africa, stayed there some time,
and returned next to Asia. Whether this double migration be confirmed or
not, the fact of a former extension of the ancestor of our horse over
Asia, Africa, and America is settled beyond doubt.

35. The Naturalist on the River Amazons, ii. 85, 95.

36. Dr. B. Altum, Waldbeschadigungen durch Thiere und Gegenmittel
(Berlin, 1889), pp. 207 seq.

37. Dr. B. Altum, ut supra, pp. 13 and 187.

38. A. Becker in the Bulletin de la Societe des Naturalistes de Moscou,
1889, p. 625.

39. Russkaya Mysl, Sept. 1888: "The Theory of Beneficency of Struggle
for Life, being a Preface to various Treatises on Botanics, Zoology, and
Human Life," by an Old Transformist.

40. "One of the most frequent modes in which Natural Selection acts is,
by adapting some individuals of a species to a somewhat different mode
of life, whereby they are able to seize unappropriated places in Nature"
(Origin of Species, p. 145)--in other words, to avoid competition.




CHAPTER III

MUTUAL AID AMONG SAVAGES

Supposed war of each against all. Tribal origin of human society. Late
appearance of the separate family. Bushmen and Hottentots. Australians,
Papuas. Eskimos, Aleoutes. Features of savage life difficult to
understand for the European. The Dayak's conception of justice. Common
law.


The immense part played by mutual aid and mutual support in the
evolution of the animal world has been briefly analyzed in the preceding
chapters. We have now to cast a glance upon the part played by the same
agencies in the evolution of mankind. We saw how few are the animal
species which live an isolated life, and how numberless are those which
live in societies, either for mutual defence, or for hunting and storing
up food, or for rearing their offspring, or simply for enjoying life in
common. We also saw that, though a good deal of warfare goes on between
different classes of animals, or different species, or even different
tribes of the same species, peace and mutual support are the rule within
the tribe or the species; and that those species which best know how to
combine, and to avoid competition, have the best chances of survival and
of a further progressive development. They prosper, while the unsociable
species decay.

It is evident that it would be quite contrary to all that we know of
nature if men were an exception to so general a rule: if a creature so
defenceless as man was at his beginnings should have found his
protection and his way to progress, not in mutual support, like other
animals, but in a reckless competition for personal advantages, with no
regard to the interests of the species. To a mind accustomed to the idea
of unity in nature, such a proposition appears utterly indefensible. And
yet, improbable and unphilosophical as it is, it has never found a lack
of supporters. There always were writers who took a pessimistic view of
mankind. They knew it, more or less superficially, through their own
limited experience; they knew of history what the annalists, always
watchful of wars, cruelty, and oppression, told of it, and little more
besides; and they concluded that mankind is nothing but a loose
aggregation of beings, always ready to fight with each other, and only
prevented from so doing by the intervention of some authority.

Hobbes took that position; and while some of his eighteenth-century
followers endeavoured to prove that at no epoch of its existence--not
even in its most primitive condition--mankind lived in a state of
perpetual warfare; that men have been sociable even in "the state of
nature," and that want of knowledge, rather than the natural bad
inclinations of man, brought humanity to all the horrors of its early
historical life,--his idea was, on the contrary, that the so-called
"state of nature" was nothing but a permanent fight between individuals,
accidentally huddled together by the mere caprice of their bestial
existence. True, that science has made some progress since Hobbes's
time, and that we have safer ground to stand upon than the speculations
of Hobbes or Rousseau. But the Hobbesian philosophy has plenty of
admirers still; and we have had of late quite a school of writers who,
taking possession of Darwin's terminology rather than of his leading
ideas, made of it an argument in favour of Hobbes's views upon primitive
man, and even succeeded in giving them a scientific appearance. 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"; to quote
his own words--"beyond the limited and, temporary relations of the
family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of
existence."(1)

It has been remarked more than once that the chief error of Hobbes, and
the eighteenth-century philosophers as well, was to imagine that mankind
began its life in the shape of small straggling families, something like
the "limited and temporary" families of the bigger carnivores, while in
reality it is now positively known that such was not the case. Of
course, we have no direct evidence as to the modes of life of the first
man-like beings. We are not yet settled even as to the time of their
first appearance, geologists being inclined at present to see their
traces in the pliocene, or even the miocene, deposits of the Tertiary
period. But we have the indirect method which permits us to throw some
light even upon that remote antiquity. A most careful investigation into
the social institutions of the lowest races has been carried on during
the last forty years, and it has revealed among the present institutions
of primitive folk some traces of still older institutions which have
long disappeared, but nevertheless left unmistakable traces of their
previous existence. A whole science devoted to the embryology of human
institutions has thus developed in the hands of Bachofen, MacLennan,
Morgan, Edwin Tylor, Maine, Post, Kovalevsky, Lubbock, and many others.
And that science has established beyond any doubt that mankind did not
begin its life in the shape of small isolated families.

Far from being a primitive form of organization, the family is a very
late product of human evolution. As far as we can go back in the
palaeo-ethnology of mankind, we find men living in societies--in tribes
similar to those of the highest mammals; and an extremely slow and long
evolution was required to bring these societies to the gentile, or clan
organization, which, in its turn, had to undergo another, also very long
evolution, before the first germs of family, polygamous or monogamous,
could appear. Societies, bands, or tribes--not families--were thus the
primitive form of organization of mankind and its earliest ancestors.
That is what ethnology has come to after its painstaking researches. And
in so doing it simply came to what might have been foreseen by the
zoologist. None of the higher mammals, save a few carnivores and a few
undoubtedly-decaying species of apes (orang-outans and gorillas), live
in small families, isolatedly straggling in the woods. All others live
in societies. And Darwin so well understood that isolately-living apes
never could have developed into man-like beings, that he was inclined to
consider man as descended from some comparatively weak but social
species, like the chimpanzee, rather than from some stronger but
unsociable species, like the gorilla.(2) Zoology and palaeo-ethnology
are thus agreed in considering that the band, not the family, was the
earliest form of social life. The first human societies simply were a
further development of those societies which constitute the very essence
of life of the higher animals.(3)

If we now go over to positive evidence, we see that the earliest traces
of man, dating from the glacial or the early post-glacial period, afford
unmistakable proofs of man having lived even then in societies. Isolated
finds of stone implements, even from the old stone age, are very rare;
on the contrary, wherever one flint implement is discovered others are
sure to be found, in most cases in very large quantities. At a time when
men were dwelling in caves, or under occasionally protruding rocks, in
company with mammals now extinct, and hardly succeeded in making the
roughest sorts of flint hatchets, they already knew the advantages of
life in societies. In the valleys of the tributaries of the Dordogne,
the surface of the rocks is in some places entirely covered with caves
which were inhabited by palaeolithic men.(4) Sometimes the
cave-dwellings are superposed in storeys, and they certainly recall much
more the nesting colonies of swallows than the dens of carnivores. As to
the flint implements discovered in those caves, to use Lubbock's words,
"one may say without exaggeration that they are numberless." The same is
true of other palaeolithic stations. It also appears from Lartet's
investigations that the inhabitants of the Aurignac region in the south
of France partook of tribal meals at the burial of their dead. So that
men lived in societies, and had germs of a tribal worship, even at that
extremely remote epoch.

The same is still better proved as regards the later part of the stone
age. Traces of neolithic man have been found in numberless quantities,
so that we can reconstitute his manner of life to a great extent. When
the ice-cap (which must have spread from the Polar regions as far south
as middle France, middle Germany, and middle Russia, and covered Canada
as well as a good deal of what is now the United States) began to melt
away, the surfaces freed from ice were covered, first, with swamps and
marshes, and later on with numberless lakes.(5) Lakes filled all
depressions of the valleys before their waters dug out those permanent
channels which, during a subsequent epoch, became our rivers. And
wherever we explore, in Europe, Asia, or America, the shores of the
literally numberless lakes of that period, whose proper name would be
the Lacustrine period, we find traces of neolithic man. They are so
numerous that we can only wonder at the relative density of population
at that time. The "stations" of neolithic man closely follow each other
on the terraces which now mark the shores of the old lakes. And at each
of those stations stone implements appear in such numbers, that no doubt
is possible as to the length of time during which they were inhabited by
rather numerous tribes. Whole workshops of flint implements, testifying
of the numbers of workers who used to come together, have been
discovered by the archaeologists.

Traces of a more advanced period, already characterized by the use of
some pottery, are found in the shell-heaps of Denmark. They appear, as
is well known, in the shape of heaps from five to ten feet thick, from
100 to 200 feet wide, and 1,000 feet or more in length, and they are so
common along some parts of the sea-coast that for a long time they were
considered as natural growths. And yet they "contain nothing but what
has been in some way or other subservient to the use of man," and they
are so densely stuffed with products of human industry that, during a
two days' stay at Milgaard, Lubbock dug out no less than 191 pieces of
stone-implements and four fragments of pottery.(6) 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, which also
accumulate like shellheaps, are living in our own times.

As to the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, which represent a still further
advance in civilization, they yield still better evidence of life and
work in societies. It is known that even during the stone age the shores
of the Swiss lakes were dotted with a succession of villages, each of
which consisted of several huts, and was built upon a platform supported
by numberless pillars in the lake. No less than twenty-four, mostly
stone age villages, were discovered along the shores of Lake Leman,
thirty-two in the Lake of Constance, forty-six in the Lake of Neuchatel,
and so on; and each of them testifies to the immense amount of labour
which was spent in common by the tribe, not by the family. It has even
been asserted that the life of the lake-dwellers must have been
remarkably free of warfare. And so it probably was, especially if we
refer to the life of those primitive folk who live until the present
time in similar villages built upon pillars on the sea coasts.

It is thus seen, even from the above rapid hints, that our knowledge of
primitive man is not so scanty after all, and that, so far as it goes,
it is rather opposed than favourable to the Hobbesian speculations.
Moreover, it may be supplemented, to a great extent, by the direct
observation of such primitive tribes as now stand on the same level of
civilization as the inhabitants of Europe stood in prehistoric times.

That these primitive tribes which we find now are not degenerated
specimens of mankind who formerly knew a higher civilization, as it has
occasionally been maintained, has sufficiently been proved by Edwin
Tylor and Lubbock. However, to the arguments already opposed to the
degeneration theory, the following may be added. Save a few tribes
clustering in the less-accessible highlands, the "savages" represent a
girdle which encircles the more or less civilized nations, and they
occupy the extremities of our continents, most of which have retained
still, or recently were bearing, an early post-glacial character. Such
are the Eskimos and their congeners in Greenland, Arctic America, and
Northern Siberia; and, in the Southern hemisphere, the Australians, the
Papuas, the Fuegians, and, partly, the Bushmen; while within the
civilized area, like primitive folk are only found in the Himalayas, the
highlands of Australasia, and the plateaus of Brazil. Now it must be
borne in mind that the glacial age did not come to an end at once over
the whole surface of the earth. It still continues in Greenland.
Therefore, at a time when the littoral regions of the Indian Ocean, the
Mediterranean, or the Gulf of Mexico already enjoyed a warmer climate,
and became the seats of higher civilizations, immense territories in
middle Europe, Siberia, and Northern America, as well as in Patagonia,
Southern Africa, and Southern Australasia, remained in early postglacial
conditions which rendered them inaccessible to the civilized nations of
the torrid and sub-torrid zones. 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. Later on, when desiccation rendered these
territories more suitable for agriculture, they were peopled with more
civilized immigrants; and while part of their previous inhabitants were
assimilated by the new settlers, another part migrated further, and
settled where we find them. The territories they inhabit now are still,
or recently were, sub-glacial, as to their physical features; their arts
and implements are those of the neolithic age; and, notwithstanding
their racial differences, and the distances which separate them, their
modes of life and social institutions bear a striking likeness. So we
cannot but consider them as fragments of the early post-glacial
population of the now civilized area.

The first thing which strikes us as soon as we begin studying primitive
folk is the complexity of the organization of marriage relations under
which they are living. With most of them the family, in the sense we
attribute to it, is hardly found in its germs. But they are by no means
loose aggregations of men and women coming in a disorderly manner
together in conformity with their momentary caprices. All of them are
under a certain organization, which has been described by Morgan in its
general aspects as the "gentile," or clan organization.(7)

To tell the matter as briefly as possible, there is little doubt that
mankind has passed at its beginnings through a stage which may be
described as that of "communal marriage"; that is, the whole tribe had
husbands and wives in common with but little regard to consanguinity.
But it is also certain that some restrictions to that free intercourse
were imposed at a very early period. Inter-marriage was soon prohibited
between the sons of one mother and her sisters, granddaughters, and
aunts. Later on it was prohibited between the sons and daughters of the
same mother, and further limitations did not fail to follow. The idea of
a gens, or clan, which embodied all presumed descendants from one stock
(or rather all those who gathered in one group) was evolved, and
marriage within the clan was entirely prohibited. It still remained
"communal," but the wife or the husband had to be taken from another
clan. And when a gens became too numerous, and subdivided into several
gentes, each of them was divided into classes (usually four), and
marriage was permitted only between certain well-defined classes. That
is the stage which we find now among the Kamilaroi-speaking Australians.
As to the family, its first germs appeared amidst the clan organization.
A woman who was captured in war from some other clan, and who formerly
would have belonged to the whole gens, could be kept at a later period
by the capturer, under certain obligations towards the tribe. She may be
taken by him to a separate hut, after she had paid a certain tribute to
the clan, and thus constitute within the gens a separate family, the
appearance of which evidently was opening a quite new phase of
civilization.

Now, if we take into consideration that this complicated organization
developed among men who stood at the lowest known degree of development,
and that it maintained itself in societies knowing no kind of authority
besides the authority of public opinion, we at once see how deeply
inrooted social instincts must have been in human nature, even at its
lowest stages. A savage who is capable of living under such an
organization, and of freely submitting to rules which continually clash
with his personal desires, certainly is not a beast devoid of ethical
principles and knowing no rein to its passions. But the fact becomes
still more striking if we consider the immense antiquity of the clan
organization. It 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."(9)
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.(10)

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. Five hundred Bushmen were
slaughtered in 1774, three thousand 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.(11) 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.(12) Burchell and Moffat both
represent them as goodhearted, disinterested, true to their promises,
and grateful,(13) 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.(14)

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."(15)

Tachart, Barrow, and Moodie(16) 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 Aleoutes, the
Papuas, and so on, by the highest authorities. I also remember having
read them applied to the Tunguses, the Tchuktchis, the Sioux, and
several others. The very frequency of that high commendation already
speaks volumes in itself.

The natives of Australia do not stand on a higher level of development
than their South African brothers. Their huts are of the same character:
very often simple screens are the only protection against cold winds. In
their food they are most indifferent: they devour horribly putrefied
corpses, and cannibalism is resorted to in times of scarcity. When first
discovered by Europeans, they had no implements but in stone or bone,
and these were of the roughest description. Some tribes had even no
canoes, and did not know barter-trade. And yet, when their manners and
customs were carefully studied, they proved to be living under that
elaborate clan organization which I have mentioned on a preceding
page.(17)

The territory they inhabit is usually allotted between the different
gentes or clans; but the hunting and fishing territories of each clan
are kept in common, and the produce of fishing and hunting belongs to
the whole clan; so also the fishing and hunting implements.(18) The
meals are taken in common. Like many other savages, they respect certain
regulations as to the seasons when certain gums and grasses may be
collected.(19) As to their morality altogether, we cannot do better than
transcribe the following answers given to the questions of the Paris
Anthropological Society by Lumholtz, a missionary who sojourned in North
Queensland:(20)--

"The feeling of friendship is known among them; it is strong. Weak
people are usually supported; sick people are very well attended to;
they never are abandoned or killed. These tribes are cannibals, but they
very seldom eat members of their own tribe (when immolated on religious
principles, I suppose); they eat strangers only. The parents love their
children, play with them, and pet them. Infanticide meets with common
approval. Old people are very well treated, never put to death. No
religion, no idols, only a fear of death. Polygamous marriage, quarrels
arising within the tribe are settled by means of duels fought with
wooden swords and shields. No slaves; no culture of any kind; no
pottery; no dress, save an apron sometimes worn by women. The clan
consists of two hundred individuals, divided into four classes of men
and four of women; marriage being only permitted within the usual
classes, and never within the gens."

For the Papuas, closely akin to the above, we have the testimony of G.L.
Bink, who stayed in New Guinea, chiefly in Geelwink Bay, from 1871 to
1883. Here is the essence of his answers to the same questioner:(21)--

"They are sociable and cheerful; they laugh very much. Rather timid than
courageous. Friendship is relatively strong among persons belonging to
different tribes, and still stronger within the tribe. A friend will
often pay the debt of his friend, the stipulation being that the latter
will repay it without interest to the children of the lender. They take
care of the ill and the old; old people are never abandoned, and in no
case are they killed--unless it be a slave who was ill for a long time.
War prisoners are sometimes eaten. The children are very much petted and
loved. Old and feeble war prisoners are killed, the others are sold as
slaves. They have no religion, no gods, no idols, no authority of any
description; the oldest man in the family is the judge. In cases of
adultery a fine is paid, and part of it goes to the negoria (the
community). The soil is kept in common, but the crop belongs to those
who have grown it. They have pottery, and know barter-trade--the custom
being that the merchant gives them the goods, whereupon they return to
their houses and bring the native goods required by the merchant; if the
latter cannot be obtained, the European goods are returned.(22) They are
head-hunters, and in so doing they prosecute blood revenge. 'Sometimes,'
Finsch says, 'the affair is referred to the Rajah of Namototte, who
terminates it by imposing a fine.'"

When well treated, the Papuas are very kind. Miklukho-Maclay landed on
the eastern coast of New Guinea, followed by one single man, stayed for
two years among tribes reported to be cannibals, and left them with
regret; he returned again to stay one year more among them, and never
had he any conflict to complain of. True that his rule was never--under
no pretext whatever--to say anything which was not truth, nor make any
promise which he could not keep. 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. They work in common,
just enough to get the food of the day; they rear their children in
common; and in the evenings they dress themselves as coquettishly as
they can, and dance. Like all savages, they are fond of dancing. Each
village has its barla, or balai--the "long house," "longue maison," or
"grande maison"--for the unmarried men, for social gatherings, and for
the discussion of common affairs--again a trait which is common to most
inhabitants of the Pacific Islands, the Eskimos, the Red Indians, and so
on. Whole groups of villages are on friendly terms, and visit each other
en bloc.

Unhappily, feuds are not uncommon--not in consequence of "Overstocking
of the area," or "keen competition," and like inventions of a mercantile
century, but chiefly in consequence of superstition. As soon as any one
falls ill, his friends and relatives come together, and deliberately
discuss who might be the cause of the illness. All possible enemies are
considered, every one confesses of his own petty quarrels, and finally
the real cause is discovered. An enemy from the next village has called
it down, and a raid upon that village is decided upon. Therefore, feuds
are rather frequent, even between the coast villages, not to say a word
of the cannibal mountaineers who are considered as real witches and
enemies, though, on a closer acquaintance, they prove to be exactly the
same sort of people as their neighbours on the seacoast.(23)

Many striking pages could be written about the harmony which prevails in
the villages of the Polynesian inhabitants of the Pacific Islands. But
they belong to a more advanced stage of civilization. So we shall now
take our illustrations from the far north. I must mention, however,
before leaving the Southern Hemisphere, that even the Fuegians, whose
reputation has been so bad, appear under a much better light since they
begin to be better known. A few French missionaries who stay among them
"know of no act of malevolence to complain of." In their clans,
consisting of from 120 to 150 souls, they practise the same primitive
communism as the Papuas; they share everything in common, and treat
their old people very well. Peace prevails among these tribes.(24) With
the Eskimos and their nearest congeners, the Thlinkets, the Koloshes,
and the Aleoutes, we find one of the nearest illustrations of what man
may have been during the glacial age. Their implements hardly differ
from those of palaeolithic man, and some of their tribes do not yet know
fishing: they simply spear the fish with a kind of harpoon.(25) They
know the use of iron, but they receive it from the Europeans, or find it
on wrecked ships. Their social organization is of a very primitive kind,
though they already have emerged from the stage of "communal marriage,"
even under the gentile restrictions. They live in families, but the
family bonds are often broken; husbands and wives are often
exchanged.(26) The families, however, remain united in clans, and how
could it be otherwise? How could they sustain the hard struggle for life
unless by closely combining their forces? So they do, and the tribal
bonds are closest where the struggle for life is hardest, namely, in
North-East Greenland. The "long house" is their usual dwelling, and
several families lodge in it, separated from each other by small
partitions of ragged furs, with a common passage in the front. Sometimes
the house has the shape of a cross, and in such case a common fire is
kept in the centre. The German Expedition which spent a winter close by
one of those "long houses" could ascertain that "no quarrel disturbed
the peace, no dispute arose about the use of this narrow space"
throughout the long winter. "Scolding, or even unkind words, are
considered as a misdemeanour, if not produced under the legal form of
process, namely, the nith-song."(27) Close cohabitation and close
interdependence are sufficient for maintaining century after century
that deep respect for the interests of the community which is
characteristic of Eskimo life. Even in the larger communities of
Eskimos, "public opinion formed the real judgment-seat, the general
punishment consisting in the offenders being shamed in the eyes of the
people."(28)

Eskimo life is based upon communism. What is obtained by hunting and
fishing belongs to the clan. But in several tribes, especially in the
West, under the influence of the Danes, private property penetrates into
their institutions. However, they have an original means for obviating
the inconveniences arising from a personal accumulation of wealth which
would soon destroy their tribal unity. When a man has grown rich, he
convokes the folk of his clan to a great festival, and, after much
eating, distributes among them all his fortune. On the Yukon river, Dall
saw an Aleonte family distributing in this way ten guns, ten full fur
dresses, 200 strings of beads, numerous blankets, ten wolf furs, 200
beavers, and 500 zibelines. 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.(29) Like distributions
of wealth appear to be a regular habit with the Eskimos, and to take
place at a certain season, after an exhibition of all that has been
obtained during the year.(30) In my opinion these distributions reveal a
very old institution, contemporaneous with the first apparition of
personal wealth; they must have been a means for re-establishing
equality among the members of the clan, after it had been disturbed by
the enrichment of the few. The periodical redistribution of land and the
periodical abandonment of all debts which took place in historical times
with so many different races (Semites, Aryans, etc.), must have been a
survival of that old custom. And the habit of either burying with the
dead, or destroying upon his grave, all that belonged to him
personally--a habit which we find among all primitive races--must have
had the same origin. In fact, while everything that belongs personally
to the dead is burnt or broken upon his grave, nothing is destroyed of
what belonged to him in common with the tribe, such as boats, or the
communal implements of fishing. The destruction bears upon personal
property alone. At a later epoch this habit becomes a religious
ceremony. It receives a mystical interpretation, and is imposed by
religion, when public opinion alone proves incapable of enforcing its
general observance. And, finally, it is substituted by either burning
simple models of the dead man's property (as in China), or by simply
carrying his property to the grave and taking it back to his house after
the burial ceremony is over--a habit which still prevails with the
Europeans as regards swords, crosses, and other marks of public
distinction.(31)

The high standard of the tribal morality of the Eskimos has often been
mentioned in general literature. Nevertheless the following remarks upon
the manners of the Aleoutes--nearly akin to the Eskimos--will better
illustrate savage morality as a whole. They were written, after a ten
years' stay among the Aleoutes, by a most remarkable man--the Russian
missionary, Veniaminoff. I sum them up, mostly in his own words:--

Endurability (he wrote) is their chief feature. It is simply colossal.
Not only do they bathe every morning in the frozen sea, and stand naked
on the beach, inhaling the icy wind, but their endurability, even when
at hard work on insufficient food, surpasses all that can be imagined.
During a protracted scarcity of food, the Aleoute cares first for his
children; he gives them all he has, and himself fasts. They are not
inclined to stealing; that was remarked even by the first Russian
immigrants. Not that they never steal; every Aleoute would confess
having sometime stolen something, but it is always a trifle; the whole
is so childish. The attachment of the parents to their children is
touching, though it is never expressed in words or pettings. The Aleoute
is with difficulty moved to make a promise, but once he has made it he
will keep it whatever may happen. (An Aleoute made Veniaminoff a gift of
dried fish, but it was forgotten on the beach in the hurry of the
departure. He took it home. The next occasion to send it to the
missionary was in January; and in November and December there was a
great scarcity of food in the Aleoute encampment. But the fish was never
touched by the starving people, and in January it was sent to its
destination.) Their code of morality is both varied and severe. It is
considered shameful to be afraid of unavoidable death; to ask pardon
from an enemy; to die without ever having killed an enemy; to be
convicted of stealing; to capsize a boat in the harbour; to be afraid of
going to sea in stormy weather; to be the first in a party on a long
journey to become an invalid in case of scarcity of food; to show
greediness when spoil is divided, in which case every one gives his own
part to the greedy man to shame him; to divulge a public secret to his
wife; being two persons on a hunting expedition, not to offer the best
game to the partner; to boast of his own deeds, especially of invented
ones; to scold any one in scorn. Also to beg; to pet his wife in other
people's presence, and to dance with her to bargain personally: selling
must always be made through a third person, who settles the price. For a
woman it is a shame not to know sewing, dancing and all kinds of woman's
work; to pet her husband and children, or even to speak to her husband
in the presence of a stranger.(32)

Such is Aleoute morality, which might also be further illustrated by
their tales and legends. Let me also add that when Veniaminoff wrote (in
1840) one murder only had been committed since the last century in a
population of 60,000 people, and that among 1,800 Aleoutes not one
single common law offence had been known for forty years. This will not
seem strange if we remark that scolding, scorning, and the use of rough
words are absolutely unknown in Aleoute life. Even their children never
fight, and never abuse each other in words. All they may say is, "Your
mother does not know sewing," or "Your father is blind of one eye."(33)

Many features of savage life remain, however, a puzzle to Europeans. The
high development of tribal solidarity and the good feelings with which
primitive folk are animated towards each other, could be illustrated by
any amount of reliable testimony. And yet it is not the less certain
that those same savages practise infanticide; that in some cases they
abandon their old people, and that they blindly obey the rules of
blood-revenge. We must then explain the coexistence of facts which, to
the European mind, seem so contradictory at the first sight. I have just
mentioned how the Aleoute father starves for days and weeks, and gives
everything eatable to his child; and how the Bushman mother becomes a
slave to follow her child; and I might fill pages with illustrations of
the really tender relations existing among the savages and their
children. Travellers continually mention them incidentally. Here you
read about the fond love of a mother; there you see a father wildly
running through the forest and carrying upon his shoulders his child
bitten by a snake; or a missionary tells you the despair of the parents
at the loss of a child whom he had saved, a few years before, from being
immolated at its birth, you learn that the "savage" mothers usually
nurse their children till the age of four, and that, in the New
Hebrides, on the loss of a specially beloved child, its mother, or aunt,
will kill herself to take care of it in the other world.(34) And so on.

Like facts are met with by the score; so that, when we see that these
same loving parents practise infanticide, we are bound to recognize that
the habit (whatever its ulterior transformations may be) took its origin
under the sheer pressure of necessity, as an obligation towards the
tribe, and a means for rearing the already growing children. The
savages, as a rule, do not "multiply without stint," as some English
writers put it. On the contrary, they take all kinds of measures for
diminishing the birth-rate. A whole series of restrictions, which
Europeans certainly would find extravagant, are imposed to that effect,
and they are strictly obeyed. But notwithstanding that, primitive folk
cannot rear all their children. However, it has been remarked that as
soon as they succeed in increasing their regular means of subsistence,
they at once begin to abandon the practice of infanticide. On the whole,
the parents obey that obligation reluctantly, and as soon as they can
afford it they resort to all kinds of compromises to save the lives of
their new-born. As has been so well pointed out by my friend Elie
Reclus,(35) they invent the lucky and unlucky days of births, and spare
the children born on the lucky days; they try to postpone the sentence
for a few hours, and then say that if the baby has lived one day it must
live all its natural life.(36) 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 creches
for getting rid of the children, every one of them recoils before the
necessity of performing the cruel sentence; they prefer to expose the
baby in the wood rather than to take its life by violence. Ignorance,
not cruelty, maintains infanticide; and, instead of moralizing the
savages with sermons, the missionaries would do better to follow the
example of Veniaminoff, who, every year till his old age, crossed the
sea of Okhotsk in a miserable boat, or travelled on dogs among his
Tchuktchis, supplying them with bread and fishing implements. He thus
had really stopped infanticide.

The same is true as regards what superficial observers describe as
parricide. We just now saw that the habit of abandoning old people is
not so widely spread as some writers have maintained it to be. It has
been extremely exaggerated, but it is occasionally met with among nearly
all savages; and in such cases it has the same origin as the exposure of
children. When a "savage" feels that he is a burden to his tribe; when
every morning his share of food is taken from the mouths of the
children--and the little ones are not so stoical as their fathers: they
cry when they are hungry; when every day he has to be carried across the
stony beach, or the virgin forest, on the shoulders of younger people
there are no invalid carriages, nor destitutes to wheel them in savage
lands--he begins to repeat what the old Russian peasants say until
now-a-day. "Tchujoi vek zayedayu, Pora na pokoi!" ("I live other
people's life: it is time to retire!") And he retires. He does what the
soldier does in a similar case. When the salvation of his detachment
depends upon its further advance, and he can move no more, and knows
that he must die if left behind, the soldier implores his best friend to
render him the last service before leaving the encampment. And the
friend, with shivering hands, discharges his gun into the dying body. So
the savages do. The old man asks himself to die; he himself insists upon
this last duty towards the community, and obtains the consent of the
tribe; he digs out his grave; he invites his kinsfolk to the last
parting meal. His father has done so, it is now his turn; and he parts
with his kinsfolk with marks of affection. The savage so much considers
death as part of his duties towards his community, that he not only
refuses to be rescued

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