There is a profound truth in the defiant line, a truth which applies equally to America or any other country. The present is inseparable from the past. We cannot understand one epoch without reference to its predecessors; we cannot understand the history of the United States unless we seek the key in the history of Europe—of England and France in particular. At the very threshold, in order to understand how the heroic navigator came to discover the vast continent of which the United States is part, we must pause to study the economic conditions of Europe which impelled the adventurous voyage, and led to the discovery of a great continent stretching across the ocean path. Such a view of history does not rob it of its romance, but rather adds to it. Surely, the wonderful linking of circumstances—the demand for spices and silks to minister to the fine tastes of aristocratic Europe, the growth of the trade with the East Indies, the grasping greed of Moor and Turk—all playing a rôle in the great drama of which the discovery of America is but a scene, is infinitely more fascinating than the latter event detached from its historical setting!
It is not easy to give in the compass of a few pages an intelligent view of the main currents of history. The sketch here introduced—not without hesitation—is an endeavor to state the Socialist concept of the course of social evolution in a brief outline and to indicate the principal economic causes which have operated to determine that course.
It is now generally admitted that primitive man lived under Communism. Lewis H. Morgan[88] has calculated that if the life of the human race be assumed to have covered one hundred thousand years, at least ninety-five thousand years were spent in a crude, tribal Communism, in which private property was practically unknown, and in which the only ethic was devotion to tribal interests, and the only crime antagonism to tribal interests. Under this social system the means of making wealth were in the hands of the tribes, or gens, and distribution was likewise socially arranged. Between the different tribes warfare was constant, but in the tribe itself there was coöperation and not struggle. This fact is of tremendous importance in view of the criticisms which have been directed against the Socialist philosophy from the so-called Darwinian point of view, according to which competition and struggle is the law of life; that what Professor Huxley calls "the Hobbesial war of each against all" is the normal state of existence.
This is described as "the so-called Darwinian" theory advisedly, for the struggle for existence as the law of evolution has been exaggerated out of all likeness to the conception of Darwin himself. In "The Descent of Man," for instance, Darwin raises the point under review, and shows how, in many animal societies, the struggle for existence is replaced by coöperation for existence, and how that substitution results in the development of faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival. "Those communities," he says, "which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring."[89] Despite these instances, and the warning of Darwin himself that the term "struggle for existence" should not be too narrowly interpreted or overrated, his followers, instead of broadening it according to the master's suggestions, narrowed it still more. Thus the theory has been exaggerated into a mere caricature of the truth. This is almost invariably the fate of theories which deal with human relations, perhaps it would be equally true to say of all theories. The exaggerations of Malthus's law of population is a case in point. The Marx-Engels theory of the materialistic conception of history is, as we have seen, another.
Kropotkin, among others, has developed the theory along the lines suggested by Darwin. He points out that "though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, mutual defense, 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.... 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 favors 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."[90]
From the lowest forms of animal life up to the highest, man, this law proves to be operative. It is not denied that there is competition for food, for life, within the species, human and other. But that competition is not usual; it arises out of unusual and special conditions. There are instances of hunger-maddened mothers tearing away food from their children; men drifting at sea have fought for water and food as beasts fight, but these are not normal conditions of life. "Happily enough," says Kropotkin again, "competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods.... Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support."[91] This is the voice of science now that we have passed through the extremes and arrived at the "beautiful goal of calm wisdom." Competition is not, in the verdict of modern science, the law of life, but of death. Strife is not nature's way of progress.
Anything more important to our present inquiry than this verdict of science it would be difficult to imagine. Men have for so long believed and declared struggle and competition to be the "law of nature," and opposed Socialism on the ground of its supposed antagonism to that law, that this new conception of nature's method comes as a vindication of the Socialist position. The naturalist testifies to the universality of the principle of coöperation throughout the animal world, and the historian and sociologist to its universality throughout the greatest part of man's history. Present economic tendencies toward combination and away from competition, in industry and commerce, appear as the fulfilling of a great universal law. And the vain efforts of men to stop that process, by legislation, boycotts, and divers other methods, appear as efforts to set aside immutable law. Like so many Canutes, they bid the tides halt, and, like Canute's, their commands are vain and mocked by the unheeding tides.
Under Communism, then, man lived for many thousands of years. As far back as we can go into the paleo-ethnology of mankind, we find evidences of this. All the great authorities, Morgan, Maine, Lubbock, Taylor, Bachofen, and many others, agree in this. And under this Communism all the great fundamental inventions were evolved, as Morgan and others have shown. The wheel, the potter's wheel, the lever, the stencil plate, the sail, the rudder, the loom, were all evolved under Communism in its various stages. So, too, the cultivation of cereals for food, the smelting of metals, the domestication of animals,—to which we owe so much, and on which we still so largely depend,—were all introduced under Communism. Even in our day there have been found many survivals of this Communism among primitive peoples. Mention need only be made here of the Bantu tribes of Africa, whose splendid organization astonished the British, and the Eskimos. It is now possible to trace with a fair amount of certainty the progress of mankind through various stages of Communism, from the unconscious Communism of the nomad to the consciously organized and directed Communism of the most highly developed tribes, right up to the threshold of civilization, when private property takes the place of common, tribal property, and economic classes appear.[92]
V
Private property, other than that personal ownership and use of things, such as weapons and tools, which involves no class or caste domination, and is an integral feature of all forms of Communism, first appears in the ownership of man by man. Slavery, strange as it may seem, is directly traceable to tribal Communism, and first appears as a tribal institution. When one tribe made war upon another, its efforts were directed to the killing of as many of its enemies as possible. Cannibal tribes killed their foes for food, rarely or never killing their fellow-tribesmen for that purpose. Non-cannibalistic tribes killed their foes merely to get rid of them. But when the power of mankind over the forces of external nature had reached that point in its development where it became relatively easy for a man to produce more than was necessary for his own maintenance, the custom arose of making captives of enemies and setting them to work. A foe captured had thus an economic value to the tribe. Either he could be set to work directly, his surplus product enriching the tribe, or he could be used to relieve some of his captors from other necessary duties, thus enabling them to produce more than would otherwise be possible, the effect being the same in the end. The property of the tribe at first, slaves become at a later stage private property—probably through the institution of the tribal distribution of wealth. Cruel, revolting, and vile as slavery appears to our modern sense,—especially the earlier forms of slavery before the body of legislation, and, not less important, sentiment, which surrounded it later arose,—it still was a step forward, a distinct advance upon the older customs of cannibalism and wholesale slaughter.