Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

To these circumstances, which play so great a part in the history, for they it is that make the matter progressive, and so give it a history, we must now direct our attention. After a time some kinds of animals are domesticated, and society enters on the second, the pastoral stage. This was the first clearly defined advance in the circumstances. We know not where, or when, or how, or by whom were first domesticated the ox, the sheep, the goat, the hog, the horse, the ass, or the camel. The dates of these achievements, pregnant with so vast a series of mighty consequences, lie far back beyond the reach of the dimmest traditions of mankind. Here, however, we are concerned only with the way in which their domestication affected the tenure and the use of the land. The most obvious effects were that the extent of land, which had formerly been required for the maintenance of the tribe by the chase, would now maintain a great many more families; and that, in this part of the world, where moisture is continuous, and therefore grass abundant, (it would be different in the dry plains of Asia,) their lives could not possibly be so vagrant as had been the case with their hunting forefathers. Because now, instead of following the migrations of wild animals, and searching for them when sparingly dispersed over large areas, they would have to attend to their flocks and herds. But their flocks and herds would still have to be protected from wild beasts, and from their neighbours. A sufficient number therefore of families must be associated into a village community to enable it to guard its own pasture ground; which in no part of Europe needed to have been of any great extent. Our three great facts, that the object of the land is to produce food; that for this purpose it must be held as property; and that, in order that it may be so held, those to whom it belongs must associate themselves, have in no way been enfeebled. They still remain in force, and govern human life. And we shall see that they will continue to do this under every new combination of circumstances that will arise. We shall never come to a time when men will not remove whatever would, under the circumstances of the day, hinder the land from producing the greatest amount of food; nor when property will cease to exist, or cease to be modified according to circumstances; nor when men will cease to associate for its protection. With respect to the latter, history will show us the village growing into the city, and neighbouring cities associating, and growing, in one way or another, into unions of cities, nations, and empires; but the necessity for, and the object of association will remain the same; for persons and property will always need protection; collectively, against aggressions from without, and, in the case of the individual, against aggressions from within. The need of protection will remain, and will be provided for in just the same way when property shall have become so varied in kind, and the new kinds so vast in amount, that the aboriginal property of land, that once was all in all, shall have become of secondary importance. Neither will the need disappear, or the old means of providing for it become obsolete, when the number of the millions of those who are associated shall exceed the number of families that were associated in the old pastoral or hunting community. The purpose and principle were precisely the same in the village of a score of families, or in the combination of such villages in the primæval German forest, as it is at this day among the forty millions who are now associating themselves into the German Empire.

With respect to the form of private, individual property, that in the pastoral period assumed a great extension: for the flocks and herds—which had now become all in all to the community—were private property; whereas the wild animals, which in the foregoing stage had occupied that position, had been common property. The pasturage, however, still remained common to the flocks and herds of the inhabitants of the village; just as formerly the hunting area had been open to all the members of the old tribe. But the commencement of individual appropriations of land is now becoming visible; for any enclosures, near to the homestead, for the purpose of penning the cattle at night, and for protecting them against wild beasts and bad weather, will belong to those who have themselves constructed them for their own cattle.

In the hunting stage the tribe had ever been on the move, and their whole time had been expended in a hard, and often ineffectual struggle for bare existence. Nothing more was possible. But the inhabitants of the pastoral village have now become stationary; and have, on easy terms, a sufficiency of food. This places some leisure time, during the year, at their disposal. A great advance has been made; and it proves to be one which like all others has in itself the germ of future advances; for it leads on to the culture of the soil, which is the third stage. But this, too, was brought about at so remote a period in the lost history of the race, that there are no traces of traditions of when, or where, or how, or by whom was introduced the culture of any one of the different kinds of cereals. All of the matter that we know for certain is that the fact turns out to be exactly the contrary of what we might have expected. Such improvements, amounting to transformations, of the seeds of some now untraceable natural grasses into our different kinds of grain, we should have felt almost sure were quite beyond the capacities and opportunities of little village aggregations of savages, or at best of semi-savages. First the idea of the possibility of such transformations, and then the thought, care, and patience necessary for effecting them, we should have been disposed to ascribe only to people among whom knowledge had largely accumulated.

Suppositions, however, of this kind, though they would, before the matter had been investigated, have been entertained by almost everybody, are completely contradicted by the facts of the case. These assure us that we are indebted, beyond controversy, not only for the domestication of animals, but also for the existence of our cereals in their present form, to the ideas, and to the patient and thoughtful labour of our remote unnamed barbarian ancestors. And these barbarian inventors of wheat, barley, and oats, and, that we may not ungratefully exclude from their due the natives of the New World, we must add of maize also, were as great benefactors of the race as the inventors of letters, and of the steam-engine. And this ought to awaken within us both a stronger sense than we now have of the continuity and unity of human history, and a greater respect than we have for still existing barbarian races.

A highly interesting illustration and confirmation of the fact now before us has lately been brought to light. In ’69 the government of Mauritius sent a commissioner to collect specimens of the different kinds of sugar-cane cultivated by the natives of New Caledonia, and to report on their respective merits. His report was issued only a few months ago. It figures, and describes separately, forty-four kinds he found still in cultivation. In the copy I now have before me each of the forty-four figures is carefully coloured; variation in colour being in this plant an indication of other variations, some of which might be useful. Here, then, are savages of a very low type, for they even practise cannibalism when other means of supporting life have failed, cultivating forty-four varieties of a plant, which probably was not originally indigenous to their island; and of which it is very doubtful whether in their island it ever produced a fertile seed. Every variety therefore which originated among them must have been the result of a sport. And this must have been watched for, and turned to account when it presented itself. Indeed, their method of cultivating the sugar-cane, which is as wonderful as the number of kinds they cultivate, appears to be intelligently directed to the aim of producing sports. But it will be better to allow the commissioner himself to describe to us in his own words what he saw.

He says, ‘Besides the sugar-cane the chief alimentary support of the New Caledonians were,’ before the French took possession of the island, ‘the taro and yam. The former, requiring an abundant supply of water, was usually grown in terraces formed on the slopes of the natural amphitheatres presented by the spurs of the main mountain range, and most ingeniously irrigated by a constant fillet of water. The latter, requiring a deep, open, rich, and well-drained soil, was planted on beds formed by heaping up the naturally thin surface soil of a few inches deep into beds of about three feet high by four feet wide, from which only one crop was taken, and the next year fresh ground was broken up for new plantations.

‘It was on the edges of these beds, forming, as will be at once evident, a peculiarly rich and deep loose soil, that the natives planted their canes, not in lines near each other, as we do, but twenty or thirty feet apart, and in a single row only. As the detached stools grew they were tied up in a bundle with straw, in order to exclude light and limit the number of shoots, and to force them to lengthen; and likewise to make them tender and juicy, instead of sweet. For a New Caledonian values a cane for the quantity of its juice, not for its saccharine qualities, and has probably never eaten a really ripe cane. No marvel that under such treatment, allowing only three or four canes to a stool, they should grow large and long; so long, in fact, that those which were tabooed, or kept for grand ceremonies, have, after two and a half or three years, attained a length of from twenty-five to thirty feet, and a diameter of four inches or more, requiring to be supported on forked sticks as they fell over. Above all it should be noted, that in direct opposition to our system, the cane was never replanted in the same land, thus giving it the best chance of progressive development, and avoiding the chances of degeneracy or disease. Every intelligent cultivator will at once recognize the necessarily practical effect of such a continual principle of selection carried out for perhaps centuries.’

Note the carefulness of these New Caledonians in this matter. The soil is collected and piled up into beds to secure a sufficiency of depth for the descending roots, in order that every root that could be formed might be turned to account. The canes are set in single rows to give to each leaf of each plant all the air and the light possible. The stems are banded up with straw to prevent evaporation. The plants in the single rows are set twenty or thirty feet apart, that there may be no interference of the roots of one plant with the roots of another. That they may have all the stimulation possible, they are never grown in succession on the same spot. Our science can suggest nothing more adapted, were it a seeding plant, to give rise to improved varieties by seed-variation, or to force a plant that does not produce seed into producing varieties by sporting. All this, too, is done under great local disadvantages and discouragements, for the island is most years affected with severe droughts and devastated with swarms of locusts which destroy the leaves of the canes. It is worth noting that the commissioner expresses the surprise he felt at witnessing the wonderful acuteness with which the natives distinguish unerringly, and give the native name to any cane shown to them which may have only an inch or two fully formed; frequently recognizing a still smaller specimen merely by its leaves. He never saw them make a mistake.

In this careful cultivation of the sugar-cane, and preservation of its varieties, we can hardly doubt but that we have an existing instance, mutatis mutandis, of the process by which some branch of our remote barbarian ancestors improved some grasses producing small edible seeds, into the kinds of grain we now cultivate. Similar care they had already bestowed on the formation of the races of domestic animals we now possess. And we ought not to forget that they were at the same time rough-hewing our language and morality. With respect to their morality—the parent stock of ours, as was the case with their language—we may, in passing, observe that in all probability they enforced and practised it, as Mr. Wallace, who lived for some years among the savages of these islands, found them practising theirs, much more rigidly than we do ours.

We have now reached a point at which we find that some reconstruction of the agrarian arrangements of the pastoral village community is being forced upon them. Formerly their flocks and herds were their only support. They are so no longer. The cultivated produce of the soil has not taken their place, but has become, to an indispensable degree, a subsidiary means of support. And as time goes on it is becoming so more and more largely, through increasing skill in the cultivation of the soil, and through its consequence, an increase of population. This new means of support has now become necessary; and it cannot be turned to account on land absolutely common. Each crop must be the property of the man who prepared the land for it, sowed, protected, and harvested it. The land therefore upon which it was grown must be his, for at all events the space of time requisite for these operations. This gives rise to the system of property in land limited in respect of time, that is to say, some form of the system of shifting severalties. Of course this must gradually pass into absolute permanent property, because the day will come when that will be necessary for enabling the community to obtain from the land the greatest amount of food. The conditions, however, that will suggest that are still a long way off. As changes become necessary, they will, each in its turn, have to fight for its establishment. The old methods will always have prescription, fact, tradition, custom to support them; the new, utility and necessity.