CHAPTER XIII: COMMUNAL REGULATION.
§ 781. In those to whom the doctrine of Evolution is repugnant I shall raise a smile of derision by the remark that certain actions of the infant are indicative of certain early social relations. Yet to the evolutionist, it is clear that constant experiences received by men during tens of thousands of years of savage life, must have produced organic modifications; and he will not be surprised to see indications of them given by the child in arms. In The Principles of Psychology, § 189, I have shown that whereas on islands never before visited, voyagers find the sea-birds so tame that they will not get out of the way, birds of kinds which, through unmeasured ages, have been in contact with mankind, have acquired an instinctive dread of them, which shows itself in every young bird as soon as it is out of the nest. Similarly through countless generations of men, the mental association between stranger and enemy, has, by perpetual repetition, been rendered partially organic; so that an unfamiliar face causes the infant gradually to contract its features and presently turn away its head and cry: an unformed cloud of painful feelings is raised by this presentation of an unknown appearance which, in the history of the race, has constantly preceded the reception of injuries.
By this seemingly irrelevant fact I intend to emphasize still further the truth already manifest, that social groups were at first held together by blood-ties. In early days relations Edition: current; Page: [437] were ready-made friends, as they are now; while in early days non-relations were either actual or potential foes. Hence the result that the communal group was primarily an aggregate of kindred, and its cohesion all along was maintained for joint protection against those who did not belong to the kindred. Cohesion was great in proportion as external dangers were great, and diminished along with the diminution of external dangers.
Before proceeding to those illustrations which chiefly concern us, as being presented by the forefathers of civilized peoples, let us contemplate those presented by the uncivilized; and chiefly by those among whom kinship through females obtains.
§ 782. The first illustration may fitly be one in which the origin of descent in the female line is made manifest, and in which, while specific male parentage is undetermined, there is male parentage within the group and a doubly-rooted communism. Quoted by Morgan from Herrera, the account concerns a people found on the coast of Venezuela when first visited:—
“The houses they dwelt in were common to all, and so spacious that they contained one hundred and sixty persons, strongly built, though covered with palm-tree leaves, and shaped like a bell.” . . . “They observed no law or rule in matrimony, but took as many wives as they would, and they as many husbands, quitting one another at pleasure, without reckoning any wrong done on either part. There was no such thing as jealousy among them, all living as best pleased them, without taking offence at one another.”
“This,” says Morgan, “shows communism in husbands as well as wives, and rendered communism in food a necessity of their condition.” Passing to those North Americans among whom kinship was reckoned through females, and who formed communal households composed of related families, it will suffice if I string together some extracts concerning different tribes. Of those on the Columbia plains, Lewis and Clarke say:—
Edition: current; Page: [438]“Their large houses usually contain several families, consisting of the parents, their sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren, among whom the provisions are common, and whose harmony is scarcely ever interrupted by disputes.”
“Several of these ancient yourts were very large, as shown by the ruins, being from fifty to eighty yards long, and twenty to forty in width. . . . In these large yourts the primitive Aleuts lived by forties, fifties, and hundreds, with the double object of protection and warmth.”
“The household of the Mandans consisting of from twenty to forty persons, the households of the Columbian tribes of about the same number, the Shoshonee household of seven families, the households of the Sauks, of the Iroquois, and of the Creeks each composed of several families, are fair types of the households of the Northern Indians at the epoch of their discovery.” Morgan adds: “provisions were in common.” They “practiced communism in living in the household.”
Concerning the existing Maya Indians we learn from Mr. J. L. Stephens the following account:—
“Their community consists of a hundred labradores, or working men; their lands are held and wrought in common, and the products are shared by all. Their food is prepared at one hut, and every family sends for its portion.”
While in this last case the separate families of the commune had separate dwellings, in the preceding cases some lived in long houses formed of separate compartments while others lived in large undivided houses.
Only an undeveloped ancestor-worship characterizes these tribes; and it is noteworthy that there consequently lacks the bond of union constituted by subordination to a patriarch. Respecting grown up families among the Columbian tribes we read—“In this state the old man is not considered the head of the family, since the active duties, as well as the responsibility, fall on some of the younger members. As these families gradually expand into bands, or tribes, or nations, the paternal authority is represented by the chief of each association. This chieftain [ship], however, is not hereditary.”
§ 783. Other forms of modified communism are shown us by certain uncivilized peoples in the Old World. Winterbottom Edition: current; Page: [439] says that in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, “the plantation is cultivated by all the inhabitants of the village, in common, and the produce is divided to every family in proportion to its numbers.” Concerning Northern Celebes since 1822, Mr. A. R. Wallace, an experienced traveller and careful observer, writes:—
“In these villages the coffee plantations and rice fields are cultivated in common. The chief and a few of the old men decide what days in the week it is required to work in them, and a gong beats at seven in the morning to assemble the labourers . . . when the crop is gathered each receives his proportionate share. This system of public fields and common labour is one not uncommon during the first stages of civilisation.”
Near akin, but in some respects different, is the illustration yielded by the Padam, one of the Indian hill-tribes. Here are extracts from Dalton’s account of them:—
The morang “is 200 feet in length and has 16 or 17 fireplaces. . . . The head-men, elders or Gâms, congregated around the central fireplace. No one is permitted to arrogate the position of the chief. . . . The notables meet daily in the morang for the discussion of affairs of state. . . . Apparently nothing is done without a consultation, and an order of the citizens in Morang assembled is issued daily regulating the day’s work. The result is rapidly promulgated by the shrill voices of boys who run through the village giving out the order in a clear monotone like a street cry. . . . I found that no presents were openly received by the Gâms or notables for themselves. Everything given on public grounds is lodged in the common treasury for the benefit of the whole body corporate. . . . Fines, forfeitures, and escheats are similarly appropriated. . . . The crime of an individual is treated as a public disgrace, to be expiated by a public sacrifice. The culprit has eventually to bear the expense of this. . . . There is no power vested in the community to take life or inflict corporal punishment on a free-born citizen, but slaves may be put to death. . . . The Morang is occupied every night by all the bachelors of the village, both freemen and slaves, and with them a certain proportion of the married men are nightly on duty, so as to constitute together a sufficient available force for any contingency of attack, fire, or other public emergency.” “When a man marries, he and his bride . . . set up a house for themselves. In building this they are assisted by the community.”
Here we have a transitional case in which, to a considerable extent, there is recognized the right of private property, at the same time that there is communal property and communal regulation of industry; and in which the communism, in so far as it is maintained, is, in part, maintained for the sake of safety.
§ 784. On now taking up afresh the thread broken at the end of the last chapter, in which patriarchal regulation had been described as transitional to communal regulation, I may fitly quote, as verifying the conclusion that the reverence felt by the young for the old is a chief factor, the testimony contained in a recent book by Mr. D. G. Hogarth, A Wandering Scholar in the Levant. He says:—
“Islam, by the respect it secures to age, gives every village the basis of communal government.”
Aryan peoples, also, with which we are now concerned, have everywhere illustrated the implied truth.
Of the more usual kinds of communal organization arising from the developed patriarchal group, we may begin with those presented by compound households which, in Eastern Europe, exist in one or other form down to the present day. In his Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot, Mr. A. J. Evans writes that, after the Turkish invasion had destroyed the preceding social organization, “society reverted to that almost patriarchal form which the Sclavonic settlers had carried with them into the Illyrian triangle.” The allotments parcelled out among the new settlers were “held in common, not so much by a village-community as by a single household. Thus the Starescina, or alderman of the community, was often literally the elective elder of the household.”
“We heard of families still existing [near Sissek] containing over three hundred members all living within the same palisaded yard, and forming a village of themselves; nor is it by any means rare to find villages in the Granitza consisting of a couple of households.”
This transition from the house-community to the village-community is clearly implied in the testimony of M. Bogišić.
“Il se rencontre souvent plusieurs communautés ayant le même nom de famille; cela vient de ce qu’elles ont formé à l’origine une seule association, qui s’est divisée pour en former de nouvelles.”
In some parts, as Radovatz, peace and concomitant industrial progress, have caused a second decay of this communal organization. Though “the old order of things still exists, and each cottage has its house-father and house-mother, and everything is held in common,” yet the households are smaller than they used to be. Other Slav peoples, as the Servians and Russians, exhibit similar phenomena. Asserting the identity of the régime between these two divisions of the race, Madame Yefimenko, as quoted by M. Kovalevsky, writes:—
“Les biens constituent la propriété commune de tous les membres de la famille; de propriété privée, il n’en existe presque pas. . . . Le chef de la communauté ne fait que gérer la fortune commune. A sa mort, elle reste indivise et passe dans les mains d’un autre chef, appellé à ce poste par son âge ou par une élection, ordinairement au frère ou au fils aîné.”
And M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, from personal observation, while similarly describing this communal system in Russia, thus remarks on some of its evils:—
“Les inconvénients ne sont pas moindres quand une étroite izba réunit plusieurs générations et plusieurs ménages que, durant les longues nuits d’un long hiver, les pères et les enfants, les frères et leurs femmes couchent pêle-mêle autour du large poêle. Il en résulte une sorte de promiscuité aussi malsaine pour l’âme que pour le corps.”
Concerning the industrial arrangements of these communal groups, as exemplified among the Servians, M. Bogišić, describing the headship as an elective autocracy kept in check by the general voice, tells us that the house-father directs the industrial actions of the members, holds the property on their behalf, and trades under their approval, while the house-mother governs the women and directs indoor industries.
Edition: current; Page: [442]A noteworthy fact must be added. While these communities, maintained for mutual protection during turbulent ages, have been disintegrating elsewhere, they have retained their original form in Montenegro. Says Sir H. Maine:—
“The dominant notion there is that, as the house-community is liable for the delinquencies of its members, it is entitled to receive all the produce of their labour; and thus the fundamental rule of these communities, as of the Hindu joint families, is that a member working or trading at a distance from the seat of the brotherhood ought to account to it for his profits.”
Evidently the chronic warfare which the Montenegrins carry on, is the cause of the implied cohesion.
§ 785. As simple family-groups grow into compound family-groups, so these, becoming too large for single households, grow, as implied above, into clusters of households: house-communities develop into village-communities. These we have now to consider.
There is evidence that in the 4th century, bc, such village-communities existed in India. Nearchus, one of Alexander’s generals, is reported by Strabo as observing that:—
“Among other tribes the ground is cultivated by families and in common; when the produce is collected, each takes a load sufficient for his subsistence during the year; the remainder is burnt, in order to have a reason for renewing their labour, and not remaining inactive.”
During two thousand and odd years, distorting changes have produced various forms, but the essential nature of these social groups remains traceable. In his essay on “The Village Community of Bengal and Upper India,” Mr. Jogendra Chandra Ghosh tells us that in certain parts of India, villages are “extensive habitations, which are far too big and too irregular, to be called a single dwelling-house, and of which the external appearance may not be very remote from that of a walled village”—a structure which he compares with the structures left by the Pueblos of New Mexico—compound houses so built as to “wall out black barbarism” (§ 730). The defensive purpose of these united Edition: current; Page: [443] dwellings, as well as of the dis-united clusters derived from them, which are found elsewhere, is implied in a passage he quotes from Mr. Elliot’s “Report on the Meerut Settlement.”
“During the misrule and disorganisation of former Governments, it was necessary for the brotherhood to combine for the purpose of resisting the unlawful encroachments of their neighbours, and the attacks of predatory hordes; it was not the interest of a party to have his separate share divided off, which could be of no use to him so long as he could not protect it from violence.”
The introduction of outsiders has gradually complicated these communities, but their family-origin is sufficiently shown by the following extracts. Mr. Elphinstone observes:—
“The popular notion is that the village landholders are all descended from one or more individuals who first settled the village. . . . The supposition is confirmed by the fact that to this day there are often only single families of landholders in small villages.”
Mr. Mayne, in his treatise on Hindu Law and Usage, says:—
“The co-sharers in many of these village communities are persons who are actually descended from a common ancestor. In many other cases they profess a common descent, for which there is probably no foundation.”
But the best indication of origin is contained in a statement of Mr. Ghosh.
“Village franchise, according to native ideas, amounts to a right to mess with one’s peers. . . . So long, however, as a man or his wife is not permitted to mess with the rest of the community at his own place, or at that of any of them, the family remains outside the communal circle.”
This test evidently points back to the early days in which the members of the community formed one household. The traits of structure at present existing also imply this. Speaking of the “parallel social strata” which have been developed, Sir Henry Maine writes:—
“There are first, a certain number of families who are traditionally said to be descended from the founder of the village. . . . Below these families, descended from the originators of the colony, there are others distributed into well ascertained groups. The brotherhood, in fact, Edition: current; Page: [444] forms a sort of hierarchy, the degrees of which are determined by the order in which the various sets of families were amalgamated with the community.”
Just noting Mr. Ghosh’s remarks that “the village life of our small communities comprises an agricultural and a governmental element,” and that “the village community have to decide all manner of questions: judicial, criminal, social, fiscal, or any other which may arise,” I pass now to the matter which more especially concerns us—the nature of the industrial regulation. The Indian cultivating groups, says Sir Henry Maine:—
“include a nearly complete establishment of occupations and trades for enabling them to continue their collective life without assistance from any person or body external to them. . . . They include several families of hereditary traders; the blacksmith, the harness maker, the shoe maker. . . . There is invariably a village-accountant. . . . But the person practising any one of these hereditary employments is really a servant of the community as well as one of its component members. He is sometimes paid by an allowance in grain, more generally by the allotment to his family of a piece of cultivated land in hereditary possession.”
So that these developed family-unions, maintained for mutual protection, show us at once the original identity of political and industrial rule, the differentiation of occupations within the group, and the partial development of an individual ownership beyond that of personal belongings, which, in some of the Hindu tribes, readily passes into complete ownership by separation of shares.
§ 786. In our own island, Wales yields the evidence least broken and distorted by over-runnings and mixtures of races. Describing the Welsh early social organization, Mr. Seebohm writes as follows:—
In the “tribal house the undivided household of free tribesmen, comprising several generations down to the great-grandchildren of a common ancestor, lived together; and, as already mentioned, even the structure of the house was typical of the tribal family arrangement.”
In a later work are kindred passages.
Edition: current; Page: [445]“The wele, therefore, of the original ancestor is a division not of the land, but of the tribe, and it remains outwardly one unit, with internal subdivisions among sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons.”
“The weles or family groups occupied undivided shares in what may be called the common rights of the villata.”
The kindreds may be pictured as “communities of graziers of cattle with rights of grazing by tribal right or tribal arrangement in different parts of the district, each community, with, it may be, its score or two of kinsmen, forming a complete unit.”
Under this system a man’s position depended wholly on blood-relationship: the “kin-broken” man occupying a servile position. The groups had a general government, under which—
“Associated with the chief of kindred, and acting as his coadjutors, were the seven elders of the kindred, whose duty it was to preserve by tradition the knowledge of kinship . . . to swear to the kin of anyone claiming by kin and descent.”
This last statement refers to a stage later than that of the compound household, when there had been separation of families who had joint claims to pasturage within the tribal territory. At that time a man’s income was “the result of his own labour and use of the cattle and cyvarwys [right of maintenance] which was received as his tribesman’s right on his coming of age and assuming a tribesman’s responsibilities.” But that along with undivided ownership of the land there went divided ownership of other property, is implied by the rules for division of household goods in cases of separation between husband and wife, as also by the rules for payment of blood-money—a graduated scale of galanas, expressed in cows.
In England the normal development of the village-community, which evidence from Wales implies was going on among the British Celts, was of course prevented by invading races, who brought with them tribal usages pre-existing on the Continent, and who, settling down as invaders, variously mingled, founded settlements partially abnormal in character. But, recognizing these causes of deviation, we Edition: current; Page: [446] may see in the groups formed, general resemblances to those thus far considered. Accepting the view of Kemble, Cunningham writes:—
“Tracts of uncultivated land were apportioned to groups of warriors . . . The evidence of nomenclature seems to show that several men of the same sept took up land together and formed a township.”
Speaking of the resulting states as existing from the sixth to the ninth centuries, he further says:—
“We may then think of England as occupied by a large number of separate groups, some of which were villages of free warriors, some estates granted on more or less favourable terms; as in all probability there was comparatively little communication between them, they would all be forced to try to raise their own food and provide their clothing.”
And then the industrial economy sequent upon this structure he describes thus:—
“When the village community is really a self-sufficing whole, the thatcher or smith is a member of the body, and pursues his craft without payment either by the hour or piece, because his livelihood is secured to him in the form of so many bushels from each householder, by the custom of the village; he does what work is required in return for his keep.”
“Buying and selling did not go on between the members, but each stood in a known customary relation to the rest.”
Sir Henry Maine, guided in part by his knowledge of industrial arrangements in the Hindu village-community above set forth, gives a kindred description.
“It is the assignment of a definite lot in the cultivated area to particular trades, which allows us to suspect that the early Teutonic groups were similarly self-sufficing. There are several English parishes in which certain pieces of land in the common field have from time immemorial been known by the name of a particular trade; and there is often a popular belief that nobody, not following the trade, can legally be owner of the lot associated with it. And it is possible that we here have a key to the plentifulness and persistence of certain names of trades as surnames among us.”
But while the communal regulation of industry, as exemplified first in the compound household and then in the cluster of related families, gradually modified by the addition Edition: current; Page: [447] of unprivileged outsiders, was mainly determined, and for a long time maintained, in the ways above shown; it was in part maintained by the absence of a money-economy, and the concomitant absence of industrial competition. If we ask how a member of one of these communities could be remunerated, when there existed no currency in which the worth of his services to the rest could be stated, and no means of measuring them against the services of others by their relative market-values, we become conscious that this system of combined living, or, later on, of assigning portions of land or shares of products, was practically necessitated. Emergence from the system of undivided earnings and common property, into the system of divided earnings and private property, was necessarily gradual; and the development of a currency was at once a cause and a consequence. It made definite division more practicable; and the further definite division was carried the greater became the need for money to make payments with.