V.
SAVAGE POLITICAL LIFE.
From the accounts of travellers respecting the nature of government among uncivilised tribes it would not be a purely baseless theory to construct a scale of successive developments, ranging from people entirely destitute of political cohesion to people characterised by a quite despotic form of government, and agreeing in the main with the fishing or hunting and the agricultural stages of human advancement respectively. The savage idea of monarchy is represented by all the possible gradations between the most limited and the most absolute kind of government, and we should naturally look for the best types of the latter among tribes where geographical limitations or other causes have necessitated a stationary and agricultural life. We should expect to find the first germs of recognised leadership among people taught by war and the chase to appreciate superior strength or skill; and to see such temporary leaders pass into definite political chiefs, when a more settled mode of life has given fixedness to ideas of property and made its defence more desirable. We might infer à priori that as men lived by hunting or fishing before they drove flocks, and drove flocks before they tilled the ground, so they lived in families before they lived in hordes, and in hordes before they lived in larger social aggregates. As representatives of the lowest stage of society, we might instance the Esquimaux, whom Cranz found ‘destitute of the very shadow of a civil polity;’ and we might pass from the hunting populations of America, who only choose rulers for the temporary purposes of war or the chase, to the despotic forms of government characteristic of the agricultural communities of Africa or Polynesia.
It is not, however, worth insisting on an induction which would be at the mercy of negative instances drawn from so large a surface as the whole known globe. To supply only one instance, in which the hunting state co-exists with a somewhat advanced political system. Most South American tribes, who practised husbandry in addition to fishing and hunting to a far greater extent than North American tribes, were found, in point of social organisation, at a much lower level than the Northern tribes, it being possible to classify the latter into nations by words supplied by themselves, whilst in the South there were merely bands, and it was necessary to invent names for such groups of bands as were allied together by language.[182] Facts are the test of theories, not theories of facts; and to insist on fitting facts to a theory is to fall into the error of the unskilful shoemaker, who transposes the task of fitting shoes to feet for the easier one of insisting that feet shall fit his shoes.
Without, therefore, attempting to elaborate theories about the development of political ideas from their rudest beginnings to their expression in mature and complex state-systems, it may not be labour lost to collect, within readable compass, some estimate of the notions of sovereignty, the political organisations, the relations of classes, and the peculiar institutions found among those communities of the earth who seem the best representatives of primitive manners and the least advanced from a state of primitive barbarism.
Statements concerning the total absence of civil government among savages, like statements concerning their total ignorance of religion, should be received with the reserve due to all propositions containing terms of expansive signification. It is noteworthy that it is generally tribes declared to be destitute of all religious feelings who in the same sentence or paragraph are described as also destitute of political ties; the statement that a tribe is entirely destitute of religion or of any civil polity being, in fact, often only an hyperbolical expression, intended to convey an extreme idea of their barbarity. Bushmen, Californians, and Australians have severally been described as not only not recognizing any gods, but as not recognizing any chiefs; but subsequent research having proved that Bushmen, at least, possess an elaborate mythology, worshipping the ethereal bodies, and having their own distinctive myths concerning the Creation, suspicion is naturally aroused that all broadly negative assertions of the same sort may be but the results of insufficient observation.[183] ‘The Caribs,’ says one writer, ‘had no chiefs; every man obeyed the dictates of his passions unrestrained by government or laws;’ but according to another they lived in hordes of from forty to fifty persons, under a patriarchal form of government, and recognized a common chief whenever they went to war with their neighbours.[184]
Undoubtedly, however, in countries where excess of numbers has not driven communities to improve their condition by raids against their neighbours, and where, consequently, military skill has attained no importance nor authority, much looser social bonds may be found than in places where a sense of property and of its value has arisen. Among people like the Esquimaux, the Lapps, or the Kamschadals, who live together in independent families, age is the only title to authority; and if skill in seal-catching or in weather-lore procure for a Greenlander the deference of younger members of his race, he has no power to compel any of them to follow his counsels, and the only moral check to a refractory person is a possible refusal on the part of his fellows to share the same hut with him. If, in distant voyages, all the boatmen submit their kajaks to the guidance of their countryman who is best acquainted with the way, they are at perfect liberty to separate from him at pleasure. Beyond this slight tie they have, or had when Cranz wrote, no political union, no system of taxation or legislation of any kind, albeit they were not wanting in methods for the enforcement of certain moral duties and the prevention of certain moral wrongs. Of the Kamschadals, Steller tells us that they had no chief, but that everyone was allowed to live according to his pleasure; yet that they chose leaders for their expeditions, who were without even power to decide private disputes, and that each ostrog, or family settlement, had its ruler (generally the oldest male), whose power to punish consisted solely in the right of verbal correction.[185]
From the condition of the Kamschadals or Esquimaux to the condition of Eastern Asia or Polynesia, where a king’s name is often so sacred as to be avoided altogether, as many gradations of civil authority exist as otherwise mark the difference of their respective civilisations. As the progress of an individual from infancy to old age is marked at each stage by a strict equipoise of good and evil, varying only in kind, so every upward step in the social advancement of mankind seems attended with some equivalent loss. Individual liberty is greatest where the social bond is the loosest; and people like the rude hunting tribes of Brazil, with only their hunting-grounds to defend and only temporary leaders to obey, undoubtedly enjoy greater freedom than is compatible with an agricultural life. As soon as tribes become settled and practise husbandry they are naturally impelled to seek the labour of slaves, which is a thing undesirable when a scanty subsistence is gained by the exertions of the chase. And when once the existence of slavery has established a difference between bondsmen and free, a way is open for all those artificial divisions of society into ranks and castes which seem in later times to belong to, nay, to constitute, the natural order of things.
It is, however, even at lower levels of general culture, often among tribes who are still in the hunting stage, that we find all traces disappear of that condition of freedom and equality once fondly imagined to belong to a ‘state of nature.’ Savages seldom constitute pure democracies, in the sense either of all being equal or of all being free. Even where the monarchical power is quite rudimentary well-marked distinctions serve to sever them into aristocracy and commonalty; for the natural differences of capacity between men divide them, if less strongly, not less definitely than slavery. Superiority in courage, strength, sagacity, or experience, entitles a savage to much the same privileges that, in more civilised countries, are allotted to superiority in wealth or lineage. The conditions, however, of savage life cause merit, and not birth, to be the primary qualification both for chieftainship and nobility. Where military capacity is the sole basis of authority it follows that such authority only descends to sons, if they are as gifted as their parents with military prowess; also, that any commoner may at any time become a noble if duly qualified for a leader, and that for the same reason even the female sex is not excluded from a career of political ambition. Among the Abipones women were often raised to the dignity of cacique or captainship of a horde; nor is it rare to find them capable of occupying positions of similar dignity among tribes who, in other respects, treat their women as little better than beasts of burthen. The Iroquois women, for instance, on whom devolved all daily labour, such as planting the corn, cutting and carrying firewood, bearing all burdens when marching, had their representatives in the public councils, enjoyed a veto upon declarations of war, and the right of interposing to bring about a peace.[186] Khond wives filled the same important post of mediators and peace-makers in the wars between the tribes of their husbands and their parents; and in Africa, where the position of women is almost uniformly one of slavery, they are ambassadors, traders, warriors, sometimes queens, besides tilling the ground, tending the herds, or working in mines.[187]