 Chapter 8 of Mutual Aid, a factor of evolution. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Enko. Mutual Aid, a factor of evolution by Peter Kropotkin. Chapter 8, Mutual Aid amongst ourselves. When bracket continued, close bracket. When we examine the everyday life of the rural populations of Europe, we find that notwithstanding all that has been done in modern states for the destruction of the village community, the life of the peasants remains honeycombed with habits and customs of mutual aid and support that imported vestiges of the communal possession of the soil or still retained and that as soon as the legal obstacles to rural association were lately removed, a network of three unions for all sorts of economical problems. Rapidly spread among the peasants, the tendency of this young movement being to reconstitute some sort of union similar to the village community of old. Such being the conclusions arrived at in the preceding chapter, we have now to consider what institutions for mutual support can be found at the present time amongst the industrial populations. For the last 300 years, the conditions for the growth of such institutions have been as unfavorable in the towns as they have been in the villages. It is well known indeed that when the medieval cities were subdued in the 16th century by growing military states, all institutions which kept the autism for monsters and the merchants together in the guilds and the cities were violently destroyed. The self-government and the self-jurisition of both the guilds and the cities were abolished. The off-up alliance between guild brothers became a knack of failure in the towers of the state. The properties of the guilds were confiscated in the same way as the lands of the village communities and the inner and technical organization of each trade was taken in hand by the state. Los gradually growing severities were forced to prevent autism from combining in any way for each time. Some shadows of old guilds were tolerated, merchants guilds were allowed to exist under the condition of really granting subsidies to the kings and some autism guilds were kept in existence as organs of administration. Some of them still dragged on their meaningless existence, but what formerly was the vital force of medieval life and industry has long since disappeared under the crushing weight of the centralised state. In Great Britain, which may be taken as the best illustration of the industrial policy of the modern states, we see the parliament beginning the destruction of the guilds as early as the 15th century, but it was especially in the next century that decisive measures were taken. Henry VIII not only ruined the organization of the guilds, but also confiscated their properties with even less excuse and manners as Thulma Smith wrote than he had produced for confiscating the estates of the monasteries. Thulma Smith, English Guards, London 1870, introduction, page 13, closed footnote. Edward VI completed his work, open footnote. The Ark of Edward VI, the first of his reign, ordered to hand over to the crown all fraternities, brotherhoods, and guards, being within the realm of England and Wales, and over of the kings dominions, and all manners, lands, tenements, and other hereditas, belonging to them or any of them. When bracket, English Guards, introduction, page 13, closed bracket, see also Okankovsky's Englands with Shaflitch and Winkleung in Oskar's Desmitele Althea's Gena 1879, chapters 2-5, closed footnote. And already in the second part of the 16th century, we find the polyamets settling all the disputes between craftsmen and merchants, which formally were settled in each city separately. The polyamets and the king not only legislated in all such contests, but keeping in view the interests of the crown in the exports, they soon began to determine the number of apprentices in each trade, and minutely to regulate the very techniques of each fabrication, the weights of the stuffs, the number of threads in the yard of cloth, and the like. With little success, it must be said, because contests and technical difficulties which were arranged for centuries in succession by agreement between closely interdependent guilds and federated cities entirely beyond the powers of a central estate, the continual interference of its official paralyse, the trades, bringing most of them to a complete decay, and the law-century economists, when they rose against the state regulation of industries, unevenly dated a widely felt discontent. The abolition of that interference by the French Revolution was greeted as an act of liberation, and the example of France was soon followed elsewhere. With the regulation of wages, the state had no better success. In the medieval cities, when the distinction between masters and apprentices or journeymen became more and more apparent in the 15th century, unions of apprentices opened bracket. Occasionally, assuming an international character, were opposed to the unions of masters and merchants. Now it was the state which undertook to settle their griffes, and under the Elizabethan statute of 1563, the justices of peace had to settle their wages, so as to guarantee a convenient livelihood to journeymen and apprentices, the justices, however, proved helpless to conciliate the conflicting interests and stillness to compel the masters to obey their decisions. The law gradually became a dead letter and was repealed by the end of the 18th century. But while the state thus abandoned the function of regulating wages, it continued severely to prohibit all combinations which were entered open by journeymen and workers in order to raise their wages or to keep them at a certain level. All through the 18th century, it legislated against the workers' unions, and in 1799 it finally prohibited all sorts of combinations under the menace of severe punishments. In fact, the British parliament only followed, in this case, the example of a French Revolutionary Convention, which had issued a draconique law against coalitions of workers' coalitions between a number of citizens being considered as attempts against the sovereignty of a state, which was supposed equally to protect all its subjects. The work of destruction of the medieval unions was thus completed, both in the town and in the village. The state ran over loose aggregations of individuals and was ready to prevent by the most stringent measures the reconstitution of any sort of separate unions among them. These were then the conditions under which the mutual aid tendency had to make its way in the 19th century. Need it be said that no such measures could destroy that tendency? Throughout the 18th century, the workers' unions were continually reconstituted open footnotes. C. Sydney and Beatrice were the history of trade unionism. London 1894, pages 21 to 38, closed footnotes, know were they stopped by the cruel prosecutions which took place under the laws of 1797 and 1799. Every flow in supervision, every delay of the monsters in denouncing the unions was taken advantage of. Under the cover of friendly societies, burial clubs or secret bubble hoods, the unions spread in the textile industries among the Sheffield cutlers, the miners and vigorous federal organizations were formed to support the branches during strikes and prosecutions. Open footnotes, C. In Sydney Web's work, the associations which existed at that time, the London artisans are supposed to have never been better organized than in 1810 to 20. The repeal of the combination laws in 1825 gave a new impulse to the movement. Unions and national federations were formed in all trades. Open footnotes, the national association for protection of labor included about 150 separate unions which paid high levies and had a membership of about 100,000. The builders' union and the miners' unions also were big organizations. Open market, Web, LC, page 107, close bucket, closed footnotes. And when Robert Owens started his grand national consolidated trades union, it must had half a million members in a few months. True that this period of relative liberty did not last long. Prosecution began anew in the thirties and the well-nourished condemnations of 1832-1844 followed. The grand national union was disbanded and all over the country, both the private employers and the government met in its own workshops, began to compel the workers to resign all collections with unions and to sign the document to that effect. New Yorkies were prosecuted wholesale under the most insolvent act, workers being summarily arrested and condemned upon a mere complaint of misbehaviour lodged by the monster. Open footnotes, I follow in this Mr. Webb's work, which is replete with documents to confirm his statements. Close footnotes, strikes were suppressed in an autocratic way and the most astounding condemnations took place for merely having announced a strike or acted as a delegate in it. To say nothing of a military suppression of strike riots, no other condemnations which followed the frequent outbursts of acts of violence. To practice mutual support under such circumstances was anything but an easy task and yet notwithstanding all obstacles of which our own generation hardly can have an idea, the revival of the unions began again in 1841 and the amalgamation of the workers has been steadily continued since. After a long fight which lasted for over 100 years, the right of combining together was conquered and at the present time nearly one fourth part of the regularly employed workers, that is about 1,500,000, belonged to trade unions. Open footnotes, great changes have taken place since the parties in the attitude of the richer classes towards the unions. However, even in the 60s, the employers made a formidable concerted attempt to crush them by locking out whole populations. Up to 1869, a simple agreement to strike and the announcement of a strike by plot cause to say nothing of picketing were often punished as intimidation. Only in 1875, the most unservant act was repealed, peaceful picketing was permitted and violence and intimidation during strikes fell into the domain of common law. Yet, even during the dark laborers strike in 1887, relief money had to be spent for fighting before the courts for the right of picketing while the prosecutions of the last few years minus once more to render the conquered rights illusory. As to the other European states, sufficient to say that up to a very recent date, all sorts of unions were prosecuted as conspiracies and that nevertheless they exist everywhere, even though they must often take the foremost secret societies while the extension and the force of labour organizations and especially of the knights of labour in the United States and in Belgium have been sufficiently illustrated by strikes in the 90s. It must however be borne in mind that prosecution upwards the mere fact of belonging to a labour union implies considerable sacrifices in money, in time and in unpaid work and continually implies the risk of using employment for the mere fact of being a unionist. A weekly contribution of 6D out of an 18SOH of 1S out of 25S means much more than 91 out of a 3001 income. It is mostly taken upon food and the levy is soon doubled when a strike is declared in a brother union. The graphic description of 20 union life by a skilled craftsman published by Mr. and Mrs. Webpenbacket, page 341, gives an excellent idea of the amount of work required from a unionist. There is moreover the strike which a unionist has continually to face and the grim reality of the strike is that the limited credit of a workers' family at the baker's and the pawnbrokers is soon exhausted. The strike pay goes not for even for food and hunger is soon written on the children's faces. For one who lives in close contact with workers, a protected strike is the most hard-rending site while what strike meant 40 years ago in this country and still means in all but the wealthiest parts of the continent can easily be conceived. Continually even now, strikes will end with the total win and the forced emigration of whole populations while the shooting down of strikers on the slightest provocation or even without any provocation. See the debates open the strikes of Falconu in Austria before the Australian which stagged on the 10th of May 1894 in which debates the fact is fully recognized by the ministry and the owner of the colliery, also the English press of that time. Cosfootnot is quite habitual still on the continent and yet every year there are thousands of strikes and lockouts in Europe and America, the most severe and protected contests being as a rule on the so-called sympathy strikes which are entered open to support locked out comrades or to maintain the rights of the unions. And while a portion of the press is prone to explain strikes by intimidation, those who have lived among strikers speak with admiration of a mutual aid and support which are constantly practiced by them. Everyone has heard of a colossal amount of work which was done by volunteer workers for organizing relief during the London, the labourers strike of the miners who, after having themselves been idle for many weeks, paid a levy of four shillings a week to the strike fund when they resumed work of the miners who during the Yorkshire labour war of 1894 bought her husband's life savings to the strike fund of the lost youth, a bread being always shared with neighbours of the rad stock miners favored with larger profits. The workers of the kitchen gardens who invited 400 bistal miners to take their share of cabbage and potatoes and so on, all newspaper correspondence during the great strike of miners in Yorkshire in 1894. New heaps of such trucks, although not all of them could report such irrelevant matters to their respective papers. Many such trucks will be found in the daily chronicle and partly the daily news for October and November 1894. Unionism is not however the only form in which the workers need of mutual support find its expression. There are besides the political associations whose activity many workers consider as more conducive to general welfare than the trade unions, limited as they are now in their purposes. Of course the mere fact of belonging to a political body cannot be taken as a manifestation of a mutual aid tendency. We all know that politics of a field in which the purely egotistic elements of society enter into the most entangled combinations with altruistic aspirations. But every expedient politician knows that all great political movements were fought upon large and often distant issues and that both of them were the strongest which provoked most disinterested enthusiasm. All great historical movements have had this character and for our own generation socialism stands in that case. Paid-age-déserts is no doubt the favorite refrain of those who know nothing about it. The truth however is that to speak only of what I know personally, if I had kept a diary for the last 24 years and inscribed in it all the devotion and self-sacrifice which I came across in the socialist movement, the reader of such a diary would have had the work eroson constantly on his lips. But the men I would have spoken of were not heroes. Inspired by a grand idea, every socialist newspaper and there are hundreds of them in Europe alone have the same history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal ambition, I have seen families living without knowing what would be their food tomorrow. The husband boycotted Oran in his little town for his pot in the paper and the wife supporting the family by suing and such a situation lasting for years until the family would retire without a word of reproach. Simply saying, continue we can hold on no more. I have seen men dying from consumption and knowing it and yet knocking about in snow and fog to prepare meetings, speaking at meetings within a few weeks from death and only then retiring to the hospital with the words, now friends I am done. The doctors say I have but a few weeks to leave. Tell the comrades that I shall be happy if they come to see me. I have seen facts which would be described as idealization if I told them in this place. And the very names of these men, hardly known outside a narrow circle of friends, will soon be forgotten when the friends do have positive way. In fact, I don't know myself which most to admire. The unbounded devotion of these few or the sum total of petty acts of devotion of a great number. Every choir of a penny, paper sold, every meeting, every hundred votes, which are won at a socialist election, represent an amount of energy and sacrifices of which no outsider has the faintest idea. And what is now done by socialists has been done in every popular and advanced society, political and religious in the post. All post progress has been promoted by lack men and by a lack devotion. Cooperation, especially in Britain, is often described as joint-stuck individualism. And such as it is now, it undoubtedly tends to breed a cooperative egotism, not only towards the community at large, but also among the cooperators themselves. It is nevertheless certain that at its origin, the movement had an essentially mutual aid character. Even now, it's most ordered promoters or pursued that cooperation leads mankind to a higher harmonic stage of economical relations and it is not possible to stay in some of the strongholds of cooperation in the north without realizing that the great number of the rag and file hold the same opinion. Most of them would lose interest in the movement if that faith were gone and it must be earned that within the last few years, broader ideas of general welfare and of a producer's solidarity have begun to be current among the cooperators. There is undoubtedly now a tendency towards establishing better relations between the owners of the cooperative workshops and the workers. The importance of cooperation in this country in Holland and in Denmark is well known. While in Germany and especially in the Rhine, the cooperative societies are already an important factor of industrial life. The 31,473 productive and consumer associations under the middle Rhine showed about 1890, a yearly expenditure of 18,437,500. 3,675,000 were granted during the year in Lund. It is however Russia which offers perhaps the best feel for the study of cooperation under an infinite variety of aspects. In Russia, it is a natural growth and inheritance from the middle ages and while a formally established cooperative society would have to cope with many legal difficulties and official suspicion, the informal cooperation of the hotels makes the very substance of Russian peasant life. The history of the making of Russia and of the colonization of Siberia is a history of hunting and trading hotels or guilds followed by village communities and at the present time we find the hotel everywhere among each group of 10 to 50 peasants who come from the same village to work at a factory in all the building rates among fishermen and hunters, among convicts on their way to and inside the area, among railway porters, exchange messengers, custom house laborers everywhere in the village industries which give occupation to 7 million men from top to bottom of the working world permanent and temporary for production and consumption under all possible aspects. Until now, many of the fishing grounds on the tributaries of the Caspian Sea are held by immense hotels, the Ural River belonging to the whole of the Ural Cossacks who allot and reallot the fishing grounds, perhaps the richest in the world among the villages, without any interference of the authorities. Fishing is always made by hotels in the Ural, the Volga and all the lakes of northern Russia. Besides these permanent organizations, there are the simply countless temporary hotels constituted for each special purpose. When 10 or 20 peasants come from some locality to a big town to work as weavers, corpainters, mason, boat builders and so on, they always constitute an hotel, they hire rooms, hire a cook, open bracket very often the wife or one of them acts in this capacity cause bracket, elect an elder and take their midst in command each one paying his share for food and lodging to the hotel. A party of convicts on its way to Siberia always does the same and its elected elder is the officially recognized intermediary between the convicts and the military chief of the party. In the hard labor prisons, they have the same organization. The railway portals, the messengers at the exchange, the workers at the custom house, the town messengers in the capitals who are collectively responsible for each member enjoy such a reputation that any amount of money or banknotes is trusted to the hotel member by the merchants. In the building trades, hotels are from 10 to 200 members are formed and the serious builders and railway contractors always prefer to deal with an hotel than with separately hired workers. The lost attempts of the Ministry of War to deal directly with productive hotels form ad hoc in the domestic trades and to give them orders for boots and all sorts of brass and iron goods are described as most satisfactory while the renting of a crown iron work, open bracket, boat kinks, closed bracket to an hotel of workers which took place 7 or 8 years ago has been a decided success. We can thus see in Russia how the old medieval institution having not been interfered with by the state open bracket and its informal manifestations closed bracket has fully survived until now and takes the greatest variety of forms in accordance with the requirements of modern industry and commerce. As to the Balkan Peninsula, the Turkish Empire and Caucasia for all guilds are maintained there in full. The staffs of Serbia are fully preserved their medieval character they include both masters and gentlemen, regulate the trades and our institutions for mutual support in labour and sickness. British Consulate report April 1889. While the armcari of Caucasia and especially at Tiflis add to these functions a considerable influence in municipal life. A capital research on this subject has been published in Russian in the Sapisky open bracket memoirs closed bracket of the Caucasian Geographical Society, volume 6 to Tiflis 1891 by C. Egyazarov closed footnote. In connection with cooperation, I would perhaps to mention also the friendly societies, the unities of odd fellows, the village and town clubs organized for meeting the doctors bills, the dress and the royal clubs, the small clubs very common among factory girls to which they contribute a few pets every week and afterwards draw by lot the sum of one pound which can at least be used for some substantial purchase and many others. A not inconsiderable amount of sociable or jovial spirit is alive in all such societies and clubs even though the credit and debit of each member are closely washed over but there are so many associations based on the readiness to sacrifice time, health and life is required that we can produce numbers of illustrations of the best forms of mutual support. The lifeboat association in this country and similar institutions on the continent must be mentioned in the first place. The former has now over 300 boats along the coast of these aisles and it would have twice as many were eaten through the poverty of the fishermen who cannot afford to buy lifeboats. The close consists however of volunteers whose readiness to sacrifice their lives for the rescue of absolute strangers to them is put every year to a severe test. Every winter the loss of several of the previous among them s'accorde and if we ask these men what moves them to risk their lives even when there is no reasonable chance of success their answer is something on the following lines a fearful snowstorm blowing across the channel region the flat sandy coast of a tiny village in Kent and a small smock laden with oranges stranded on the sands nearby in these shallow waters a near flat bottom lifeboat of a simplified type can be kept and to launch it during such a storm was to face an almost certain disaster and yet the men went out for four hours against the wind and the bootcap size twice one man was drowned the others were caused ashore one of these loss a refined coast god was found this morning badly bruised and half frozen in the store I asked him how they came to make that desperate attempt I don't know myself was his reply there was a wreck all the people from the village stood on the beach and all said it would be finished to go out we never should work through the surf we saw five or six men clinging to the mast making desperate signals we all felt that something must be done but what could we do? one hour passed, two hours and we all stood there we all felt most uncomfortable when all of a sudden through the storm it seemed to us as if we heard their cries they had a boy with them we could not stand that any longer all at once we said we must go the women said so too they would have treated us as cowards if we had not gone all the next day they said we had been fools to go even when we rushed to the boat and went the boat capsized but we took a hold of it the worst was to see all drowning by the side of the boat and we could do nothing to save him then came a fearful wave the boat capsized again and with the coast ashore the men were still rescued by the debut our west was caught miles away I was found next morning in the snow the same feeling moved also the miners of the Rwanda valley when they worked for the rescue of the comrades from the inundated mine they had pierced through 32 hours of coal in order to reach the Anthem comrades but when only 3 years more remained to be pierced fire depth envelopped them the lamps went out and the rescue men retired to work in such conditions was to risk being burned up at every moment but the wraps of the Anthem miners were still heard the men were still alive and appealed for help and several miners volunteered to work at any risk and as we went down the mine their wives had only silent tears to follow them not one word to stop them with the gift of human psychology a nest men or madden in the battlefield they cannot stand it to hear appeals for help and not to respond to them the hero goes and what the hero does all feel that they ought to have done as well the surfisms of the brain cannot resist the mutual aid feeling because this feeling has been nurtured by thousands of years of human social life and hundreds of thousands of years of pre-human life in societies but what about those men who were drowned in the serpentine in the presence of the crowd out of which no one moved for the rescue it may be asked what about the child which fell into the region's pork canal also in the presence of a holly-dee crowd and was only saved for the presence of mine of a maid who let out a newfound land dog to the rescue the answer is plain enough men is the result of both his inherited instincts and his education among the miners and the seamen their common occupations and their everyday contact with one another create a feeling of solidarity while the surrounding dangers maintain courage and pluck in the cities on the contrary the absence of common interest nurtures indifference while courage and pluck which seldom find their opportunities disappear or take another direction moreover the tradition of the hero of a mine and the sea lives in the miners and fishermen's villages adorned with a political hallou but what are the traditions of a motley london crowd the only tradition they might have in common ought to be created by literature but the literature which would correspond to the village epics holly exists the clergy also anxious to prove that all that comes from human nature is seen and that all good in man has a supernatural origin that they mostly ignore the facts which cannot be produced as an example of higher inspiration or grace coming from above and as to the lyric writers their attention is chiefly directed towards one sort of heroism the heroism which promotes the idea of a state therefore they admire the Roman hero or the soldier in the battle while they post by the fisherman's heroism hardly paying attention to it the poet and the painter might of course be taken by the beauty of the human heart in itself but both seldom know the life of the poor closers and while they can sing or paint the roman or the military hero in conventional surroundings they can neither sing nor paint impressively the hero who acts in those modest surroundings which they ignore if they venture to do so they produce a mere piece of rhetoric aupinl footnote escape from a french prison is extremely difficult nevertheless a prisoner escape from one of the french prisons in 1884 or 1885 he even managed to conceal himself during the whole day although the alarm was given and the peasants in the neighborhood were on the look out for him next morning found him concealed in a dish close by a small village perhaps he intended to steal some food or some clothes in order to take off his prison uniform as he was lying in the dish Le fire broke out in the village, he saw a woman running out of one of the burning houses and heard her desperate appeals to rescue a child in the upper story of the burning house. No one moved to the zoo, then the escape prisoner dashed out of his retreat, made his way through the fire and with a scalded face and burning clothes, brought the child safe out of the fire and handed it to its mother. Of course he was arrested on the spot by the village chendon, who now made his appearance. Le fire was taken back to a prison, the fire was reported in all french papers, but none of them bestigued itself to obtain his reliefs. If he had shielded a ward from a comrades blue, he would have been made a hero of, but his act was simply human. He did not promote the state's ideal, he himself did not attribute it to a sudden inspiration of living grace, and that was enough to let the man fall into oblivion. Perhaps 6 or 12 months were added to his sentence for having stolen the state's property, the prison's dress, close foot note. The countless societies, clubs and alliances, for the enjoyment of life, for study and research, for education and so on, which have lately grown up in such numbers that it would require many years to simply tabulate them or another manifestation of the same ever-working tendency for association and mutual support. Some of them, like the brutes of young birds of different species which come together in the autumn, are entirely given to share in common the joys of life. Every village in this country, in Switzerland, Germany and so on, has its cricket, football, tennis, nine pins, pigeon, musical or singing clubs. Other societies are much more numerous, and some of them, like the cyclist's alliance, have suddenly taken a formidable development. Although the members of this alliance have nothing in common but the level of cycling, there is already among them a sort of remissionary for mutual help, especially in the remote nooks and corners which are not flooded by cyclists. They look upon the CSE, the cyclist's alliance club, in a village as a sort of home, and at the yearly cyclist camp, many standing friendship has been established. The Kegelbruder, the brothers of the nine pins in Germany, or a similar association, so also the gymnas societies, open bracket 300 000 members in Germany, cause bracket the informal brotherhood of paddlers in France, the Yacht clubs and so on. Such associations certainly do not alter the economical certification of society, but especially in the small towns, they contribute to smooth social distinctions, and as they all tend to join in large national and international federations, they certainly aid the growth of personal friendly intercourse between all sorts of men scattered in different parts of the globe. The Alpine clubs, the Jags-Juwerin in Germany, which has over 100 000 members, hunters, educated foresters, zoologists and simple lovers of nature, and the International Ornithological Society, which includes zoologists, breeders and simple peasants in Germany, have the same character, not only have they done in a few years a large amount of very useful work, which large associations alone could do properly. Open bracket maps, refuge huts, mountain roads, studies of animal life, of noxious insects, of migration of birds and so on, cause bracket, but they create new birds between men, two alpinists of different nationalities, who meet in a refuge hut in the Caucasus, of a professor and the peasants ornithologists, who stayed the same house or no more strangers to each other, while the uncle-to-be society at New Coastal, which has already induced over 260 000 boys and girls never to destroy, bird's nest and to be kind to all animals, has certainly done more for the development of human feelings and of taste in natural science than lots of moralists and most of our schools. We cannot omit even in this rapid review the thousands of scientific, etterrory, autistique, et éducationales societies. Up till now, the scientific bodies closely controlled and often subsidized by the state have generally moved in a very narrow circle and they often came to be looked upon as mere openings for getting state appointments, while the very narrowness of their circles undoubtedly bred petty jailises. Still, it is a fact that the distinctions of birth, political parties and creeds are smooth to some extent by such associations, while in the smaller and remote towns, the scientific, geographical or musical societies, especially those of them which appeal to a larger circle of amateurs, becomes more centers of intellectual life, a sort of link between the little spot and the wide world and a place where men of very different conditions meet on a footing of equality, to fully appreciate the value of such centers, one ought to know them, say, in Siberia, as to the countless educational societies which only now begin to break down the states and the church monopolies in education. They are sure to become before long the leading power in their branch. To the global unions, we already overgin the garden system and to a number of formal and informal educational associations beyond the high standard of women's education in Russia. Although all the time, the societies and groups had to akin strong opposition to a powerful government. Open footnote. The medical academy for women open bracket, which has given to Russia a large portion of her 700 graduated lady doctors close bracket, the four ladies universities open bracket, about 1,000 pupils in 1887 closed that year and reopened in 1895 close bracket, and the high commercial school for women or entirely the work of such private societies. To the same societies be over high standard, which the girls gymnasia attained since they were open in the 60s. The 100 gymnasia now scattered over the empire open bracket, over 70,000 pupils close bracket, correspond to the high schools for girls in this country. All teachers or however graduates of the universities. Close footnote. As to the various pedagogical societies in Germany, it is well known that they have done the best part in the working out of the modern methods of teaching science in popular schools. In such associations, the teacher finds also his best support. How miserable the overworked and underpaid village teacher would have been without their aid. Open footnote. The variant four, the abratum, chemets, new skills, techniques, although it has only 5,500 members, has already opened more than 1,000 public and school libraries, organized thousands of lectures and published most valuable books. Close footnote. All these associations, societies, brotherhoods, alliances, instituts, and so on, which must now be counted by the 10,000 in Europe alone, and each of which represents an immense amount of voluntary, unambitious and unpaid or underpaid work. What are they but so many manifestations under an infinite variety of aspects of the same ever living tendency of men towards mutual aid and support. For nearly three centuries, men were prevented from joining hands, even for literary, artistic and educational purposes. Societies could only be formed under the protection of the state, over church or as secret brotherhoods, like Freemasonry. But now that the resistance has been broken, they swarm in all directions, they extend over all multifarious branches of human activity, they become international, and they undoubtedly contribute to an extent which cannot yet be fully appreciated, to break down the screens erected by states between different nationalities. Notwithstanding the jailoses which are bred by commercial competition and the provocation to hatred which are sounded by the ghost of a decaying post, there is a conscience of international solidarity which is growing both among the leading spirits of the world and the masters of the workers, since they also have conquered the right of international intercourse and in the preventing of the European war during the last quarter of the century, this spirit has undoubtedly had its share. The religious charitable associations which again represent a whole world certainly must be mentioned in this place. There is not the slightest doubt that the great birth of their members are moved by the same mutual aid feelings which are common to all mankind. Unhappily, the religious teachers of men prefer to ascribe to such feelings a supernatural origin. Many of them pretend that men does not consciously obey the mutual aid inspiration so long as he has not been enlightened by the teachings of a special religion which they represent and with Saint Augustine, most of them do not recognize such feelings in the pagan savage. Moreover, while early Christianity like all other religions was an appeal to the broadly human feelings of mutual aid and sympathy, the Christian church has aided the state in wrecking all standing institutions of mutual aid and support which were ontagé to it or developed outside of it and instead of a mutual aid which every savage considers as due to his skin-span, it has preached charity which bears a character of inspiration from above and accordingly implies a certain superiority of a giver upon the receiver with this limitation and without any intention to give offense to those who consider themselves as a body-elect when they act simply human. We certainly may consider the immense numbers of religious charitable associations as an outcome of the same mutual aid tendency. All these facts show that a reckless prosecution of personal interests with no regard to other people's needs is not the only characteristic of modern life. By the side of this correct which took proudly claims leadership in human affairs, we perceive a hot struggle sustained by both the rural and industrial populations in order to reintroduce standing institutions of mutual aid and support and we discover in all classes of society a widely spread movement towards the establishment of an infinite variety of more or less permanent institutions for the same purpose. But when we pause from public life to the private life of a modern individual we discover another extremely wide world of mutual aid and support which only pauses un notice by most sociologists because it is limited to the narrow circle of the family and personal friendship. Open foot note. Very few writers in sociology have paid attention to it. Dr Thierryng is one of them and his case is very instructive. When the great German writer and law began his philosophical work they as waked in right then bracket purpose in law, close bracket, he intended to analyze the active forces which called forth the advance of society and maintain it and to thus give a fury of a sociable man. He analyzed first the egotistic forces at work including the present wage system and coercion in variety of political and social laws and in a carefully worked out scheme of his work he intended to give a law's paragraph to the ethical forces the sense of duty and mutual love which contribute to the same aim. When he came however to discuss the social function of these two factors he had to write a second volume twice as big as the first and yet he treated only of the personal factors which will take in the following pages only a few lines. El Dorgun took up the same idea in egoismus and altruismus in their national economy. Le Bzik 1885 adding some new facts. Bushner's love and the several paraphrases of it published here in Germany deal with the same subject close foot note. Under the present social system all birds of union among the inhabitants of the same street or neighborhood have been dissolved. In the richer parts of the large towns people live without knowing who are their next door neighbors but in the crowded lanes people know each other perfectly and are continually brought into mutual contact. Of course, petty quarrels go their course. In the lanes as elsewhere but groupings in accordance with personal affinities grew up and within the circle mutual aid is practiced to an extent of which the richer classes have no idea. If we take for instance the children of a poor neighborhood who play in a street or a church yard or on a green we notice at once that a close union exists among them notwithstanding the temporary fights and that that union protects them from all sorts of misfortunes. As soon as a mite bends inquisitively over the opening of a drain don't stop there another mite shots out feather sits in the hole don't climb over that wall the train will kill you if you tumble down don't come near to the ditch don't eat those berries poison you will die such are the first teachings imported to the etchin when he joins his mates outdoors. How many of the children whose playgrounds of the pavements around model workers dwellings over quays and bridges of the canals would be crushed to death by the causeful drown in the muddy waters were it not for that sort of mutual support and when a fair jack has made a slip into the unprotected ditch at the back of a milkman's yard or etcherry chic lisihas of the old tumble down into a canal the young brood raisers subscribe that all the neighborhood is on the alert and rushes to the rescue. Then comes in the alliance of the mothers you could not imagine open bracket a lady doctor who lives in a poor neighborhood who told me lately close bracket how much they help each other if a woman has prepared nothing or could prepare nothing for the baby which expected and how often that happens all the neighbors bring something for the newcomer one of the neighbors always take care of the children and some of the always drops in to take care of the household so long as the mother is in bed this habit is general it is mentioned by all those who have lived among the poor in a thousand small ways the mothers support each other and best to their care open children that are not their own. Some training would do bad let them decide it for themselves is required in a lady of the richer classes to render her able to pass by a shivering and hungry child in the street without noticing it but the mothers of the poorer classes have not that training they cannot stand the sight of a hungry child they must feed it and so they do when the school children beg bread they seldom or rather never meet with a refusal a lady friend who has worked several years in white chapel in connection with the workers club writes to me but I may perhaps as well transcribe a few more passages from her letter nursing neighbors in cases of illness without any shade of remuneration is quite general among the workers also when a woman has little children and goes out for work another mother always take care of them if in the working classes they would not help each other they could not exist I know families which continually help each other with money, with food, with fuel for bringing up the little children in cases of illness in cases of death the mind and mind is much less sharply observed among the poor than among the rich shoes, dress, hats and so on what may be wanted on the spot or continually borrowed from each other also all sorts of household things last winter the members of a united radical club had bought together some little money and began off the Christmas to distribute free soup and bread to the children going to school gradually they had 1,800 children to attend to the money came from outsiders but all the work was done by the members of the club some of them who were out of work came at 4 in the morning to wash and to build the vegetables 5 women came at 9, 0, 10 open bracket after having done their own household work cause bracket for cooking and stayed till 6 or 7 to wash the dishes and at mealtime between 12 and half past 1 20 to 30 workers came into aid in serving the soup each one staying what he could spare of his mealtime this law sent for 2 months no one was paid my friend also mentions various individual cases of which the following are typical Annie W was given by her mother to be bordel by an old person in Wilmot Street when her mother died the old woman who herself was very poor kept the child without being paid a penny for that when the old lady died too the child who was 5 years old was of course neglected during her illness and was robbed but she was taken at once by Mrs S the wife of a shoemaker who herself has 6 children lately when the husband was ill we had not much to eat all of them the other day Mrs M mother of 6 children attended Mrs MG throughout her illness and took to her own rooms the elder child but do you need such facts they are quite general and also Mrs D open bracket Oval Hacney Road close bracket who has a shoeing machine and continually shoes for others without ever accepting any remuneration although she has herself 5 children and her husband to look after and so on for everyone who has any idea of the life of the labouring classes it is evident that without mutual aid being practiced among them on a large scale they never could pull through all their difficulties it is only by chance that a worker's family can live its lifetime without having to face such circumstances as the crisis described by the ribbon with Joseph Gutierrez in his autobiography open footnote leaked and shadows in the life of artisan Coventry 1893 close footnote and if all do not go to the ground in such cases they seek to mutual help in Gutierrez's case it was an old nurse miserably poor herself who turned up at the moment when the family was sleeping towards a final catastrophe and brought in some bread cold and bedding which she had obtained on credit in other cases it would be someone else or the neighbors will take steps to save the family but without some aid from other poor how many more would be brought every year to irreparable ruin open footnote many rich people cannot understand how the very poor can help each other because they do not realize upon what infinitesimal amounts of food or money often hangs the life of one of the poorest classes who, Chathtersbury had understood this terrible truth when he started his flowers and watercress girls found out of which loads of one pound and only occasionally two pounds were granted to enable the girls to buy a basket and flowers when the winter sets in and they are in dire distress the loans were given to girls who had not a sixpence but never failed to find some other poor to go bale for them of all the movements I have ever been connected with Lord Chathtersbury wrote I look upon this watercress girls movement as the most successful it was begun in 1872 and we have had our 800 to 1000 loans and have not lost 501 during the whole period and it has been very little under the circumstances has been by reason of death or sickness not by food Open bracket, the life and work of the 7th Earl of Chathersbury by Edwin Hodder volume 3 page 322 London 1885 to 1886 close bracket several more facts in point in C.H. Booth's life and labor in London volume 1 in Miss Beatrice Potter's pages Michael's diary when bracket 19th century September 1888 page 310 close bracket and so on Mr. Plimsall after he had lived for some time among the poor on 7S6D a week was compelled to recognize that the kindly feelings he took with him when he began this life changed into hearty respect and admiration when he saw how the relations between the poor are permeated with mutual aid and support and the simple ways in which that support is given after a many years experience his conclusion was that when you come to think of it such as these men were so were the vast majority of the working closers open foot nerd Samuel Plimsall our seaman, cheap edition London 1870 page 110 close foot nerd as to bringing up orphans even by the poorest families it is so widely spread a habit that it may be described as a general rule thus among the biners it was found after the two explosions at Warren Vale and at Lone Hill that nearly one third of the men killed as the respective committees can testify for the supporting relations of the van wife and child have you reflected Mr. Plimsall added what this is which meant even comfortably to do men do this I don't doubt but consider the difference consider what is some of one chilling subscribed by each worker to help a comrades with the 06D to help a fellow worker extra expense of a funeral means for one who earns 16 s a week and has a wife and in some cases 506 children to support open foot nerd our seaman US page 110 Mr. Plimsall added I don't wish to disparage the rich but I think it may be reasonably doubted whether these qualities are so fully developed in them for notwithstanding that not a few of them are not unacquainted with the claims reasonable or unreasonable of poor relatives these qualities are not in such constant exercise which just seem in so many cases to smoother the manliness of their possessors and their sympathies become not so much narrowed as to speak certified they are reserved for the sufferings of their own cause and also the woes of those above them they seldom tend downwards much and they are far more likely to admire and act of courage than to admire the constantly exercise, fortitude and the tenderness which are the daily characteristics of a British workman's life and of the workman all over the world as well close foot nerd but such subscriptions or a general practice among the workers all over the world even in much more ordinary cases than a death in the family while aid in work is the commonest thing in their lives nor do the same practices of mutual aid and support fail among the richer classes of course when one thinks of the harshness which is often shown by the richer employers towards the employees one feels inclined to take the most pessimist view of human nature many must remember the indignation which was aroused during the great Yorkshire strike of 1894 when all miners who had big call from an abandoned pit were prosecuted by the colliery owners and even if we live aside the horrors of the periods of struggle and social war such as the extermination of thousands of workers prisoners after the fall of the Paris commune who can read for instance revelations about the labor inquest which was made here in the 40s or what Lord Shaftesbury wrote about the frightful waste of human life in the factories to which the children taken from the work houses or simply purchased all over this country to be sold as factory slaves were consigned open foot nerd life of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury by Edwin Hodder volume 1 pages 137 to 138 close foot nerd without being vividly impressed by the business which is possible in men when his greediness is at stake but it must also be said that all fault for such treatment must not be thrown entirely upon the criminality of human nature one of the teachings of men of science and even of a notable portion of the colliery up to a quite recent time teachings of distrust despite and almost hated towards the poorer classes did not science teach that since serfdom has been abolished no one need be poor unless poor his own vices and how few in the church had the courage to blame the children killers while the great numbers taught that the sufferings of the poor and even the slavery of the negroes were part of the divine plan was not non-conformism itself largely a popular protest against the harsh treatment of the poor at the hand of the established church with such spiritual leaders the feelings of the richer classes necessarily became mis de pims en remorque not so much blunted as stratified the seldom went downwards towards the poor from whom the world to do people are separated by the manner of life and whom they do not know under their best aspects in their everyday life but among themselves are the ones being made for the effects of the wealth accumulating passions and the futile expenses imposed by wealth itself among themselves in the circle of family and friends the rich practice the same mutual aid as the poor Dr. E. Herring and L. Dorgon are perfectly right in saying that if a statistical record could be taken of all the money which passes from hand to hand in the shape of friendly loans and aid, the sum total would be enormous even in comparison with the commercial transactions of the world's trade and if we could add to it as we certainly ought to what is spent in hospitality petty mutual services, the management of other people's affairs gifts and charities we certainly should be struck by the importance of such transfers in national economy even in the world which is ruled by commercial egotism the current expression we have been harshly treated by that firm shows that there is also the friendly treatment as opposed to the harsh that is the legal treatment while every commercial man knows how many firms are saved every year from failure by the friendly support of other firms as to the charities and the amounts of work for general well-being done by so many well-to-do persons as well as by workers and especially by professional men everyone knows the part which is played by these two categories of benevolence in modern life if the desire of acquiring the charity political power or social distinction often spoils the true character of that sort of benevolence there is no doubt possible as to the impulse coming in the majority of cases from the same mutual aid feelings men who have acquired wealth very often do not find in it the expected satisfaction others begin to feel that whatever economics may say about wealth being the reward of capacity their own reward is exaggerated the conscience of human solidarity begins to tell and all the society life is so orange as to stifle that feeling by thousands of awful means it often gets the upper hand and then they try to find an outcome for that deeply humans need by giving the fortune or their forces in their opinion will promote general welfare in short, neither the crushing powers of the centralised state nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pts struggle which came adorned with the attributes of science from obliging philosophers and sociologists could read out the feeling of human solidarity deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution what was the outcome of evolution since its earlier stages cannot be overpowered by one of the aspects of that same evolution and the need of mutual aid and support which had lately taken refuge in the narrow circle of the family of the slum neighbours in the village of the secret unit of workers reassert itself again even in our modern society and claims it tries to be as always has been the chief leader towards further progress such are the conclusions which we are necessarily brought to when we carefully ponder over each other groups of facts briefly enumerated in the last two chapters enough chapter 8, recording by Enko conclusion of mutual aid a factor of evolution this is a library box recording all library box recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librarybox.org recording by Enko mutual aid a factor of evolution by Peter Kropotkin conclusion if we take now the teachings which can be borrowed from the analysis of modern society in connection with the body of evidence relative to the importance of mutual aid in the evolution of the animal world and of mankind we may sum up our enquiry as follows in the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life understood of course in its Darwinian sense not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavorable to the species the animal species in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development and invariably the most numerous the most prosperous and the most open to further progress the mutual protection which is obtained in this case the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience the higher intellectual development and the further growth of sociable habits secure the maintenance of the species its extension and its further progressive evolution the unsociable species on the contrary or doomed to decay going next over to man we found him living in clans and tribes at the very dawn of the stone age we saw a wide series of social institutions developed already in the lower savage stage in the clan and the tribe and we found that the earliest tribal customs and habits gave to mankind the embryo of all the institutions which made later on the leading aspects of further progress out of the savage tribe grew up the Borbellian village community and a new still wider circle of social customs habits and institutions numbers of which are still alive among ourselves was developed under the principles of common possession of a given territory under the jurisdiction of the village folk mode and in the federation of villages belonging or supposed to belong to one stem and when new requirements induce men to make a new start they made it in the city which represented a double network of territorial new units open bracket village communities connected with guilds this latter arising out of the common prosecution of a given auto craft or for mutual support and defense finally in the lost chapters facts were produced to show that all the growth of the state on the pattern of imperial Rome had put a violent end to all medieval institutions for mutual support this new aspect of civilization could not lost the state based upon loose aggregations of individuals and undertaking to be their only bone of union did not answer its purpose the mutual aid tendency finally broke down its iron rules it reappeared and reasserted itself infinity of associations which now tend to embrace all aspects of life and to take possession of all that is required by men for life and for reproducing the waste occasion by life it will probably be remarked that mutual aid even though it may represent one of the factors of evolution covers nevertheless one aspect only of human relations that by the side of this current powerful though it may be there is and always has been the overcurrent, the self-assertion not only in its efforts to attain personal or cause superiority economical, political and spiritual but also in its much more important or the less evident function of breaking through the bonds always prone to become crystallized which the tribe, the village community the city and the state impose upon the individual in other words there is the self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element it is evident that no review of evolution can be complete unless these two dominant currents are analyzed, however the self-assertion of the individual or of groups of individuals their struggles for superiority and the conflicts which resulted therefrom have already been analyzed described and glorified from time immemorial in fact up to the present time this current alone has received attention from the epical poet, the analyst the historian and the sociologist history such as it has hitherto been written entirely a description of the ways and means by which theocracy, military power autocracy and later on the richer classes rule have been promoted, established and maintained the struggles between these forces make in fact the substance of history we may thus take the knowledge of the individual factor in human history as granted even though there is full room for a new study of the subject on the lines just alluded to while on the other side this factor has been hitherto totally lost sight of it was simply denied or even scoffed at by the writers of the present and post generation it was therefore necessary to show first of all the immense part which this factor plays in the evolution of both the animal world and human societies only after this has been fully recognized will it be possible to proceed to a comparison between the two factors to make even a rough estimate of the relative importance de l'histicle is evidently impossible one single war we all know may be productive of more evil immediate and subsequent than hundreds of years of the unchecked action of a mutual aid principle may be productive of good but when we see that in the animal world progressive development and mutual aid go hand in hand while the inner struggle within the species is concomitant with retrogressive development when we notice that with man we are passionate to the development of mutual aid in each of the two conflicting nations cities, parties or tribes and that in the process of evolution war itself open bracket so far as it can go this way cross bracket has been made subservient to the ends of progress in mutual aid within the nation the city overclen we already obtain a perception of the dominating influence of a mutual aid factor as an element of progress but we see also that the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his arts, knowledge and intelligence and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in arts, industry and science in fact the study of the inner life of a medieval city and of the ancient greek cities reveals the fact that the combination of mutual aid as it was practiced within the guild in the greek clan with a large initiative which was left to the individual and the group by means of the federative principle gave to mankind the two greatest periods of its history the ancient greek city and the medieval city periods while the rule of the above institutions during the state periods of history which followed corresponded in both cases to a rapid decay As to the sudden industrial progress which has been achieved during our own century which is usually ascribed to the triumph of individualism and competition it certainly has a much deeper origin than that once the great discoveries of the 15th century were made especially that of the pressure of the atmosphere supported by a series of advances in natural philosophy and they were made under the medieval city organization once these discoveries were made the invention of a steam motor and all the revolution in which the conquest of a new power implied had necessarily to follow if the medieval cities had lived to bring the discoveries to that point the ethical consequences of the revolution effected by steam might have been different but the same revolution in techniques and science would have inevitably taken place it remains indeed an open question whether the general decay of industries which followed the rule of the three cities and was especially noticeable in the first part of the 18th century did not considerably retort the appearance of the steam engine as well as the consequent revolution in arts when we consider the astounding rapidity of industrial progress from the 12th to the 15th centuries in weaving, working of metals architecture and navigation and ponder over the scientific discoveries which that industrial progress led to at the end of the 15th century we must ask ourselves whether mankind was not delayed in taking full advantage of this conquest when a general depression of arts and industries took place in Europe after the decay of medieval civilization surely it was not the disappearance of the Ortiz-Ortizan nor the ruin of large cities and the extinction of intercourse between them which could further the industrial revolution and we know indeed that James Watt spent 20 or more years of his life in order to render his invention serviceable because he could not find in the last century what he would have readily found in medieval Florence or Bruges but is the Ortizans capable of realizing his devices in metal and of giving them the autistic finish and precision which the steam engine requires to attribute therefore the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all which it has proclaimed is to reason like the man who knowing not the causes of rain attributes it to the victim he has emulated before his clay idol for industrial progress as for each of the conquest of nature mutual aid and close intercourse certainly or as they have been much more advantageous than mutual struggle however it is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating importance of a mutual aid principle appears in full that mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough but whatever the opinions as to the first origin of a mutual aid feeling or instinct may be whether a biological or a supernatural cause is ascribe to it we must stress its existence as for back as to the lowest stages of the animal world and from these stages we can follow its uninterrupted evolution in opposition to a number of contrary agencies through all degrees of human development up to the present times even the new religions which were born from time to time always at epochs when the mutual aid principle was falling into decay in the tier classes and despotic states of the east or at the decline of the roman empire even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same principle they found their first supporters among the humble in the lowest downtrodden layers of society where the mutual aid principle is the necessary foundation of everyday life and the new forms of union which were introduced in the earliest buddhist and christian communities in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on took the character of return to the best aspects of mutual aid in early tribal life each time however that an attempt to return to this whole principle was made its fundamental idea itself was widened from the clan it was extended to the stem to the federation of stems to the nation and finally in ideal at least to the whole of mankind it was also refined at the same time in primitive buddhism and primitive christianity in the writings of some of the musulman teachers in the early movements of the reform and especially in the ethical and philosophical movements of the law century and of our own times the total abandonment of the idea of revenge or of due reward of good for good and evil for evil is affirmed more and more vigorously the higher conception of no revenge for wrongs and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbors is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality a principle superior to mere equivalence equity or justice and more conducive to happiness and man is appealed to be guided in his acts not merely by love which is always personal or at the best tribal but by the perception of his oneness with each human being in the practice of mutual aid which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man mutual support not mutual struggle has had the leading part in its wide extension even at the present time we also see the best guarantee of the still of the evolution of our race end of conclusion recording by Enko end of mutual aid a factor of evolution by Peter Kropotkin