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  THE STATE

  _ITS HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT VIEWED
  SOCIOLOGICALLY_

  _By_ FRANZ OPPENHEIMER, M.D., PH.D.
  Professor of Political Science in the University of Frankfort-on-Main

  _Authorized Translation_
  _By_ JOHN M. GITTERMAN, PH.D., LL.B.
  (Of the New York County Bar)

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  VANGUARD PRESS




  _Copyright_, 1914
  THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

  _Copyright_, 1922
  B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.


  VANGUARD PRINTINGS

  _First--August, 1926_
  _Second--February, 1928_


  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




THE MAN (1864--):

    _Franz Oppenheimer_, one of a fairly large number of British,
    French and German physicians who abandoned their medical pursuits
    and rose to fame as political economists, was born in Berlin.
    He studied and practiced medicine, became private Lecturer of
    Economics at the Berlin University in 1909, and Professor of
    Sociology at the Frankfort University in 1919. His libertarian
    views made him, for many years, the target of academic
    persecutions, until the growing fame of his masterpiece, _The
    State_, effectively silenced his detractors.


THE BOOK (1908):

    The organic history of the State is a long and exciting
    adventure, usually rendered dull in learned accounts. Not so
    in Oppenheimer’s _The State_ which extracts that history, in
    a highly stimulating manner, from the sharp necessities and
    homicidal conflicts of all sorts and conditions of men, from the
    Stone Age to the Age of Henry Ford. The easy flow of important
    information derivable from this German volume has rendered it
    highly acceptable to American readers.




OTHER BOOKS BY DOCTOR FRANZ OPPENHEIMER


  Die Siedlungsgenossenschaft                             1896

  Grossgrundeigentum und Soziale Frage                    1898

  Das Grundgesetz der Marxschen Gesellschaftslehre        1903

  Robertus’ Angriff auf Ricardos Renten-theorie
  und der Lexis-Diehl’sche Rettungsversuch                1908

  David Ricardos Grundrententheorie                       1909

  Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Ökonomie             1910




AUTHOR’S PREFACE

TO THE SECOND AMERICAN EDITION


This little book has made its way. In addition to the present
translation into English, there are authorized editions in French,
Hungarian and Serbian. I am also informed that there are translations
published in Japanese, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish; but these, of
course, are pirated. The book has stood the test of criticism, and has
been judged both favorably and unfavorably. It has, unquestionably,
revived the discussion on the origin and essence of the State.

Several prominent ethnologists, particularly Holsti, the present
Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Finnish Free State, have attacked
the basic principle formulated and demonstrated in this Work, but they
have failed, because their definition of the State assumed the very
matter that required to be proven. They have brought together a large
array of facts in proof of the existence of some forms of _Government_
and _Leadership_, even where no classes obtained, and to the substance
of these forms they have given the name of “The State.” It is not
my intention to controvert these facts. It is self-evident, that in
any group of human beings, be it ever so small, there must exist an
authority which determines conflicts and, in extraordinary situations,
assumes the leadership. But this authority is not “The State,” in
the sense in which I use the word. The State may be defined as an
organization of _one class_ dominating over the other classes. Such
a class organization can come about in one way only, namely, through
conquest and the subjection of ethnic groups by the dominating group.
This can be demonstrated with almost mathematical certainty. Not one of
my critics has brought proofs to invalidate this thesis. Most modern
sociologists, among whom may be named Albion Small, Alfred Vierkandt
and Wilhelm Wundt, accept this thesis. Wilhelm Wundt, in particular,
asserts in unmistakable language, that “the political society (a
term identical with the State in the sense employed in this book)
first came about and could originate only in the period of migration
and conquest,” whereby the subjugation of one people by another was
effected.

But even some of my opponents are favorably inclined to my arguments,
as in the case of the venerable Adolf Wagner, whose words I am proud
to quote. In his article on “The State” in the _Handwörterbuch der
Staatswissenschaften_, he writes: “The sociologic concept of the State,
to which I have referred, particularly in the broad scope and treatment
of it given by Oppenheimer, deserves careful consideration, especially
from political economists and political historians. The vista opened
out, from this point of view, of the economic development of peoples
and that of the State during historic times, should be attractive even
to the opponents of the concept itself.”

The “sociologic concept of the State,” as Ludwig Gumplowicz termed it,
is assured of ultimate general acceptance. Its opponents are strenuous
and persevering, and I once called them “the sociologic root of all
evil;” but the concept, none the less, is the basic principle of
“bourgeoisie” sociology, and will be found of value in the study, not
only of economics and history, but in that of Law and Constitutional
History. I permit myself to make a few remarks on this point.

The earliest evidence of the recognition of the idea underlying the
_law of previous accumulation_, may be traced back, at the latest, to
the period of the decay of classical civilization, at the time when
the capitalistic slave economy brought the city states to ruin as
though their peoples had suffered from a galloping consumption. As
in our modern capitalistic age, which resembles that period in many
respects, there occurred a breach in all those naturally developed
relations in which the individual has found protection. What Ferdinand
Toennies calls the “community bonds” were loosened. The individual
found himself unprotected, compelled to rely on his own efforts and
on his own reason in the seething sea of competition which followed.
The collective reason, the product of the wisdom of thousands of years
of experience, could no longer guide or safeguard him. It had become
scattered. Out of this need for an individual reason, there arose the
idea of _nationalism_. This idea had its justification at first, as a
line of development and a method in the newly born science of social
government; but when later it became what Rubenstein (in his work
_Romantic Socialism_) calls a “tendency,” it was not justified. The
community, to use Toennies’ term, changed into a “society.” “Contract”
seemed to be the only bond that held men together--the contract based
on the purely rationalistic relation of service for service, the _do
ut des_, the “Contrat Social” of Rousseau. A “society” would thus
appear to be a union of self-seeking individuals who hoped through
combination to obtain their personal satisfactions. Aristotle had
taught that the State had developed, by gradual growth, from the family
group. The Stoics and Epicureans held that individuals formed the
State--with this difference, that the former viewed the individual as
being socially inclined by nature, and the latter that he was naturally
anti-social. To the Stoics, therefore, the “State of Nature” was a
peaceful union; to the Epicureans it was a war of each against the
other, with Society as a compelling means for a decent modus vivendi.
With the one a Society was conditioned “physei” (by nature); with the
other it was “nomo” (by decree).

In spite, however, of this fundamental difference between these
schools, both assumed the premise that, at the beginning, individuals
were _free_, _equal_ politically and economically, and that it was from
such an original social order there had developed, through gradual
differentiation, the fully developed State with its class hierarchy.
This is the _law of previous accumulation_.

But we should err if we believed that this thesis was originally
intended as a historical account. Rationalism is essentially
unhistoric, even anti-historic. On the contrary, the thesis was
originally put forward as a “fiction,” a theory, a conscious
unhistorical assumption. In this form it acquired the name of _natural
law_. It was under this name that it came into modern thought,
tinctured stoically in Grotius and Puffendorf, and epicureanally in
Hobbes. It became the operative weapon of thought among the rising
third estate of the capitalists.

The capitalists used the weapon, first against the feudal state with
its privileged class, and, later against the fourth estate, with its
class theory of Socialism. Against the feudal domination it argued
that a “Law of Nature” knows and permits no privileges. After its
victories in the English Revolution of 1648, and the great French
Revolution of 1789, it justified, by the same reasoning, its own _de
facto_ pre-eminence, its own social and economic class superiority,
against the claims of the working classes. According to Adam Smith, the
classes in a society are the results of “natural” development. From an
original state of equality, these arose from no other cause than the
exercise of the economic virtues of industry, frugality and providence.
Since these virtues are pre-eminently those of a bourgeoisie society,
the capitalist rule, thus sanctioned by natural law, is just and
unassailable. As a corollary to this theorem the claims of Socialism
cannot be admitted.

Thus, what originally was put forward as a “fiction,” became first, a
hypothesis and finally the _axiom_ of all bourgeoisie sociology. Those
who support it accept the axiom as self-evident, as not requiring
proof. For them, class domination, on this theory, is the result of a
gradual differentiation from an original state of general equality and
freedom, with no implication in it of any extra-economic power. Robert
Malthus applied this alleged law to the future, in his attempt to
demonstrate any kind of Socialism to be purely Utopian. His celebrated
_Law of Population_ is nothing but the _law of original accumulation_
projected into the future. He claims that if any attempt were made to
restore the state of economic equality, the workings of the law would
have the effect--because of the difference in economic efficiency--of
restoring modern class conditions. All orthodox sociology begins
with the struggle against this supposed law of class formations. Yet
every step of progress made in the various fields of the science of
sociology, has been made by tearing up, one by one, the innumerable and
far-spreading roots which have proceeded from this supposed axiom. A
sound sociology has to recall the fact that class formation in historic
times, did not take place through gradual differentiation in pacific
economic competition, but was the result of violent conquest and
subjugation.

As both Capitalism and Socialism had their origins in England,
these new ideas were certain to find their first expression in that
country. So that we find Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the “true
levellers” of Cromwell’s time, arraying the facts of history against
this anti-historical theoretical assumption. He showed that the
English ruling class (the Squirearchy) was composed essentially of the
victorious conquerors, the Normans, and that the subject class were the
conquered English Saxons. But his demonstration had little influence.
It was only when the great French Revolution brought the contrast out
sharply that the thought sunk in. No less a person than Count St.
Simon, acknowledged as the founder of the science of modern sociology,
and the no less scientific Socialism, discovered in the dominant class
of his country the Frankish and Burgundian conquerors, and in its
subject population, the descendants of the Romanized Celts. It was
the publication of this discovery that gave birth to Western European
sociology. The conclusions drawn from it were carried further by St.
Simon’s disciple, August Comte, in his _Philosophy of History_, and
by the Saint Simonists, Enfantin and Bazard. These thinkers had great
influence on the economic development of the next century; but their
chief contribution was the elaboration of the sociologic idea of the
State.

Among the peoples of Western Europe, the new sociology found a readier
acceptance than it did among those of Eastern Europe. The reason for
this can easily be seen when it is remembered that in the East the
contrast between the “State” and “Society,” had not been so definitely
realized, as it had been in the West. Even in the West, this contrast
was only fully appreciated, as a social fact, in England, France, the
Netherlands and Italy, because in these countries only the class of
mobile wealth which had worked its way up as the third estate, had
succeeded in ousting the feudal “State.” In France, the league of the
capitalists with the Crown against the then armed and active nobility
had succeeded in subjecting the Frondeurs under the absolute power of
the King. From this time on, this new estate represented itself as
the Nation, and the term “National Economy” takes the place of the
older term “Political Economy.” The members of this third estate felt
themselves to be those subjects of the State whose rights and liberties
had been curtailed by the privileges of the two dominant estates of
the nobility and the clergy. Henceforth, the Third Estate proclaims
the rights of “Society” and against the “State,” opposes the eternal
Law of Nature--that of original equality and freedom--against the
theoretic-historical rights of the Estates. The concept of Society as a
contrast to the concept of the State, first appears in Locke, and from
his time on this contrast was more and more defined, especially in the
writings of the physiocrat school of economists.

In this struggle between classes and ideas, neither Middle nor Eastern
Europe played any important part. In Germany there had once developed
a Capitalist class (in the period of the Fuggers of Augsburg) which
attained to almost American magnitude. But it was crushed by the
Religious Wars and the various French invasions of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, which left Germany a devastated, depopulated
desert. At the end of the period there remained a few cities and small
states under the absolute domination of princes. Within the cities
the artisans were bound together in their craft-leagues, and the rest
consisted of those of educational pursuits and academic officials. In
a large degree all these were dependent on the State--the members of
the craft-guilds because they accepted a privileged condition, the
officials because they were servants of the State, and the professional
men, because they belonged to the upper estate of the society. For this
reason there was no economic or social movement of the third estate in
Germany; there was only a literary movement influenced by the flow of
ideas from the West. This explains why the contrast between the two
ideas of the State and of Society was not present in the minds of the
German people. On the contrary, the two terms were used as synonyms,
both connotating an essentially necessary conformity to nature.

But there is still another cause for this difference in the mental
attitude between Western and Eastern Europe. In England and France,
from the time of Descartes, the problems and inquiries of science
were set by men trained in mathematics and the natural sciences.
Especially in the new study of the philosophy of history, the beginning
of our modern sociology, did these men act as guides. In Germany, on
the contrary, it was the theologians and especially the Protestant
theologians who were the leaders of thought. In their hands the State
came to be looked upon as an instrument of Divine fashioning, and,
indeed, of immanent divinity. This thought resulted in a worship of
the State, which reached its height in the well-known Hegelian system.
It thus happened that two rivers of thought flowed for a time side by
side--the Sociology of Western Europe, and the philosophy of History of
Germany--with occasional intercommunicating streams, such as Althusios
and Puffendorf into the French, English and Dutch teaching of natural
law, and that of Rousseau into Hegel. In 1840, however, a direct
junction was effected through Lorenz Stein, one of Hegel’s most gifted
pupils who, later, became the leading German teacher of administrative
law, and influenced generations of thinkers. He came to Paris, as a
young man, for the purpose of studying Socialism at the fountain head.
He became acquainted with the celebrated men of that heroic time--with
Enfintin and Bazard, with Louis Blanc, Reybaud, and Proudhon.

Lorenz Stein absorbed the new thought with enthusiasm, and in his
fertile mind there was precipitated the creative synthesis between the
Western Europe scientific sociological thought and the metaphysical
German philosophy of history. The product was called by him the Science
of Society (_Gesellschaftswissenschaft_). It is from the writings of
Stein that almost all the important developments of German sociologic
thought received their first impulses. Karl Marx, especially (as Struve
has shown), as well as Schaeffle, Othmar Spann and Gumplowicz are
largely indebted to him.

It is not my purpose to develop this historical theme. I am concerned
only in tracing the development of the sociologic idea of the State.
The first effect of this meeting of the two streams of thought was a
mischievous confusion of terminology. The writers in Western Europe had
long ago lost control of the unification of expressions in thinking.
As stated above, the Third Estate began by thinking itself to be
“Society,” as opposed to the State. But when the Fourth Estate grew to
class consciousness and became aware of its own theoretic existence,
it arrogated to itself the term “Society” (as may be seen from the
selection of the word Socialism), and it treated the Bourgeoisie as a
form of the “State,” of the class state. There were thus two widely
differing concepts of “Society.” Yet here was an underlying idea common
to both Bourgeoisie and Socialist, since they conceived the State as
a collection of privileges arising and maintained _in violation_ of
natural law, while Society was thought of as the prescribed form of
human union in _conformity_ with natural law. They differed in one
essential only, namely, that while the Third Estate declared its
capitalistic Society to be the result of the processes of natural law,
the Socialists regarded their aims as not yet attained, and proclaimed
that the ideal society of the future which would really be the product
of the processes of natural law, could only be realized by the
elimination of all “surplus value.” Though both were in conflict with
regard to fundamentals, both agreed in viewing the “State” as _civitas
diaboli_ and “Society” as _civitas dei_.

Stein, however, reversed the objectives of the two concepts. As an
Hegelian, and pre-eminently a worshipper of the State, he conceived the
State as _civitas coelestis_. Society, which he understood to mean only
the dominant bourgeoisie Society, he viewed through the eyes of his
Socialist friends and teachers, and conceived it as _civitas terrena_.

What in Plato’s sense is the “pure idea,” the “ordre naturel” of the
early physiocrats and termed by Frenchmen and Englishmen “Society,”
was to Stein, the “State.” What had been contaminated and made impure
by the admixture of coarse matter, they termed the “State,” while
the German called it “Society.” In reality, however, there is little
difference between the two. Stein realized with pain, that Hegel’s pure
concept of a State based on right and freedom, was bound to remain
an “idea” only. Eternally fettered, as he assumed it must be, by the
forces of property and the culture proceeding from them, it could never
be a fact. This is his conclusion regarding “Society,” so that its
effective development is obstructed by the beneficent association of
human beings, as Stein conceived that association.

Thus was attained the very pinnacle of confused thinking. All German
sociologists, with the single exception of Carl Dietzel, soon realized
that the Hegelian concept of the State was impotent, existing only in
the “Idea.” In no point did it touch the reality of historical growth,
and in no sense could it be made to stand for what had always been
considered as the State. Long ago both Marx and Bakunin--respectively
the founders of scientific collectivism and practical anarchism--and
especially Ludwig Gumplowicz, abandoned the Hegelian terminology and
accepted that of Western Europe and this has been generally accepted
everywhere.

In this little book I have followed the Western European terminology.
By the “State,” I do not mean the human aggregation which may perchance
_come about to be_, or, as it properly _should be_. I mean by it
that summation of privileges and dominating positions which are
brought into being by extra-economic power. And in contrast to this,
I mean by Society, the totality of concepts of all purely natural
relations and institutions between man and man, which will not be
fully realized until the last remnant of the creations of the barbaric
“ages of conquest and migration,” has been eliminated from community
life. Others may call any form of leadership and government or some
other ideal, the “State.” That is a matter of personal choice. It is
useless to quarrel about definitions. But it might be well if those
other thinkers were to understand that they have not controverted the
sociologic idea of the “State,” if a concept of the “State” grounded on
a different basis, does not correspond to that which they have evolved.
And they must guard themselves particularly against the danger of
applying any definition other than that used in this book to those
actual historical products which have hitherto been called “States,”
the essence, development, course and future of which must be explained
by any true teaching or philosophy of the State.

            FRANZ OPPENHEIMER.

  Frankfort-on-Main, April 1922.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE

       AUTHOR’S PREFACE                                              iii

    I  THEORIES OF THE STATE                                           1

        The Sociological Idea of the State                            15


   II  THE GENESIS OF THE STATE                                       22

        (a) Political and Economic Means                              24

        (b) Peoples Without a State: Huntsmen and Grubbers            27

        (c) Peoples Preceding the State: Herdsmen and Vikings         33

        (d) The Genesis of the State                                  51


  III  THE PRIMITIVE FEUDAL STATE                                     82

        (a) The Form of Dominion                                      82

        (b) The Integration                                           89

        (c) The Differentiation: Group Theories and Group
                Psychology                                            92

        (d) The Primitive Feudal State of Higher Grade               105


   IV  THE MARITIME STATE                                            121

        (a) Traffic in Prehistoric Times                             122

        (b) Trade and the Primitive State                            135

        (c) The Genesis of the Maritime State                        140

        (d) Essence and Issue of the Maritime States                 155


    V  THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEUDAL STATE                           174

        (a) The Genesis of Landed Property                           174

        (b) The Central Power in the Primitive Feudal State          182

        (c) The Political and Social Disintegration of the
                Primitive Feudal State                               191

        (d) The Ethnic Amalgamation                                  213

        (e) The Developed Feudal State                               221


   VI  THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL STATE                   229

        (a) The Emancipation of the Peasantry                        231

        (b) The Genesis of the Industrial State                      236

        (c) The Influences of Money Economy                          243

        (d) The Modern Constitutional State                          257


   VII  THE TENDENCY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE                 274


        NOTES                                                        293




THE STATE




CHAPTER I

THEORIES OF THE STATE


This treatise regards the State from the sociological standpoint only,
not from the juristic--sociology, as I understand the word, being both
a philosophy of history and a theory of economics. Our object is to
trace the development of the State from its socio-psychological genesis
up to its modern constitutional form; after that, we shall endeavor to
present a well-founded prognosis concerning its future development.
Since we shall trace only the State’s inner, essential being, we need
not concern ourselves with the external forms of law under which its
international and intra-national life is assumed. This treatise, in
short, is a contribution to the philosophy of State development; but
only in so far as the law of development here traced from its generic
form affects also the social problems common to all forms of the modern
State.

With this limitation of treatment in mind, we may at the outset dismiss
all received doctrines of public law. Even a cursory examination of
conventional theories of the State is sufficient to show that they
furnish no explanation of its genesis, essence and purpose. These
theories represent all possible shadings between all imaginable
extremes. Rousseau derives the State from a social contract, while
Carey ascribes its origin to a band of robbers. Plato and the followers
of Karl Marx endow the State with omnipotence, making it the absolute
lord over the citizen in all political and economic matters; while
Plato even goes so far as to wish the State to regulate sexual
relations. The Manchester school, on the other hand, going to the
opposite extreme of liberalism, would have the State exercise only
needful police functions, and would thus logically have as a result
a scientific anarchism which must utterly exterminate the State.
From these various and conflicting views, it is impossible either to
establish a fixed principle, or to formulate a satisfactory concept of
the real essence of the State.

This irreconcilable conflict of theories is easily explained by the
fact that none of the conventional theories treats the State from the
sociological view-point. Nevertheless, the State is a phenomenon common
to all history, and its essential nature can only be made plain by a
broad and comprehensive study of universal history. Except in the field
of sociology, the king’s highway of science, no treatment of the State
has heretofore taken this path. All previous theories of the State
have been class theories. To anticipate somewhat the outcome of our
researches, every State has been and is a class State, and every theory
of the State has been and is a class theory.

A class theory is, however, of necessity, not the result of
investigation and reason, but a by-product of desires and will. Its
arguments are used, not to establish truth, but as weapons in the
contest for material interests. The result, therefore, is not science,
but nescience. By understanding the State, we may indeed recognize the
essence of theories concerning the State. But the converse is not true.
An understanding of theories about the State will give us no clue to
its essence.

The following may be stated as a ruling concept, especially prevalent
in university teaching, of the origin and essence of the State. It
represents a view which, in spite of manifold attacks, is still
affirmed.

It is maintained that the State is an organization of human community
life, which originates by reason of a social instinct implanted in men
by nature (Stoic Doctrine); or else is brought about by an irresistible
impulse to end the “war of all against all,” and to coerce the savage,
who opposes organized effort, to a peaceable community life in place
of the anti-social struggle in which all budding shoots of advancement
are destroyed (Epicurean Doctrine). These two apparently irreconcilable
concepts were fused by the intermediation of mediæval philosophy.
This, founded on theologic reasoning and belief in the Bible, developed
the opinion that man, originally and by nature a social creature, is,
through original sin, the fratricide of Cain and the transgression at
the tower of Babel, divided into innumerable tribes, which fight to the
hilt, until they unite peaceably as a State.

This view is utterly untenable. It confuses the logical concept of a
class with some subordinate species thereof. Granted that the State is
_one_ form of organized political cohesion, it is also to be remembered
that it is a form having _specific_ characteristics. Every state in
history was or is a _state of classes_, a polity of superior and
inferior social groups, based upon distinctions either of rank or of
property. This phenomenon must, then, be called the “State.” With it
alone history occupies itself.

We should, therefore, be justified in designating every other
form of political organization by the same term, without further
differentiation, had there never existed any other than a class-state,
or were it the only conceivable form. At least, proof might properly
be called for, to show that each conceivable political organization,
even though originally it did not represent a polity of superior and
inferior social and economic classes, since it is of necessity subject
to inherent laws of development, must in the end be resolved into the
specific class form of history. Were such proof forthcoming, it would
offer in fact only one form of political amalgamation, calling in
turn for differentiation at various stages of development, viz., the
preparatory stage, when class distinction does not exist, and the stage
of maturity, when it is fully developed.

Former students of the philosophy of the State were dimly aware of this
problem. And they tried to adduce the required proof, that because of
inherent tendencies of development, every human political organization
must gradually become a class-state. Philosophers of the canon law
handed this theory down to philosophers of the law of nature. From
these, through the mediation of Rousseau, it became a part of the
teachings of the economists; and even to this day it rules their views
and diverts them from the facts.

This assumed proof is based upon the concept of a “primitive
accumulation,” or an original store of wealth, in lands and in movable
property, brought about by means of purely economic forces; a doctrine
justly derided by Karl Marx as a “fairy tale.” Its scheme of reasoning
approximates this:

Somewhere, in some far-stretching, fertile country, a number of free
men, of equal status, form a union for mutual protection. Gradually
they differentiate into property classes. Those best endowed with
strength, wisdom, capacity for saving, industry and caution, slowly
acquire a basic amount of real or movable property; while the stupid
and less efficient, and those given to carelessness and waste, remain
without possessions. The well-to-do lend their productive property to
the less well-off in return for tribute, either ground rent or profit,
and become thereby continually richer, while the others always remain
poor. These differences in possession gradually develop social class
distinctions; since everywhere the rich have preference, while they
alone have the time and the means to devote to public affairs and
to turn the laws administered by them to their own advantage. Thus,
in time, there develops a ruling and property-owning estate, and a
proletariate, a class without property. The primitive state of free and
equal fellows becomes a class-state, by an inherent law of development,
because in every conceivable mass of men there are, as may readily be
seen, strong and weak, clever and foolish, cautious and wasteful ones.

This seems quite plausible, and it coincides with the experience of our
daily life. It is not at all unusual to see an especially gifted member
of the lower class rise from his former surroundings, and even attain
a leading position in the upper class; or conversely, to see some
spendthrift or weaker member of the higher group “lose his class” and
drop into the proletariate.

And yet this entire theory is utterly mistaken; it is a “fairy tale,”
or it is a class theory used to justify the privileges of the upper
classes. The class-state never originated in this fashion, and never
could have so originated. History shows that it did not; and economics
shows deductively, with a testimony absolute, mathematical and binding,
that it could not. A simple problem in elementary arithmetic shows that
the assumption of an original accumulation is totally erroneous, and
has nothing to do with the development of the class-state.

The proof is as follows: All teachers of natural law, etc., have
unanimously declared that the differentiation into income-receiving
classes and propertyless classes can only take place when all fertile
lands have been occupied. For so long as man has ample opportunity
to take up unoccupied land, “no one,” says Turgot, “would think of
entering the service of another;” we may add, “at least for wages,
which are not apt to be higher than the earnings of an independent
peasant working an unmortgaged and sufficiently large property;” while
mortgaging is not possible as long as land is yet free for the working
or taking, as free as air and water. Matter that is obtainable for the
taking has no value that enables it to be pledged, since no one loans
on things that can be had for nothing.

The philosophers of natural law, then, assumed that complete occupancy
of the ground must have occurred quite early, because of the natural
increase of an originally small population. They were under the
impression that at their time, in the eighteenth century, it had taken
place many centuries previous, and they naïvely deduced the existing
class aggroupment from the assumed conditions of that long-past point
of time. It never entered their heads to work out their problem; and
with few exceptions their error has been copied by sociologists,
historians and economists. It is only quite recently that my figures
were worked out, and they are truly astounding.[A]

[A] Franz Oppenheimer, _Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Œkonomie_.
Berlin, 1912.--_Translator._

We can determine with approximate accuracy the amount of land of
average fertility in the temperate zone, and also what amount is
sufficient to enable a family of peasants to exist comfortably, or
how much such a family can work with its own forces, without engaging
outside help or permanent farm servants. At the time of the migration
of the barbarians (350 to 750 A. D.), the lot of each able-bodied man
was about thirty morgen (equal to twenty acres) on average lands, on
very good ground only ten to fifteen morgen (equal to seven or ten
acres), four morgen being equal to one hectare. Of this land, at least
a third, and sometimes a half, was left uncultivated each year. The
remainder of the fifteen to twenty morgen sufficed to feed and fatten
into giants the immense families of these child-producing Germans, and
this in spite of the primitive technique, whereby at least half the
productive capacity of a day was lost. Let us assume that, in these
modern times, thirty morgen (equal to twenty acres) for the average
peasant suffices to support a family. We have then assumed a block
of land sufficiently large to meet any objection. Modern Germany,
populated as it is, contains an agricultural area of thirty-four
million hectares (equal to eighty-four million, fifteen thousand, four
hundred and eighty acres). The agricultural population, including
farm laborers and their families, amounts to seventeen million; so
that, assuming five persons to a family and an equal division of the
farm lands, each family would have ten hectares (equal to twenty-five
acres). In other words, not even in the Germany of our own day would
the point have been reached where, according to the theories of the
adherents of natural law, differentiation into classes would begin.

Apply the same process to countries less densely settled, such, for
example, as the Danube States, Turkey, Hungary and Russia, and still
more astounding results will appear. As a matter of fact, there are
still on the earth’s surface, seventy-three billion, two hundred
million hectares (equal to one hundred eighty billion, eight hundred
eighty million and four hundred sixteen thousand acres); dividing
into the first amount the number of human beings of all professions
whatever, viz., one billion, eight hundred million, every family of
five persons could possess about thirty morgen (equal to eighteen
and a half acres), _and still leave about two-thirds of the planet
unoccupied_.

If, therefore, purely economic causes are ever to bring about a
differentiation into classes by the growth of a propertyless laboring
class, the time has not yet arrived; and the critical point at which
ownership of land will cause a natural scarcity is thrust into the dim
future--if indeed it ever can arrive.

As a matter of fact, however, for centuries past, in all parts of the
world, we have had a class-state, with possessing classes on top and
a propertyless laboring class at the bottom, even when population was
much less dense than it is to-day. Now it is true that the class-state
can arise only where all fertile acreage has been _occupied_
completely; and since I have shown that even at the present time, all
the ground is not occupied economically, this must mean that it has
been preëmpted politically. Since land could not have acquired “natural
scarcity,” the scarcity must have been “legal.” This means that the
land has been preëmpted by a ruling class against its subject class,
and settlement prevented. Therefore the State, as a class-state, can
have originated in no other way than through conquest and subjugation.

This view, the so-called “sociologic idea of the state,” as the
following will show, is supported in ample manner by well-known
historical facts. And yet most modern historians have rejected it,
holding that both groups, amalgamated by war into one State, before
that time had, each for itself formed a “State.” As there is no method
of obtaining historical proof to the contrary, since the beginnings
of human history are unknown, we should arrive at a verdict of “not
proven,” were it not that, deductively, there is the absolute certainty
that the State, as history shows it, the class-state, could not have
come about except through warlike subjugation. The mass of evidence
shows that our simple calculation excludes any other result.


THE SOCIOLOGICAL IDEA OF THE STATE

To the originally, purely sociological, idea of the State, I have added
the economic phase and formulated it as follows:

What, then, is the State as a sociological concept? The State,
completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the
first stages of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a
victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of
regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished,
and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad.
Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic
exploitation of the vanquished by the victors.

No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner.[1]
Wherever a reliable tradition reports otherwise, either it concerns
the amalgamation of two fully developed primitive states into one body
of more complete organization; or else it is an adaptation to men of
the fable of the sheep which made a bear their king in order to be
protected against the wolf. But even in this latter case, the form and
content of the State became precisely the same as in those states where
nothing intervened, and which became immediately “wolf states.”

The little history learned in our school-days suffices to prove this
generic doctrine. Everywhere we find some warlike tribe of wild men
breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling
down as nobility and founding its State. In Mesopotamia, wave follows
wave, state follows state--Babylonians, Amoritans, Assyrians, Arabs,
Medes, Persians, Macedonians, Parthians, Mongols, Seldshuks, Tartars,
Turks; on the Nile, Hyksos, Nubians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs,
Turks; in Greece, the Doric States are typical examples; in Italy,
Romans, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks, Germans; in Spain, Carthaginians,
Visigoths, Arabs; in Gaul, Romans, Franks, Burgundians, Normans; in
Britain, Saxons, Normans. In India wave upon wave of wild warlike
clans has flooded over the country even to the islands of the Indian
Ocean. So also is it with China. In the European colonies, we find
the selfsame type, wherever a settled element of the population has
been found, as for example, in South America and Mexico. Where that
element is lacking, where only roving huntsmen are found, who may be
exterminated but not subjugated, the conquerors resort to the device
of importing from afar masses of men to be exploited, to be subject
perpetually to forced labor, and thus the slave trade arises.

An apparent exception is found only in those European colonies in
which it is forbidden to replace the lack of a domiciled indigenous
population by the importation of slaves. One of these colonies, the
United States of America, is among the most powerful state-formations
in all history. The exception there found is to be explained by this,
that the mass of men to be exploited and worked without cessation
_imports itself_, by emigration in great hordes from primitive states
or from those in higher stages of development in which exploitation has
become unbearable, while liberty of movement has been attained. In this
case, one may speak of an infection from afar with “statehood” brought
in by the infected of foreign lands. Where, however, in such colonies,
immigration is very limited, either because of excessive distances
and the consequent high charges for moving from home, or because of
regulations limiting the immigration, we perceive an approximation
to the final end of the development of the State, which we nowadays
recognize as the necessary outcome and finale, but for which we have
not yet found a scientific terminology. Here again, in the dialectic
development, a change in the quantity is bound up with a change of
the quality. The old form is filled with new contents. We still find
a “State” in so far as it represents the tense regulation, secured by
external force, whereby is secured the social living together of large
bodies of men; but it is no longer the “State” in its older sense.
It is no longer the instrument of political domination and economic
exploitation of one social group by another; it is no longer a “State
of Classes.” It rather resembles a condition which appears to have
come about through a “social contract.” This stage is approached by
the Australian Colonies, excepting Queensland, which after the feudal
manner still exploits the half enslaved Kanakas. It is almost attained
in New Zealand.

So long as there is no general assent as to the origin and essence of
states historically known or as to the sociological meaning of the word
“State,” it would be futile to attempt to force into use a new name
for these most advanced commonwealths. They will continue to be called
“states” in spite of all protests, especially because of the pleasure
of using confusing concepts. For the purpose of this study, however, we
propose to employ a new concept, a different verbal lever, and shall
speak of the result of the new process as a “Freemen’s Citizenship.”

This summary survey of the states of the past and present should, if
space permitted, be supplemented by an examination of the facts offered
by the study of races, and of those states which are not treated in our
falsely called “Universal History.” On this point, the assurance may be
accepted that here again our general rule is valid without exception.
Everywhere, whether in the Malay Archipelago, or in the “great
sociological laboratory of Africa,” at all places on this planet where
the development of tribes has at all attained a higher form, the State
grew from the subjugation of one group of men by another. Its basic
justification, its raison d’être, was and is the economic exploitation
of those subjugated.

The summary review thus far made may serve as proof of the basic
premise of this sketch. The pathfinder, to whom, before all others,
we are indebted for this line of investigation is Professor Ludwig
Gumplowicz of Graz, jurist and sociologist, who crowned a brave life
by a brave self-chosen death. We can, then, in sharp outlines, follow
in the sufferings of humanity the path which the State has pursued in
its progress through the ages. This we propose now to trace from the
primitive state founded on conquest to the “freemen’s citizenship.”




CHAPTER II

THE GENESIS OF THE STATE


One single force impels all life; one force developed it, from the
single cell, the particle of albumen floating about in the warm ocean
of prehistoric time, up to the vertebrates, and then to man. This one
force, according to Lippert, is the tendency to provide for life,
bifurcated into “hunger and love.” With man, however, philosophy also
enters into the play of these forces, in order hereafter, together with
“hunger and love, to hold together the structure of the world of men.”
To be sure, this philosophy, this “idea” of Schopenhauer’s, is at its
source nothing else than a creature of the provision for life called
by him “will.” It is an organ of orientation in the world, an arm in
the struggle for existence. Yet in spite of this, we shall come to
know the desire for causation as a self-acting force, and of social
facts as coöperators in the sociological process of development. In the
beginning of human society, and as it gradually develops, this tendency
pushes itself forward in various bizarre ideas called “superstition.”
These are based on purely logical conclusions from incomplete
observations concerning air and water, earth and fire, animals and
plants, which seem endowed with a throng of spirits both kindly and
malevolent. One may say that in the most recent modern times, at a
stage attained only by very few races, there arises also the younger
daughter of the desire for causation, namely science, as a logical
result of complete observation of facts; science, now required to
exterminate widely branched-out superstition, which, with innumerable
threads, has rooted itself in the very soul of mankind.

But, however powerfully, especially in the moment of “ecstasy,”[2]
superstition may have influenced history, however powerfully, even in
ordinary times, it may have coöperated in the development of human
communal life, the principal force of development is still to be found
in the necessities of life, which force man to acquire for himself
and for his family nourishment, clothing and housing. This remains,
therefore, the “economic” impulse. A sociological--and that means a
socio-psychological--investigation of the development of history can,
therefore, not progress otherwise than by following out the methods by
which economic needs have been satisfied in their gradual unfolding,
and by taking heed of the influences of the causation impulse at its
proper place.


(a) POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC MEANS

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring
sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying
his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the
forcible appropriation of the labor of others. Robbery! Forcible
appropriation! These words convey to us ideas of crime and the
penitentiary, since we are the contemporaries of a developed
civilization, specifically based on the inviolability of property. And
this tang is not lost when we are convinced that land and sea robbery
is the primitive relation of life, just as the warriors’ trade--which
also for a long time is only organized mass robbery--constitutes the
most respected of occupations. Both because of this, and also on
account of the need of having, in the further development of this
study, terse, clear, sharply opposing terms for these very important
contrasts, I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own
labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of
others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the
unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the
“political means.”

The idea is not altogether new; philosophers of history have at all
times found this contradiction and have tried to formulate it. But no
one of these formulæ has carried the premise to its complete logical
end. At no place is it clearly shown that the contradiction consists
only in the _means_ by which the _identical purpose_, the acquisition
of economic objects of consumption, is to be obtained. Yet this is the
critical point of the reasoning. In the case of a thinker of the rank
of Karl Marx, one may observe what confusion is brought about when
economic purpose and economic means are not strictly differentiated.
All those errors, which in the end led Marx’s splendid theory so far
away from truth, were grounded in the lack of clear differentiation
between the means of economic satisfaction of needs and its end. This
led him to designate slavery as an “economic category,” and force as
an “economic force”--half truths which are far more dangerous than
total untruths, since their discovery is more difficult, and false
conclusions from them are inevitable.

On the other hand, our own sharp differentiation between the two
means toward the same end, will help us to avoid any such confusion.
This will be our key to an understanding of the development, the
essence, and the purpose of the State; and since all universal history
heretofore has been only the history of states, to an understanding
of universal history as well. All world history, from primitive times
up to our own civilization, presents a single phase, a contest namely
between the economic and the political means; and it can present only
this phase until we have achieved free citizenship.


(b) PEOPLES WITHOUT A STATE: HUNTSMEN AND GRUBBERS

The state is an organization of the political means. No state,
therefore, can come into being until the economic means has created a
definite number of objects for the satisfaction of needs, which objects
may be taken away or appropriated by warlike robbery. For that reason,
primitive huntsmen are without a state; and even the more highly
developed huntsmen become parts of a state structure only when they
find in their neighborhood an evolved economic organization which they
can subjugate. But primitive huntsmen live in practical anarchy.

Grosse says concerning primitive huntsmen in general:

“There are no essential differences of fortune among them, and thus a
principal source for the origin of differences in station is lacking.
Generally, all grown men within the tribe enjoy equal rights. The older
men, thanks to their greater experience, have a certain authority;
but no one feels himself bound to render them obedience. Where in
some cases chiefs are recognized--as with the Botokude, the Central
Californians, the Wedda and the Mincopie--their power is extremely
limited. The chieftain has no means of enforcing his wishes against
the will of the rest. Most tribes of hunters, however, have no
chieftain. The entire society of the males still forms a homogeneous
undifferentiated mass, in which only those individuals achieve
prominence who are believed to possess magical powers.”[3]

Here, then, there scarcely exists a spark of “statehood,” even in the
sense of ordinary theories of the state, still less in the sense of
the correct “sociologic idea of the state.”

The social structure of primitive peasants has hardly more resemblance
to a state than has the horde of huntsmen. Where the peasant, working
the ground with a grub, is living in liberty, there is as yet no
“state.” The plow is always the mark of a higher economic condition
which occurs only in a state; that is to say, in a system of plantation
work carried on by subjugated servants.[4] The grubbers live isolated
from one another, scattered over the country in separated curtilages,
perhaps in villages, split up because of quarrels about district or
farm boundaries. In the best cases, they live in feebly organized
associations, bound together by oath, attached only loosely by the
tie which the consciousness of the same descent and speech and the
same belief imposes upon them. They unite perhaps once a year in the
common celebration of renowned ancestors or of the tribal god. There is
no ruling authority over the whole mass; the various chieftains of a
village, or possibly of a district, may have more or less influence in
their circumscribed spheres, this depending usually upon their personal
qualities, and especially upon the magical powers attributed to them.
Cunow describes the Peruvian peasants before the incursion of the Incas
as follows: “An unregulated living side by side of many independent,
mutually warring tribes, who again were split up into more or less
autonomous territorial unions, held together by ties of kinship.”[5]
One may say that all the primitive peasants of the old and new world
were of this type.

In such a state of society, it is hardly conceivable that a warlike
organization could come about for purposes of attack. It is
sufficiently difficult to mobilize the clan, or still more the tribe,
for common defense. The peasant is always lacking in mobility. He is
as attached to the ground as the plants he cultivates. As a matter of
fact, the working of his field makes him “bound to the soil” (_glebæ
adscriptus_), even though, in the absence of law, he has freedom of
movement. What purpose, moreover, would a looting expedition effect in
a country, which throughout its extent is occupied only by grubbing
peasants? The peasant can carry off from the peasant nothing which he
does not already own. In a condition of society marked by superfluity
of agricultural land, each individual contributes only a little work
to its extensive cultivation. Each occupies as much territory as he
needs. More would be superfluous. Its acquisition would be lost labor,
even were its owner able to conserve for any length of time the grain
products thus secured. Under primitive conditions, however, this spoils
rapidly by reason of change of atmosphere, ants, or other agencies.
According to Ratzel, the Central African peasant must convert the
superfluous portion of his crops into beer as quickly as possible in
order not to lose it entirely!

For all these reasons, primitive peasants are totally lacking in that
warlike desire to take the offensive which is the distinguishing mark
of hunters and herdsmen: war can not better their condition. And this
peaceable attitude is strengthened by the fact that the occupation of
the peasant does not make him an efficient warrior. It is true his
muscles are strong and he has powers of endurance, but he is sluggish
of movement and slow to come to a determination, while huntsmen and
nomads by their methods of living develop speed of motion and swiftness
of action. For this reason, the primitive peasant is usually of a more
gentle disposition than they.[B]

[B] This psychological contradiction, though often expressly stated, is
not the absolute rule, Grosse, _Forms of the Family_, says (page 137):
“Some historians of civilization place the peasant in opposition to the
warlike nomads, claiming that the peasants are peace-loving peoples. In
fact one can not state that their economic life leads them to wars, or
educates them for it, as can be said of stock raisers. Nevertheless,
one finds within the scope of this form of cultivation a mass of the
most warlike and cruel peoples to be found anywhere. The wild cannibals
of the Bismarck archipelago, the blood-lusting Vitians, the butchers of
men of Dahome and Ashanti--they all cultivate the ‘peaceable’ acres;
and if other peasants are not quite as bad, it seems that the kindly
disposition of the vast mass appears to be, at least, questionable.”

To sum up: within the economic and social conditions of the peasant
districts, one finds no differentiation working for the higher forms
of integration. There exists neither the impulse nor the possibility
for the warlike subjection of neighbors. No “State” can therefore
arise; and, as a matter of fact, none ever has arisen from such social
conditions. Had there been no impulse from without, from groups of men
nourished in a different manner, the primitive grubber would never have
discovered the State.


(c) PEOPLES PRECEDING THE STATE: HERDSMEN AND VIKINGS

Herdsmen, on the contrary, even though isolated, have developed a whole
series of the elements of statehood; and in the tribes which have
progressed further, they have developed this in its totality, with the
single exception of the last point of identification which completes
the state in its modern sense, that is to say, with exception only of
the definitive occupation of a circumscribed territory.

One of these elements is an economic one. Even without the intervention
of extra-economic force, there may still develop among herdsmen a
sufficiently marked differentiation of property and income. Assuming
that, at the start, there was complete equality in the number of
cattle, yet within a short time, the one man may be richer and the
other poorer. An especially clever breeder will see his herd increase
rapidly, while an especially careful watchman and bold hunter will
preserve his from decimation by beasts of prey. The element of luck
also affects the result. One of these herders finds an especially good
grazing ground and healthful watering places; the other one loses his
entire stock through pestilence, or through a snowfall or a sandstorm.

Distinctions in fortune quickly bring about class distinctions. The
herdsman who has lost all must hire himself to the rich man; and
sinking thus under the other, become dependent on him. Wherever
herdsmen live, from all three parts of the ancient world, we find the
same story. Meitzen reports of the Lapps, nomadic in Norway: “Three
hundred reindeer sufficed for one family; who owned only a hundred
must enter the service of the richer, whose herds ran up to a thousand
head.”[6] The same writer, speaking of the Central Asiatic Nomads,
says: “A family required three hundred head of cattle for comfort; one
hundred head is poverty, followed by a life of debt. The servant must
cultivate the lands of the lord.”[7] Ratzel reports concerning the
Hottentots of Africa a form of “commendatio”: “The poor man endeavors
to hire himself to the rich man, his only object being to obtain
cattle.”[8] Laveleye, who reports the same circumstances from Ireland,
traces the origin and the name of the feudal system (_système féodal_)
to the loaning of cattle by the rich to the poor members of the tribe;
accordingly, a “fee-od” (owning of cattle) was the first feud whereby
so long as the debt existed the magnate bound the small owner to
himself as “his man.”

We can only hint at the methods whereby, even in peaceable associations
of herdsmen, this economic and consequent social differentiation may
have been furthered by the connection of the patriarchate with the
offices of supreme and sacrificial priesthood if the wise old men
used cleverly the superstition of their clan associates. But this
differentiation, so long as it is unaffected by the political means,
operates within very modest bounds. Cleverness and efficiency are not
hereditary with any degree of certainty. The largest herd will be split
up if many heirs grow up in one tent, and fortune is tricky. In our
own day, the richest man among the Lapps of Sweden, in the shortest
possible time, has been reduced to such complete poverty that the
government has had to support him. All these causes bring it about
that the original condition of economic and social equality is always
approximately restored. “The more peaceable, aboriginal, and genuine
the nomad is, the smaller are the tangible differences of possession.
It is touching to note the pleasure with which an old prince of the
Tsaidam Mongols accepts his tribute or gift, consisting of a handful of
tobacco, a piece of sugar, and twenty-five kopeks.”[9]

This equality is destroyed permanently and in greater degree by the
political means. “Where war is carried on and booty acquired, greater
differences arise, which find their expression in the ownership of
slaves, women, arms and spirited mounts.”[10]

The ownership of _slaves_! The nomad is the inventor of slavery, and
thereby has created the seedling of the state, the first economic
exploitation of man by man.

The huntsman carries on wars and takes captives. But he does not make
them slaves; either he kills them, or else he adopts them into the
tribe. Slaves would be of no use to him. The booty of the chase can
be stowed away even less than grain can be “capitalized.” The idea
of using a human being as a labor motor could only come about on
an economic plane on which a body of wealth has developed, call it
capital, which can be increased only with the assistance of dependent
labor forces.

This stage is first reached by the herdsmen. The forces of one family,
lacking outside assistance, suffice to hold together a herd of very
limited size, and to protect it from attacks of beasts of prey or human
enemies. Until the political means is brought into play, auxiliary
forces are found very sparingly; such as the poorer members of the
clan already mentioned, together with runaways from foreign tribes,
who are found all over the world as protected dependents in the suite
of the greater owners of herds.[11] In some cases, an entire poor
clan of herdsmen enters, half freely, into the service of some rich
tribe. “Entire peoples take positions corresponding to their relative
wealth. Thus the Tungusen, who are very poor, try to live near the
settlements of the Tschuktsches, because they find occupation as
herdsmen of the reindeer belonging to the wealthy Tschuktsches; they
are paid in reindeer. And the subjection of the Ural-Samojedes by the
Sirjaenes came about through the gradual occupation of their pasturing
grounds.”[12]

Excepting, however, the last named case, which is already very
state-like, the few existing labor forces, without capital, are not
sufficient to permit the clan to keep very large herds. Furthermore,
methods of herding themselves compel division. For a pasture may
not, as they say in the Swiss Alps, be “overpushed,” that is to say,
have too many cattle on it. The danger of losing the entire stock
is reduced by the measure in which it is distributed over various
pastures. For cattle plagues, storms, etc., can affect only a part;
while even the enemy from abroad can not drive off all at once. For
that reason, the Hereros, for example, “find every well-to-do owner
forced to keep, besides the main herd, several other subsidiary herds.
Younger brothers or other near relatives, or in want of these, tried
old servants, watch them.”[13]

For that reason, the developed nomad spares his captured enemy; he can
use him as a slave on his pasture. We may note this transition from
killing to enslaving in a customary rite of the Scythians: they offered
up at their places of sacrifice one out of every hundred captured
enemies. Lippert, who reports this, sees in it “the beginning of a
limitation, and the reason thereof is evidently to be found in the
value which a captured enemy has acquired by becoming the servant of a
tribal herdsman.”[14]

With the introduction of slaves into the tribal economy of the
herdsmen, the state, in its essential elements, is completed, except
that it has not as yet acquired a definitely circumscribed territorial
limit. The state has thus the _form_ of dominion, and its economic
basis is the exploitation of human labor. Henceforth, economic
differentiation and the formation of social classes progress rapidly.
The herds of the great, wisely divided and better guarded by numerous
armed servants than those of the simple freemen, as a rule, maintain
themselves at their original number: they also increase faster than
those of the freemen, since they are augmented by the greater share
in the booty which the rich receive, corresponding to the number of
warriors (slaves) which these place in the field.

Likewise, the office of supreme priest creates an ever-widening
cleft which divides the numbers of the clan, all formerly equals;
until finally a genuine nobility, the rich descendants of the rich
patriarchs, is placed in juxtaposition to the ordinary freemen. “The
redskins have also in their progressive organization developed
no nobility and no slavery,[C] and in this their organization
distinguishes itself most essentially from those of the old world.
Both arise from the development of the patriarchate of stock-raising
people.”[15]

[C] This statement of Lippert is not quite correct. The higher
developed domiciled huntsmen and fishermen of Northwest America have
both nobles and slaves.

Thus we find, with all developed tribes of herdsmen, a social
separation into three distinct classes: nobility (“head of the house
of his fathers” in the biblical phrase), common freemen and slaves.
According to Mommsen, “all Indo-Germanic people have slavery as a
jural institution.”[16] This applies to the Arians and the Semites
of Asia and Africa as well as to the Hamites. Among all the Fulbe of
the Sahara, “society is divided into princes, chieftains, commons and
slaves.”[17] And we find the same facts everywhere, as a matter of
course, wherever slavery is legally established, as among the Hova[18]
and their Polynesian kinsmen, the “Sea Nomads.” Human psychology under
similar circumstances brings about like conditions, independent of
color or race.

Thus the herdsman gradually becomes accustomed to earning his
livelihood through warfare, and to the exploitation of men as servile
labor motors. And one must admit that his entire mode of life impels
him to make more and more use of the “political means.”

He is physically stronger and just as adroit and determined as the
primitive huntsman, whose food supply is too irregular to permit him
to attain his greatest natural physical development. The herdsman can,
in all cases, grow to his full stature, since he has uninterrupted
nourishment in the milk of his herds and an unfailing supply of meat.
This is shown in the Arian horse nomad, no less than in the herdsman of
Asia and Africa, e. g., the Zulu. Secondly, tribes of herdsmen increase
faster than hordes of hunters. This is so, not only because the adults
can obtain much more nourishment from a given territory, but still
more because possession of the milk of animals shortens the period of
nursing for the mothers, and consequently permits a greater number
of children to be born and to grow to maturity. As a consequence, the
pastures and steppes of the old world became inexhaustible fountains,
which periodically burst their confines letting loose inundations of
humanity, so that they came to be called the “_vaginæ gentium_.”

Moreover we find a much larger number of armed warriors among
herdsmen than among hunters. Each one of these herdsmen is stronger
individually, and yet all of them together are at least as mobile
as is a horde of huntsmen; while the camel and horse riders among
them are incomparably more mobile. This greater mass of the best
individual elements is held together by an organization only possible
under the ægis of a slave-holding patriarchate accustomed to rule, an
organization prepared and developed by its occupation, and therefore
superior to that of the young warriors of the huntsmen sworn to the
service of one chief.

Hunters, it may be observed, work best alone or in small groups.
Herdsmen, on the other hand, move to the best advantage in a great
train, in which each individual is best protected; and which is in
every sense an armed expedition, where every stopping place becomes an
armed camp. Thus there is developed a science of tactical maneuvers,
strict subordination, and firm discipline. “One does not make a
mistake,” as Ratzel says, “if one accounts as the disciplinary forces
in the life of the nomads the order of the tents which, in the same
form, exists since most ancient times. Every one and everything here
has a definite, traditional place; hence the speed and order in setting
up and in breaking camp, in establishment and in rearrangement. It is
unheard of that any one without orders, or without the most pressing
reason, should change his place. Thanks to this strict discipline, the
tents can be packed up and loaded away within the space of an hour.”[19]

The same tried order, handed down from untold ages, regulates
the warlike march of the tribe of herdsmen while on the hunt, in
war and in peaceable wandering. Thus they become professional
fighters, irresistible until the state develops higher and mightier
organizations. Herdsman and warrior become identical concepts. Ratzel’s
statement concerning the Central Asiatic Nomads applies to them all:
“The nomad is, as herdsman, an economic, as warrior, a political
concept. It is easy for him to turn from any activity to that of the
warrior and robber. Everything in life has for him a pacific and
war-like, an honest and robber-like, side; according to circumstances,
the one or the other of these phases appears uppermost. Even fishing
and navigation, at the hands of the East Caspian Turkomans, developed
into piracy.... The activities of the apparently pacific existence as
a herdsman determine those of the warrior; the pastoral crook becomes
a fighting implement. In the fall, when the horses return strengthened
from the pasture and the second cropping of the sheep is completed,
the nomads’ minds turn to some feud or robbing expedition (_Baranta_,
literally, to make cattle, to lift cattle), adjourned to that time.
This is an expression of the right of self help, which in contentions
over points of law, or in quarrels affecting dignity, or in blood
feuds, seeks both requital and surety in the most valuable things that
the enemy possesses, namely, the animals of his herd. Young men who
have not been on a _baranta_ must first acquire the name _batir_, hero,
and thus earn the claim to honor and respect. The pleasure of ownership
joined to the desire for adventure develops the triple descending
gradation of avenger, hero and robber.”[20]

An identical development takes place with the sea nomads, the
“Vikings,” as with the land nomads. This is quite natural, since in the
most important cases noted in the history of mankind, sea nomads are
simply land nomads taking to the sea.

We have noted above one of the innumerable examples which indicate that
the herdsman does not long hesitate to use for marauding expeditions,
instead of the horse or the “ship of the desert,” the “horses of the
sea.” This case is exemplified by the East Caspian Turkomans.[21]
Another example is furnished by the Scythians: “From the moment when
they learn from their neighbors the art of navigating the seas, these
wandering herdsmen, whom Homer (_Iliad_, XIII, 3) calls ‘respected
horsemen, milk-eaters and poor, the most just of men,’ change into
daring navigators like their Baltic and Scandinavian brethren. Strabo
(_Cas._, 301) complains: ‘Since they have ventured on the sea,
carrying on piracy and murdering foreigners, they have become worse;
and associating with many peoples, they adopt their petty trading and
spendthrift habits.’”[22]

If the Phœnicians really were “Semites,” they furnish an additional
example of incomparable importance of the transformation of land into
“sea Bedouins,” i. e., warlike robbers; and the same is probably
true for the majority of the numerous peoples who looted the rich
countries around the Mediterranean, whether from the coast of Asia
Minor, Dalmatia, or from the North African shore. These begin from the
earliest times, as we see from the Egyptian monuments (the Greeks
were not admitted into Egypt),[23] and continue to the present day: e.
g., the Riff pirates. The North African “Moors,” an amalgamation of
Arabs and of Berbers, both originally land nomads, are perhaps the most
celebrated example of this change.

There are cases in which sea nomads--that is to say, sea robbers--arise
immediately from fishermen, with no intermediate herdsman stage.
We have already examined the causes which give the herdsmen their
superiority over the peasantry: the relatively numerous population of
the horde, combined with an activity which develops courage and quick
resolution in the individual, and educates the mass as a whole to tense
discipline. All this applies also to fishermen dwelling on the sea.
Rich fishing grounds permit a considerable density of population, as
is shown in the case of the Northwest Indians (Tlinkit, etc.); these
permit also the keeping of slaves, since the slave earns more by
fishing than his keep amounts to. Thus we find, here alone among the
redskins, slavery developed as an institution; and we find, therefore,
along with it, permanent economic differences among the freemen, which
result in a sort of plutocracy similar to that noted among herdsmen.
Here, as there, the habit of command over slaves produces the habit
of rule and a taste for the “political means.” This is favored by the
tense discipline developed in navigation. “Not the least advantage
of fishing in common is found in the discipline of the crews. They
must render implicit obedience to a leader chosen in each of the
larger fishing boats, since every success depends upon obedience. The
command of a ship afterward facilitates the command of the state. We
are accustomed to reckon the Solomon Islanders as complete savages,
and yet their life is subject to one solitary element, which combines
their forces, namely, navigation.”[24] If the Northwest Indians did not
become such celebrated sea robbers as their likes in the old world,
this is due to the fact that the neighborhoods within their reach had
developed no rich civilization; but all more developed fishermen carry
on piracy.

For this reason, the Vikings have the same capacity to choose the
political means as the basis of their economic existence as have the
cattle raiders; and similarly they have been founders of states on a
large scale. Hereafter, we shall distinguish the states founded by
them as “sea states,” while the states founded by herdsmen--and in the
new world by hunters--will be called “land states.” Sea states will be
treated extensively when we discuss the consequences of the _developed
feudal state_. As long, however, as we are discussing the development
of the state, and the _primitive_ feudal state, we must limit ourselves
to the consideration of the land state and leave the sea state out of
account. This treatment is convenient, since in all essential things
the sea state has the same characteristics, but its development can not
be followed through the various typical stages as can the development
of the land state.


(d) THE GENESIS OF THE STATE

The hordes of huntsmen are incomparably weaker, both in numbers and in
the strength of the single fighters, than are the herdsmen with whom
they occasionally brush. Naturally they can not withstand the impact.
They flee to the highlands and mountains, where the herdsmen have no
inclination to follow them, not only because of the physical hardships
involved, but also because their cattle do not find pasturage there;
or else they enter into a form of cliental relation, as happened often
in Africa, especially in very ancient times. When the Hyksos invaded
Egypt, such dependent huntsmen followed them. The huntsmen usually pay
for protection an inconsiderable tribute in the form of spoils of the
chase, and are used for reconnoitering and watching. But the huntsman,
being a “practical anarchist,” often invites his own destruction rather
than submit to regular labor. For these reasons, no “state” ever arose
from such contact.

The peasants fight as undisciplined levies, and with their single
combatants undisciplined; so that, in the long run, even though they
are strong in numbers, they are no more able than are the hunters to
withstand the charge of the heavily armed herdsmen. But the peasantry
do not flee. The peasant is attached to his ground, and has been used
to regular work. He remains, yields to subjection, and pays tribute
to his conqueror; _that is the genesis of the land states in the old
world_.

In the new world, where the larger herding animals, cattle, horses,
camels, were not indigenous, we find that instead of the herdsman the
hunter is the conqueror of the peasant, because of his infinitely
superior adroitness in the use of arms and in military discipline.
“In the old world we found that the contrast of herdsmen and peasants
developed civilization; in the new world the contrast is between the
sedentary and the roving tribes. The Toltecks, devoted to agriculture,
fought wild tribes (with a highly developed military organization)
breaking in from the north, as endlessly as did Iran with Turan.”[25]

This applies not only to Peru and Mexico, but to all America, a strong
ground for the opinion that the fundamental basis of civilization is
the same all over the world, its development being consistent and
regular under the most varied economic and geographical conditions.
Wherever opportunity offers, and man possesses the power, he prefers
political to economic means for the preservation of his life. And
perhaps this is true not alone of man, for, according to Maeterlinck’s
_Life of the Bees_, a swarm which has once made the experiment of
obtaining honey from a foreign hive, by robbery instead of by tedious
building, is thenceforth spoiled for the “economic means.” From working
bees, robber bees have developed.

Leaving out of account the state formations of the new world, which
have no great significance in universal history, the cause of the
genesis of all states is the contrast between peasants and herdsmen,
between laborers and robbers, between bottom lands and prairies.
Ratzel, regarding sociology from the geographical view-point,
expresses this cleverly: “It must be remembered that nomads do not
always destroy the opposing civilization of the settled folk. This
applies not only to tribes, but also to states, even to those of some
might. The war-like character of the nomads is a great factor in the
creation of states. It finds expression in the immense nations of
Asia controlled by nomad dynasties and nomad armies, such as Persia,
ruled by the Turks; China, conquered and governed by the Mongols and
Manchus; and in the Mongol and Radjaputa states of India, as well as
in the states on the border of the Soudan, where the amalgamation of
the formerly hostile elements has not yet developed so far, although
they are joined together by mutual benefit. In no place is it shown
so clearly as here on the border of the nomad and peasant peoples,
that the great workings of the impulse making for civilization on
the part of the nomads are not the result of civilizing activity,
but of war-like exploits at first detrimental to pacific work. Their
importance lies in the capacity of the nomads to hold together the
sedentary races who otherwise would easily fall apart. This, however,
does not exclude their learning much from their subjects.... Yet all
these industrious and clever folk did not have and could not have the
will and the power to rule, the military spirit, and the sense for
the order and subordination that befits a state. For this reason, the
desert-born lords of the Soudan rule over their negro folk just as
the Manchus rule their Chinese subjects. This takes place pursuant
to a law, valid from Timbuctoo to Pekin, whereby advantageous state
formations arise in rich peasant lands adjoining a wide prairie; where
a high material culture of sedentary peoples is violently subjugated to
the service of prairie dwellers having energy, war-like capacity, and
desire to rule.”[26]

In the genesis of the state, from the subjection of a peasant folk by
a tribe of herdsmen or by sea nomads, six stages may be distinguished.
In the following discussion it should not be assumed that the actual
historical development must, in each particular case, climb the
entire scale step by step. Although, even here, the argument does not
depend upon bare theoretical construction, since every particular
stage is found in numerous examples, both in the world’s history and
in ethnology, and there are states which have apparently progressed
through them all. But there are many more which have skipped one or
more of these stages.

The first stage comprises robbery and killing in border fights, endless
combats broken neither by peace nor by armistice. It is marked by
killing of men, carrying away of children and women, looting of herds,
and burning of dwellings. Even if the offenders are defeated at first,
they return in stronger and stronger bodies, impelled by the duty of
blood feud. Sometimes the peasant group may assemble, may organize
its militia, and perhaps temporarily defeat the nimble enemy; but
mobilization is too slow and supplies to be brought into the desert
too costly for the peasants. The peasants’ militia does not, as does
the enemy, carry its stock of food--its herds--with it into the field.
In Southwest Africa the Germans recently experienced the difficulties
which a well-disciplined and superior force, equipped with a supply
train, with a railway reaching back to its base of supply, and with
the millions of the German Empire behind it, may have with a handful
of herdsmen warriors, who were able to give the Germans a decided
setback. In the case of primitive levies, this difficulty is increased
by the narrow spirit of the peasant, who considers only his own
neighborhood, and by the fact that while the war is going on the lands
are uncultivated. Therefore, in such cases, in the long run, the small
but compact and easily mobilized body constantly defeats the greater
disjointed mass, as the panther triumphs over the buffalo.

This is the first stage in the formation of states. The state may
remain stationary at this point for centuries, for a thousand years.
The following is a thoroughly characteristic example:

“Every range of a Turkoman tribe formerly bordered upon a wide belt
which might be designated as its ‘looting district.’ Everything north
and east of Chorassan, though nominally under Persian dominion, has for
decades belonged more to the Turkomans, Jomudes, Goklenes, and other
tribes of the bordering plains, than to the Persians. The Tekinzes,
in a similar manner, looted all the stretches from Kiwa to Bokhara,
until other Turkoman tribes were successfully rounded up either by
force or by corruption to act as a buffer. Numberless further instances
can be found in the history of the chain of oases which extends
between Eastern and Western Asia directly through the steppes of its
central part, where since ancient times the Chinese have exercised
a predominant influence through their possession of all important
strategic centers, such as the Oasis of Chami. The nomads, breaking
through from north and south, constantly tried to land on these islands
of fertile ground, which to them must have appeared like Islands of
the Blessed. And every horde, whether laden down with booty or fleeing
after defeat, was protected by the plains. Although the most immediate
threats were averted by the continued weakening of the Mongols, and the
actual dominion of Thibet, yet the last insurrection of the Dunganes
showed how easily the waves of a mobile tribe break over these islands
of civilization. Only after the destruction of the nomads, impossible
as long as there are open plains in Central Asia, can their existence
be definitely secured.”[27]

The entire history of the old world is replete with well-known
instances of mass expeditions, which must be assigned to the first
stage of state development, inasmuch as they were intent, not upon
conquest, but directly on looting. Western Europe suffered through
these expeditions at the hands of the Celts, Germans, Huns, Avars,
Arabs, Magyars, Tartars, Mongolians and Turks by land; while the
Vikings and the Saracens harassed it on the waterways. These hordes
inundated entire continents far beyond the limits of their accustomed
looting ground. They disappeared, returned, were absorbed, and left
behind them only wasted lands. In many cases, however, they advanced
in some part of the inundated district directly to the sixth and last
stage of state formation, in cases namely, where they established a
permanent dominion over the peasant population. Ratzel describes these
mass migrations excellently in the following:

“The expeditions of the great hordes of nomads contrast with this
movement, drop by drop and step by step, since they overflow with
tremendous power, especially Central Asia and all neighboring
countries. The nomads of this district, as of Arabia and Northern
Africa, unite mobility in their way of life with an organization
holding together their entire mass for one single object. It seems to
be a characteristic of the nomads that they easily develop despotic
power and far-reaching might from the patriarchal cohesion of the
tribe. Mass governments thereby come into being, which compare with
other movements among men in the same way that swollen streams compare
with the steady but diffused flow of a tributary. The history of China,
India, and Persia, no less than that of Europe, shows their historical
importance. Just as they moved about on their ranges with their wives
and children, slaves and carts, herds and all their paraphernalia, so
they inundated the borderlands. While this ballast may have deprived
them of speed it increased their momentum. The frightened inhabitants
were driven before them, and like a wave they rolled over the conquered
countries, absorbing their wealth. Since they carried everything with
them, their new abodes were equipped with all their possessions, and
thus their final settlements were of an ethnographic importance. After
this manner, the Magyars flooded Hungary, the Manchus invaded China,
the Turks, the countries from Persia to the Adriatic.”[28]

What has been said here of Hamites, Semites and Mongolians, may be said
also, at least in part, of the Arian tribes of herdsmen. It applies
also to the true negroes, at least to those who live entirely from
their herds: “The mobile, warlike tribes of the Kafirs possess a power
of expansion which needs only an enticing object in order to attain
violent effects and to overturn the ethnologic relations of vast
districts. Eastern Africa offers such an object. Here the climate did
not forbid stock raising, as in the countries of the interior, and did
not paralyze from the start, the power of impact of the nomads, while
nevertheless numerous peaceable agricultural peoples found room for
their development. Wandering tribes of Kafirs poured like devastating
streams into the fruitful lands of the Zambesi, and up to the highlands
between the Tanganyika and the coast. Here they met the advance guard
of the Watusi, a wave of Hamite eruption, coming from the north. The
former inhabitants of these districts were either exterminated, or as
serfs cultivated the lands which they formerly owned; or they still
continued to fight; or again, they remained undisturbed in settlements
left on one side by the stream of conquest.”[29]

All this has taken place before our eyes. Some of it is still going
on. During many thousands of years it has “jarred all Eastern Africa
from the Zambesi to the Mediterranean.” The incursion of the Hyksos,
whereby for over five hundred years Egypt was subject to the shepherd
tribes of the eastern and northern deserts--“kinsmen of the peoples
who up to the present day herd their stock between the Nile and the
Red Sea”[30]--is the first authenticated foundation of a state. These
states were followed by many others both in the country of the Nile
itself, and farther southward, as far as the Empire of Muata Jamvo
on the southern rim of the central Congo district, which Portuguese
traders in Angola reported as early as the end of the sixteenth
century, and down to the Empire of Uganda, which only in our own day
has finally succumbed to the superior military organization of Europe.
“Desert land and civilization never lie peaceably alongside one
another; but their battles are all alike and full of repetitions.”[31]

“Alike and full of repetitions”! That may be said of universal history
on its basic lines. The human ego in its fundamental aspect is much the
same all the world over. It acts uniformly, in obedience to the same
influences of its environment, with races of all colors, in all parts
of the earth, in the tropics as in the temperate zones. One must step
back far enough and choose a point of view so high that the variegated
aspect of the details does not hide the great movements of the mass. In
such a case, our eye misses the “mode” of fighting, wandering, laboring
humanity, while its “substance,” ever similar, ever new, ever enduring
through change, reveals itself under uniform laws.

Gradually, from this first stage, there develops the second, in which
the peasant, through thousands of unsuccessful attempts at revolt, has
accepted his fate and has ceased every resistance. About this time,
it begins to dawn on the consciousness of the wild herdsman that a
murdered peasant can no longer plow, and that a fruit tree hacked
down will no longer bear. In his own interest, then, wherever it is
possible, he lets the peasant live and the tree stand. The expedition
of the herdsmen comes just as before, every member bristling
with arms, but no longer intending nor expecting war and violent
appropriation. The raiders burn and kill only so far as is necessary
to enforce a wholesome respect, or to break an isolated resistance.
But in general, principally in accordance with a developing customary
right--the first germ of the development of all public law--the
herdsman now appropriates only the surplus of the peasant. That is to
say, he leaves the peasant his house, his gear and his provisions up
to the next crop.[D] The herdsman in the first stage is like the bear,
who for the purpose of robbing the beehive, destroys it. In the second
stage he is like the bee-keeper, who leaves the bees enough honey to
carry them through the winter.

[D] Ratzel, l. c. II, page 393, in speaking of the Arabs says: “The
difficulty of nourishing slaves makes it impossible to keep them.
Vast populations are kept in subjection and deprived of everything
beyond the necessaries for maintaining life. They turn entire oases
into demesne lands, visited at the harvest time in order to rob the
inhabitants; a domination characteristic of the desert.”

Great is the progress between the first stage and the second. Long is
the forward step, both economically and politically. In the beginning,
as we have seen, the acquisition by the tribe of herdsmen was purely an
occupying one. Regardless of consequences, they destroyed the source
of future wealth for the enjoyment of the moment. Henceforth the
acquisition becomes economical, because all economy is based on wise
housekeeping, or in other words, on restraining the enjoyment of the
moment in view of the needs of the future. The herdsman has learned to
“capitalize.” It is a vast step forward in politics when an utterly
strange human being, prey heretofore like the wild animals, obtains a
value and is recognized as a source of wealth. Although this is the
beginning of all slavery, subjugation, and exploitation, it is at the
same time the genesis of a higher form of society, that reaches out
beyond the family based upon blood relationship. We saw how, between
the robbers and the robbed, the first threads of a jural relation were
spun across the cleft which separated those who had heretofore been
only “mortal enemies.” The peasant thus obtains a semblance of _right_
to the bare necessaries of life; so that it comes to be regarded as
_wrong_ to kill an unresisting man or to strip him of everything.

And better than this, gradually more delicate and softer threads are
woven into a net very thin as yet, but which, nevertheless, brings
about more human relations than the customary arrangement of the
division of spoils. Since the herdsmen no longer meet the peasants
in combat only, they are likely now to grant a respectful request,
or to remedy a well grounded grievance. “The categorical imperative”
of equity, “Do to others as you would have them do unto you,” had
heretofore ruled the herdsmen only in their dealings with their own
tribesmen and kind. Now for the first time it begins to speak, shyly
whispering in behalf of those who are alien to blood relationship.
In this, we find the germ of that magnificent process of external
amalgamation which, out of small hordes, has formed nations and unions
of nations; and which, in the future is to give life to the concept
of “humanity.” We find also the germ of the internal unification
of tribes once separated, from which, in place of the hatred of
“barbarians,” will come the all comprising love of humanity, of
Christianity and Buddhism.

_The moment when first the conqueror spared his victim in order
permanently to exploit him in productive work, was of incomparable
historical importance. It gave birth to nation and state, to right
and the higher economics, with all the developments and ramifications
which have grown and which will hereafter grow out of them._ The root
of everything human reaches down into the dark soil of the animal--love
and art, no less than state, justice and economics.

Still another tendency knots yet more closely these psychic relations.
To return to the comparison of the herdsman and the bear, there are
in the desert, beside the bear who guards the bees, other bears who
also lust after honey. But our tribe of herdsmen blocks their way, and
protects its beehives by force of arms. The peasants become accustomed,
when danger threatens, to call on the herdsmen, whom they no longer
regard as robbers and murderers, but as protectors and saviors. Imagine
the joy of the peasants when the returning band of avengers brings back
to the village the looted women and children, with the enemies’ heads
or scalps. These ties are no longer threads, but strong and knotted
bands.

Here is one of the principal forces of that “integration,” whereby in
the further development, those originally not of the same blood, and
often enough of different groups speaking different languages, will in
the end be welded together into _one_ people, with _one_ speech, _one_
custom, and _one_ feeling of nationality. This unity grows by degrees
from common suffering and need, common victory and defeat, common
rejoicing and common sorrow. A new and vast domain is open when master
and slave serve the same interests; then arises a stream of sympathy, a
sense of common service. Both sides apprehend, and gradually recognize,
each other’s common humanity. Gradually the points of similarity are
sensed, in place of the differences in build and apparel, of language
and religion, which had heretofore brought about only antipathy and
hatred. Gradually they learn to understand one another, first through a
common speech, and then through a common mental habit. The net of the
psychical inter-relations becomes stronger.

In this second stage of the formation of states, the ground work, in
its essentials, has been mapped out. No further step can be compared in
importance to the transition whereby the bear becomes a bee-keeper. For
this reason, short references must suffice.

The third stage arrives when the “surplus” obtained by the peasantry is
brought by them regularly to the tents of the herdsmen as “tribute,” a
regulation which affords to both parties self-evident and considerable
advantages. By this means, the peasantry is relieved entirely from the
little irregularities connected with the former method of taxation,
such as a few men knocked on the head, women violated, or farmhouses
burned down. The herdsmen on the other hand, need no longer apply
to this “business” any “expense” and labor, to use a mercantile
expression; and they devote the time and energy thus set free toward an
“extension of the works,” in other words, to subjugating other peasants.

This form of tribute is found in many well-known instances in history:
Huns, Magyars, Tartars, Turks, have derived their largest income
from their European tributes. Sometimes the character of the tribute
paid by the subjects to their master is more or less blurred, and
the act assumes the guise of payment for protection, or indeed, of
a subvention. The tale is well known whereby Attila was pictured by
the weakling emperor at Constantinople as a vassal prince; while the
tribute he paid to the Hun appeared as a fee.

The fourth stage, once more, is of very great importance, since it
adds the decisive factor in the development of the state, as we are
accustomed to see it, namely, the union on one strip of land of both
ethnic groups.[E] (It is well known that no jural definition of a
state can be arrived at without the concept of state territory.)
From now on, the relation of the two groups, which was originally
international, gradually becomes more and more intra-national.

[E] There is apparently in the case of the Fulbe, a transition stage
between the first three stages and the fourth, in which dominion is
exercised half internationally and half intranationally. According
to Ratzel (l. c. II, page 419): “Like a cuttle-fish, the conquering
race stretches numerous arms hither and thither among the terrified
aborigines, whose lack of cohesion affords plenty of gaps. Thus the
Fulbe are slowly flowing into the Benue countries and quite gradually
permeating them. Later observers have thus quite rightly abstained
from assigning definite boundaries. There are many scattered Fulbe
localities which look to a particular place as their center and as the
center of their power. Thus Muri is the capital of the numerous Fulbe
settlements scattered about the Middle Benue, and the position of Gola
is similar in the Adamawa district. As yet there are no proper kingdoms
with defined frontiers against each other and against independent
tribes. Even these capitals are in other respects still far from being
firmly settled.”

This territorial union may be caused by foreign influences. It may be
that stronger hordes have crowded the herdsmen forward, or that their
increase in population has reached the limit set by the nutritive
capacity of the steppes or prairies; it may be that a great cattle
plague has forced the herdsmen to exchange the unlimited scope of the
prairies for the narrows of some river valley. In general, however,
internal causes alone suffice to bring it about that the herdsmen stay
in the neighborhood of their peasants. The duty of protecting their
tributaries against other “bears” forces them to keep a levy of young
warriors in the neighborhood of their subjects; and this is at the same
time an excellent measure of defense since it prevents the peasants
from giving way to a desire to break their bonds, or to let some other
herdsmen become their overlords. This latter occurrence is by no means
rare, since, if tradition is correct, it is the means whereby the sons
of Rurik came to Russia.

As yet the local juxtaposition does not mean a state community in its
narrowest sense; that is to say, a unital organization.

In case the herdsmen are dealing with utterly unwarlike subjects,
they carry on their nomad life, peaceably wandering up and down and
herding their cattle among their perioike and helots. This is the case
with the light-colored Wahuma,[32] “the handsomest men of the world”
(Kandt), in Central Africa, or the Tuareg clan of the Hadanara of the
Asgars, “who have taken up their seats among the Imrad and have become
wandering freebooters. These Imrad are the serving class of the Asgars,
who live on them, although the Imrad could put into the field ten times
as many warriors; the situation is analogous to that of the Spartans in
relation to their Helots.”[33] The same may be said of the Teda among
the neighboring Borku: “Just as the land is divided into a semi-desert
supporting the nomads, and gardens with date groves, so the population
is divided between nomads and settled folk. Although about equal in
number, ten to twelve thousand altogether, it goes without saying that
these latter are subject to the others.”[34]

And the same applies to the entire group of herdsmen known as the Galla
Masi and Wahuma. “Although differences in possessions are considerable,
they have few slaves, as a serving class. These are represented by
peoples of a lower caste, who live separate and apart from them. It
is herdsmanship which is the basis of the family, of the state, and
along with these of the principle of political evolution. In this wide
territory, between Scehoa and its southernmost boundaries, on the one
hand, and Zanzibar on the other, there is found no strong political
power, in spite of the highly developed social articulation.”[35]

In case the country is not adapted to herding cattle on a large
scale--as was universally the case in Western Europe--or where a less
unwarlike population might make attempts at insurrection, the crowd of
lords becomes more or less permanently settled, taking either steep
places or strategically important points for their camps, castles, or
towns. From these centers, they control their “subjects,” mainly for
the purpose of gathering their tribute, paying no attention to them in
other respects. They let them administer their affairs, carry on their
religious worship, settle their disputes, and adjust their methods
of internal economy. Their autochthonous constitution, their local
officials, are, in fact, not interfered with.

If Frants Buhl reports correctly, that was the beginning of the rule
of the Israelites in Canaan.[36] Abyssinia, that great military force,
though at the first glance it may appear to be a fully developed state,
does not, however, seem to have advanced beyond the fourth stage. At
least Ratzel states: “The principal care of the Abyssinians consists
in the tribute, in which they follow the method of oriental monarchs
in olden and modern times, which is not to interfere with the internal
management and administration of justice of their subject peoples.”[37]

The best example of the fourth stage is found in the situation in
ancient Mexico before the Spanish conquest: “The confederation under
the leadership of the Mexicans had somewhat more progressive ideas of
conquest. Only those tribes were wiped out that offered resistance. In
other cases, the vanquished were merely plundered, and then required to
pay tribute. The defeated tribe governed itself just as before, through
its own officials. It was different in Peru, where the formation of
a compact empire followed the first attack. In Mexico, intimidation
and exploitation were the only aims of the conquest. And so it came
about that the so-called Empire of Mexico at the time of the conquest
represented merely a group of intimidated Indian tribes, whose
federation with one another was prevented by their fear of plundering
expeditions from some unassailable fort in their midst.”[38] It will be
observed that one can not speak of this as a state in any proper sense.
Ratzel shows this in the note following the above: “It is certain that
the various points held in subjection by the Warriors of Montezuma
were separated from one another by stretches of territory not yet
conquered. A condition very like the rule of the Hova in Madagascar.
One would not say that scattering a few garrisons, or better still,
military colonies, over the land, is a mark of absolute dominion, since
these colonies, with great trouble, maintain a strip of a few miles in
subjection.”[39]

The logic of events presses quickly from the fourth to the fifth stage,
and fashions almost completely the full state. Quarrels arise between
neighboring villages or clans, which the lords no longer permit to be
fought out, since by this the capacity of the peasants for service
would be impaired. The lords assume the right to arbitrate, and in case
of need, to enforce their judgment. In the end, it happens that at each
“court” of the village king or chief of the clan there is an official
deputy who exercises the power, while the chiefs are permitted to
retain the appearance of authority. The state of the Incas shows, in a
primitive condition, a typical example of this arrangement.

Here we find the Incas united at Cuzco where they had their patrimonial
lands and dwellings.[40] A representative of the Incas, the Tucricuc,
however, resided in every district at the court of the native
chieftain. He “had supervision over all affairs of his district;
he raised the troops, superintended the delivery of the tribute,
ordered the forced labor on roads and bridges, superintended the
administration of justice, and in short supervised everything in his
district.”[41]

The same institutions which have been developed by American huntsmen
and Semite shepherds are found also among African herdsmen. In Ashanti,
the system of the Tucricuc has been developed in a typical fashion;[42]
and the Dualla have established for their subjects living in segregated
villages “an institution based on conquest midway between a feudal
system and slavery.”[43] The same author reports that the Barotse have
a constitution corresponding to the earliest stage of the mediæval
feudal organization: “Their villages are ... as a rule surrounded by
a circle of hamlets where their serfs live. These till the fields
of their lords in the immediate neighborhood, grow grain, or herd
the cattle.”[44] The only thing that is not typical here consists in
this, that the lords do not live in isolated castles or halls, but are
settled in villages among their subjects.

It is only a very small step from the Incas to the Dorians in
Lacedæmon, Messenia, or Crete; and no greater distance separates the
Fulbe, Dualla and Barotse from the comparatively rigidly organized
feudal states of the African Negro Empires of Uganda, Unyoro, etc.; and
the corresponding feudal empires of Eastern and Western Europe and of
all Asia. In all places, the same results are brought about by force
of the same socio-psychological causes. The necessity of keeping the
subjects in order and at the same time of maintaining them at their
full capacity for labor, leads step by step from the fifth to the sixth
stage, in which the state, by acquiring full intra-nationality and by
the evolution of “Nationality,” is developed in every sense. The need
becomes more and more frequent to interfere, to allay difficulties, to
punish, or to coerce obedience; and thus develop the habit of rule and
the usages of government. The two groups, separated, to begin with,
and then united on one territory, are at first merely laid alongside
one another, then are scattered through one another like a mechanical
mixture, as the term is used in chemistry, until gradually they become
more and more of a “chemical combination.” They intermingle, unite,
amalgamate to unity, in customs and habits, in speech and worship.
Soon the bonds of relationship unite the upper and the lower strata.
In nearly all cases the master class picks the handsomest virgins from
the subject races for its concubines. A race of bastards thus develops,
sometimes taken into the ruling class, sometimes rejected, and then
because of the blood of the masters in their veins, becoming the born
leaders of the subject race. In form and in content the primitive state
is completed.




CHAPTER III

THE PRIMITIVE FEUDAL STATE


(a) THE FORM OF DOMINION

Its form is domination; the dominion of a small warlike minority,
interrelated and closely allied, over a definitely bounded territory
and its cultivators. Gradually, custom develops some form of law in
accordance with which this dominion is exercised. This law regulates
the rights of primacy and the claims of the lords, and the duty
of obedience and of service on the part of the subjects, in such
wise that the capacity of the peasants for rendering service is not
impaired. This word, _praestationsfaehigkeit_, dates from the reforms
of Frederick the Great. The “bee-keepership,” therefore, is governed
by the law of custom. The duty of paying and working on the part of
the peasants corresponds to the duty of protection on the part of
the lords, who ward off exactions of their own companions, as well as
defend the peasants from the attacks of foreign enemies.

Although this is one part of the content of the state concept, there is
another, which in the beginning is of much greater magnitude; the idea
of economic exploitation, the political means for the satisfaction of
needs. The peasant surrenders a portion of the product of his labor,
without any equivalent service in return. “_In the beginning was the
ground rent._”

The forms under which the ground rent is collected or consumed vary.
In some cases, the lords, as a closed union or community, are settled
in some fortified camp and consume as communists the tribute of their
peasantry. This is the situation in the state of the Inca. In some
cases, each individual warrior-noble has a definite strip of land
assigned to him: but generally the produce of this is still, as in
Sparta, consumed in the “syssitia,” by class associates and companions
in arms. In some cases, the landed nobility scatters over the entire
territory, each man housed with his following in his fortified castle,
and consuming, each for himself, the produce of his dominion or lands.
As yet these nobles have not become landlords, in the sense that they
administer their property. Each of them receives tribute from the labor
of his dependents, whom he neither guides nor supervises. This is the
type of the mediæval dominion in the lands of the Germanic nobility.
Finally, the knight becomes the owner and administrator of the knight’s
fee.[F] His former serfs develop into the laborers on his plantation,
and the tribute now appears as the profit of the entrepreneur. This
is the type of the earliest capitalist enterprise of modern times,
the exploitation of large territories in the lands east of the Elbe,
formerly occupied by Slavs and later colonized by Germans. Numerous
transitions lead from one stage to the other.

[F] _Rittergutsbesitz_ is the ultimate molecule of the German feudal
system, a non-urban territory, approximating the concept of knight’s
fee in the Angevin fiscal legislation; in modern Germanic law, the
possession of an acreage, alienable only as an entity, and by recent
legislation, alienable to non-nobles, but subject to and capable
of certain exceptions in law not inhering in other forms of real
estate.--_Translator._

But always, in its essence, is the “State” the same. Its purpose, in
every case, is found to be the political means for the satisfaction
of needs. At first, its method is by exacting a ground rent, so
long as there exists no trade activity the products of which can be
appropriated. Its form, in every case, is that of dominion, whereby
exploitation is regarded as “justice,” maintained as a “constitution,”
insisted on strictly, and in case of need enforced with cruelty.
And yet, in these ways, the absolute right of the conqueror becomes
narrowed within the confines of law, for the sake of permitting the
continuous acquisition of ground rents. The duty of furnishing supplies
on the part of the subjects is limited by their right to maintain
themselves in good condition. The right of taxation on the part of the
lords is supplemented by their duty to afford protection within and
without the state--security under the law and defense of the frontier.

At this point, the primitive state is completely developed in all its
essentials. It has passed the embryonic condition; whatever follows can
be only phenomena of growth.

As compared with unions of families, the state represents, doubtless, a
much higher species; since the state embraces a greater mass of men, in
closer articulation, more capable of conquering nature and of warding
off enemies. It changes the half playful occupations of men into
strict methodic labor, and thus brings untold misery to innumerable
generations yet unborn. Henceforth, these must eat their bread in the
sweat of their brow, since the golden age of the free community of
blood relations has been followed by the iron rule of state dominion.
But the state, by discovering labor in its proper sense, starts in this
world that force which alone can bring about the golden age on a much
higher plane of ethical relation and of happiness for all. The state,
to use Schiller’s words, destroys the untutored happiness of the people
while they were children, in order to bring them along a sad path of
suffering to the conscious happiness of maturity.

A higher species! Paul von Lilienfeld, one of the principal advocates
of the view that society is an organism of a higher kind, has pointed
out that in this respect an especially striking parallel can be drawn
between ordinary organisms and this super-organism. All higher beings
propagate sexually; lower beings asexually, by partition, by budding
and sometimes by conjugation. We have shown that simple partition
corresponds exactly to the growth and the further development of the
association based on blood relationship, which existed before the
state. This grows until it becomes too large for cohesion; it then
loses its unity, divides, and the separate hordes, if they associate
at all, remain in a very loose connection, without any sort of closer
articulation. The amalgamation of exogamic groups is comparable to
conjugation.

_The state, however, comes into being through sexual propagation._
All bisexual propagation is accomplished by the following process:
The male element, a small, very active, mobile, vibrating cell--the
spermatozoön--searches out a large inactive cell without mobility
of its own--the ovum, or female principle--enters and fuses with
it. From this process, there results an immense growth; that is to
say, a wonderful differentiation with simultaneous integration. The
inactive peasantry, bound by nature to their fields, is the ovum,
the mobile tribe of herdsmen the spermatozoön, of this sociologic
act of fecundation; and its resultant is the ripening of a higher
social organism more fully differentiated in its organs, and much more
complete in its integrations. It is easy to find further parallels.
One may compare the border feuds to the manner in which innumerable
spermatozoa swarm about the ovum until finally one, the strongest or
most fortunate, discovers and conquers the micropyle. One may compare
the almost magical attraction which the ovum has for the spermatozoön,
to the no less magical power by which the herdsmen from the steppes are
drawn into the cultivated plains.

But all this is no proof for the “organism.” The problem, however, has
been pointed out.


(b) THE INTEGRATION

We have followed the genesis of the state, from its second stage
onward, in its objective growth as a political and jural form with
economic content. But it is far more important to examine its
subjective growth, its socio-psychological “differentiation and
integration,” since all sociology is nearly always social psychology.
First, then, let us discuss integration.

We saw in the second stage, as set forth above, how the net of
psychical relations becomes ever tighter and closer enmeshed, as the
economic amalgamation advances. The two dialects become one language;
or one of the two, often of an entirely different stock from the other,
becomes extinct. This, in some cases, is the language of the victors,
but more frequently that of the vanquished. Both cults amalgamate to
one religion, in which the tribal god of the conquerors is adored as
the principal divinity, while the old gods of the vanquished become
either his servants, or, as demons or devils, his adversaries. The
bodily type tends to assimilate, through the influence of the same
climate and similar mode of living. Where a strong difference between
the types existed or is maintained,[45] the bastards, to a certain
extent, fill the gap--so that, in spite of the still existing ethnic
contrast, everybody, more and more, begins to feel that the type of the
enemies beyond the border is more strange, more “foreign” than is the
new co-national type. Lords and subjects view one another as “we,” at
least as concerns the enemy beyond the border; and at length the memory
of the different origin completely disappears. The conquerors are held
to be the sons of the old gods. This, in many cases, they literally
are, since these gods are nothing but the souls of their ancestors
raised to godhead by apotheosis.

Since the new “states” are much more aggressive than the former
communities bound together by mere blood relationship, the feeling
of being different from the foreigner beyond the borders, growing in
frequent feuds and wars, becomes stronger and stronger among those
within the “realm of peace.” And in the same measure there grows
among them the feeling of belonging to another; so that the spirit
of fraternity and of equity, which formerly existed only within the
horde and which never ceased to hold sway within the association of
nobles, takes root everywhere, and more and more finds its place in the
relations between the lords and their subjects.

At first these relations are manifested only in infrequent cases:
equity and fraternity are allowed only such play as is consistent
with the right to use the political means; but that much is granted.
A far stronger bond of psychical community between high and low,
more potent than any success against foreign invasion, is woven by
legal protection against the aggression of the mighty. “_Justitia
fundamentum regnorum._” When, pursuant to their own ideals of justice,
the aristocrats as a social group execute one of their own class
for murder or robbery, for having exceeded the bounds of permitted
exploitation, the thanks and the joy of the subjects are even more
heartfelt than after victory over alien foes.

These, then, are the principal lines of development of the psychical
integration. Common interest in maintaining order and law and peace
produce a strong feeling of solidarity, which may be called “a
consciousness of belonging to the same state.”


(c) THE DIFFERENTIATION: GROUP THEORIES AND GROUP PSYCHOLOGY

On the other hand, as in all organic growth, there develops _pari
passu_ a psychic differentiation just as powerful. The interests of the
group produce strong group feelings; the upper and lower strata develop
a “class consciousness” corresponding to their peculiar interests.

The separate interest of the master group is served by maintaining
intact the imposed law of political means; such interest makes for
“conservatism.” The interest of the subject group, on the contrary,
points to the removal of the prevailing rule, to the substitution for
it of a new rule, the law of equality for all inhabitants of the state,
and makes for “liberalism” and revolution.

Herein lies the tap root of all class and party psychology. Hence
there develop, in accordance with definite psychological laws, those
incomparably mighty forms of thought which, as “class theories,”
through thousands of years of struggle guide and justify every social
contest in the consciousness of contemporaries.

“When the will speaks reason has to be silent,” says Schopenhauer, or
as Ludwig Gumplowicz states the same idea, “Man acts in accordance with
laws of nature, as an afterthought he thinks humanly.” Man’s will being
strictly “determined,” he must act according to the pressure which the
surrounding world exerts upon him; and the same law is valid for every
community of men: groups, classes, and the state itself. They “flow
from the plane of higher economic and social pressure to that of lower
pressure, along the line of least resistance.” But every individual and
each community of men believe themselves free agents; and therefore, by
an unescapable psychical law they are forced to consider the path they
are traversing as a freely chosen means, and the point toward which
they are driven as a freely chosen end. And since man is a rational
and ethical being, that is, a social entity, he is obliged to justify
before reason and morality the method and the objective point of his
movement, and to take account of the social consciousness of his time.

So long as the relations of both groups were simply those of
internationally opposed border enemies, the exercise of the political
means called for no justification, because a man of alien blood had
no rights. As soon, however, as the psychic integration develops, in
any degree, the community feeling of state consciousness, as soon as
the bond servant acquires “rights,” and the consciousness of essential
equality percolates through the mass, the political means requires a
system of justification; and there arises in the ruling class the
group theory of “legitimacy.”

Everywhere, the upholders of legitimacy justify dominion and
exploitation with similar anthropological and theological reasoning.
The master group, since it recognizes bravery and warlike efficiency
as the only virtues of a man, declares itself, the victors,--and from
its standpoint quite correctly--to be the more efficient, the better
“race.” This point of view is the more intensified, the lower the
subject race is reduced by hard labor and low fare. And since the
tribal god of the ruling group has become the supreme god in the new
amalgamated state religion, this religion declares--and again from
its view-point quite correctly--that the constitution of the state
has been decreed by heaven, that it is “tabu,” and that interference
with it is sacrilege. In consequence, therefore, of a simple logical
inversion, the exploited or subject group is regarded as an essentially
inferior race, as unruly, tricky, lazy, cowardly and utterly incapable
of self-rule or self-defense, so that any uprising against the imposed
dominion must necessarily appear as a revolt against God Himself and
against His moral ordinances. For these reasons, the dominant group at
all times stands in closest union with the priesthood, which, in its
highest positions, at least, nearly always recruits itself from their
sons, sharing their political rights and economic privileges.

This has been, and is at this day, the class theory of the ruling
group; nothing has been taken from it, not an item has been added to
it. Even the very modern argument by which, for example, the landed
nobility of old France and of modern Prussia attempted to put out
of court the claims of the peasantry to the ownership of lands, on
the allegation that they had owned the land from time immemorial,
while their peasants had only been granted a life tenure therein,--is
reproduced among the Wahuma, of Africa,[46] and probably could be shown
in many other instances.

Like their class theory, their class psychology has been, and is,
at all times the same. Its most important characteristic, the
“aristocrat’s pride,” shows itself in contempt for the lower laboring
strata. This is so inherent, that herdsmen, even after they have lost
their herds and become economically dependent, still retain their pride
as former lords: “Even the Galla, who have been despoiled of their
wealth of herds by the Somali north of the Tana, and who thus have
become watchers of other men’s herds, and even in some cases along
the Sabaki become peasants, still look with contempt upon the peasant
Watokomo, who are subject to them and resemble the Suaheli. But their
attitude is quite different toward their tributary hunting peoples,
namely, the Waboni, the Wassanai, and the Walangulo (Ariangulo) who
resemble the Galla.”[47]

The following description of the Tibbu applies, as though it had been
originally told of them, to Walter Havenaught and the rest of the poor
knights who, in the crusades, looked for booty and lordly domain. It
applies no less to many a noble fighting cock from Germany east of the
Elbe, and to many a ragged Polish gentleman. “They are men full of
self-consciousness. They may be beggars, but they are no pariahs. Many
a people under these circumstances would be thoroughly miserable and
depressed; the Tibbu have steel in their nature. They are splendidly
fitted to be robbers, warriors, and rulers. Even their system of
robbery is imposing, although it is base as a jackal’s. These ragged
Tibbus, fighting against extreme poverty and constantly on the verge
of starvation, raise the most impudent claims with apparent or real
belief in their validity. The right of the jackal, which regards the
possessions of a stranger as common property, is the protection of
greedy men against want. The insecurity of an all but perpetual state
of war brings it about that life becomes an insistent challenge, and
at the same time the reward of extortion!”[48] This phenomenon is in
nowise limited to Eastern Africa, for it is said of the Abyssinian
soldier: “Thus equipped he comes along. Proudly he looks down on every
one: his is the land, and for him the peasant must work.”[49]

Deeply as the aristocrat at all times despises the economic means and
the peasants who employ it, he admits frankly his reliance on the
political means. Honest war and “honest thievery”[G] are his occupation
as a lord, are his good right. His right--except over those who belong
to the same clique--extends just as far as his power. One finds this
high praise of the political means nowhere so well stated as in the
well-known Doric drinking song:

   “I have great treasures; the spear and the sword;
      Wherewith to guard my body, the bull hide shield well tried.
    With these I can plough, and harvest my crop,
      With these I can garner the sweet grape wine,
    By them I bear the name ‘Lord’ with my serfs.

   “But these never dare to bear spear and sword,
      Still less the guard of the body, the bull hide shield well tried.
    They lie at my feet stretched out on the ground,
      My hand is licked by them as by hounds,
    I am their Persian king--terrifying them by my name.”[50]

[G] Compare this with the prevalent justification of “honest graft” in
municipal or political contracts.--_Translator._

In these wanton lines is expressed the pride of warlike lords.
The following verses, taken from an entirely different phase of
civilization, show that the robber still has part in the warrior in
spite of Christianity, the Peace of God, and the Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation. These lines also praise the political means, but in
its most crude form, simple robbery:

   “Would you eke out your life, my young noble squire,
      Follow then my teaching, upon your horse and join the gang!
    Take to the greenwood, when the peasant comes up,
      Run him down quickly, grab him then by the collar,
    Rejoice in your heart, taking from him whatever he has,
      Unharness his horses and get you away!”[51]

“Unless,” as Sombart adds, “he preferred to hunt nobler game and to
relieve merchants of their valuable consignments.” The nobles carried
on robbery as a natural method of supplementing their earnings,
extending it more and more as the income from their property no longer
sufficed to pay for the increasing demands of daily consumption and
luxury. The system of freebooting was considered a thoroughly honorable
occupation, since it met the demand of the essence of chivalry, that
every one should appropriate whatever was within reach of his spear
point or of the blade of his sword. The nobles learned freebooting as
the cobbler was brought up to his trade. The ballad has put this in
merry wise:

   “To pillage, to rob, that is no shame,
    The best in the land do quite the same.”

Besides this principal point of the “squire-archical” psychology, a
second distinguishing mark scarcely less characteristic is found in
the piety of these folk whether it be of conviction or merely strongly
accentuated in public.

It seems as though the same social ideas always force identical
characteristics on the ruling class. This is illustrated by the form
under which God, in their view, appears as their special National God
and preponderatingly as a God of War. Although they profess God as the
creator of all men, even of their enemies, and since Christianity, as
the God of Love, this does not counteract the force with which class
interests formulate their appropriate ideology.

In order to complete the sketch of the psychology of the ruling class,
we must not forget the tendency to squander, easily understood in those
“ignorant of the taste of toil,” which appears sometimes in a higher
form as generosity; nor must we forget, as their supreme trait, that
death-despising bravery, which is called forth by the coercion imposed
on a minority, their need to defend their rights at any time with arms,
and which is favored by a freedom from all labor which permits the
development of the body in hunting, sport and feuds. Its caricature
is combativeness, and a supersensitiveness to personal honor, which
degenerates into madness.

At this point a small digression: Cæsar found the Celts just at that
stage of their development, in which the nobles had obtained dominion
over their fellow clansmen. Since that time, his classic narrative
has stood as a norm--their class psychology appears as the race
psychology of all Celts. Not even Mommsen escaped this error. The
result is that now, in every book on universal history or sociology,
one may read the palpable error, repeated until contradiction is of
no avail, although a mere glance would have sufficed to show that all
peoples of all races, in the same stage of their development, have
showed the same characteristics; in Europe, Thessalians, Apulians,
Campanians, Germans, Poles, etc. Meanwhile the Celts, and specifically
the French, in different stages of their development, have showed quite
different traits of character. The psychology belongs to the stage of
development, not to the race!

Whenever, on the other hand, the religious sanctions of the “state” are
weak, or become so, there develops as a group theory on the part of the
subjects, the concept, either clear or blurred, of _Natural Law_. The
lower class regards the race pride and the assumed superiority of the
nobles as presumptuous, claims to be of as good race and blood as the
ruling class--and from their standpoint again quite correctly, since
according to their views, labor, efficiency and order are accounted the
only virtues. They are skeptical also as to the religion which is the
helper of their adversaries; and are as firmly convinced as are the
nobles of the directly opposite opinion, namely, that the privileges of
the master group violate law as well as reason. Later development is
not able to add any essential point to the factors originally given.

Under the influence of these ideas, now clearly, now obscurely brought
out, the two groups henceforth fight out their battles, each for its
own interests. The young state would be burst apart under the strain
of such centrifugal forces, were it not for the centripetal pull of
common interests, of the still more powerful state-consciousness. The
pressure of foreigners from without, of common enemies, overcomes the
inner strain of conflicting class interests. An example may be found in
the tale of the secession of the “Plebs” and the successful mission of
Menenius Agrippa. And so the young state would, like a planet, swing
through all eternity in its predetermined orbit, in accordance with
the parallelogram of forces, were it not that it and its surrounding
world is changed and developed until it produces new external and inner
energies.


(d) THE PRIMITIVE FEUDAL STATE OF HIGHER GRADE

Growth in itself conditions important changes; and the young state must
grow. The same forces that brought it into being, urge its extension,
require it to grasp more power. Even were such a young state “sated,”
as many a modern state claims to be, it would still be forced to
stretch and grow under penalty of extinction. Under primitive social
conditions Goethe’s lines apply with absolute truth: “You must rise or
fall, conquer or yield, be hammer or anvil.”

States are maintained in accordance with the same principles that
called them into being. The primitive state is the creation of warlike
robbery; and only by warlike robbery can it be preserved.

The economic want of the master group has no limits; no man is
sufficiently rich to satisfy his desires. The political means are
turned on new groups of peasants not yet subjected, or new coasts
yet unpilfered are sought out. The primitive state expands, until a
collision takes place on the edge of the “sphere of interests” of
another primitive state, which itself originated in precisely the same
way. Then we have for the first time, in place of the warlike robbery
heretofore carried on, true war in its narrower sense, since henceforth
equally organized and disciplined masses are hurled at one another.

The object of the contest remains always the same, the produce of the
economic means of the working classes, such as loot, tribute, taxes
and ground rent; but the contest no longer takes place between a group
intent on exploiting and another mass to be exploited, but between two
master groups for the possession of the entire booty.

The final result of the conflict, in nearly all instances, is the
amalgamation of both primitive states into a greater. This in turn,
naturally and by force of the same causes, reaches beyond its borders,
devours its smaller neighbors, and is perhaps in its turn devoured by
some greater state.

The subjected laboring group may not take much interest in the final
issue of these contests for the mastery; it is a matter of indifference
whether it pays tribute to one or the other set of lords. Their chief
interest lies in the course of the particular fight, which is, in any
case, paid for with their own hides. Therefore, except in cases of
gross ill treatment and exploitation, the lower classes are rightly
governed by their “state-consciousness” when, with all their might they
aid their hereditary master group in times of war. For if their master
group is vanquished, the subjects suffer most severely from the utter
devastation of war. They fight literally for wife and children, for
home and hearth, when they fight to prevent the rule of foreign masters.

The master group is involved completely in the issue of this fight for
dominion. In extreme cases, it may be completely exterminated, as were
the local nobility of the Germanic tribes in the Frankish Empire.
Nearly as bad, if not worse, is the prospect of being thrust into the
group of the serfs. Sometimes a well-timed treaty of peace preserves
their social position as master groups of subordinate rank: e. g., the
Saxon nobility in Norman England, or the Suppans in German territory
taken from the Slavs. In other cases, where the forces are about equal,
the two groups amalgamate into one master group with equal rights,
which forms a nobility whose members intermarry. This, for instance,
was the situation in the Slavic Territories, where isolated Wendish
chieftains were treated as the equals of the Germans, or in mediæval
Rome, in the case of prominent families from the Alban Hills and
Tuscany.

In this new “primitive feudal state of higher grade,” as we shall call
it, the ruling group may, therefore, disintegrate into a number of
more or less powerful and privileged strata. The organization may show
many varieties because of the well-known fact, that often the master
group separates into two subordinated economic and social layers,
developed as we saw them in the herdsmen stage: the owners of large
herds and of many slaves, and the ordinary freemen. Possibly the less
complete differentiation into social ranks in the states created by
huntsmen in the new world, is to be assigned to the circumstance that
in the absence of herds, the concomitants of that form of ownership,
and the original separation into classes, were not introduced into the
state. We shall, later, see what force was exerted on the political and
economic development of states in the old world by the differences in
rank and property of the two strata of rulers.

Similarly, as in the case of the ruling group, a corresponding process
of differentiation divides the subject group in the “primitive feudal
state of a higher grade” into various strata more or less despised
and compelled to render service. It is only necessary to recall the
very marked difference in the social and jural position occupied by
the peasantry in the Doric States, Lacedæmon and Crete, and among the
Thessalians, where the perioiki had clear rights of possession and
fairly well protected political rights, while the helots, in the latter
case the _penestai_, were almost unprotected in life and property.
Among the old Saxons also we find a class, the liti, intermediate
between the common freemen and the serfs.[52] These examples could be
multiplied; apparently they are caused by the same tendencies that
brought about the differentiation among the nobility mentioned above.
When two primitive feudal states amalgamate, their social layers
stratify in a variety of ways, which to a certain extent are comparable
to the combinations resulting from mixing together two packs of cards.

It is certain that this mechanical mixture caused by political forces,
influences the development of _castes_, that is to say, of hereditary
professions, which at the same time form a hierarchy of social classes.
“Castes are usually, if not always, consequences of conquest and
subjugation by foreigners.”[53] Although this problem has not been
completely solved, it may be said that the formation of castes has been
very strongly influenced by economic and religious factors. It is
probable that castes came about in some such way as this: state-forming
forces penetrated into existing economic organizations, and vocations
underwent adaptation, and then became petrified under the influence
of religious concepts, which, however, may also have influenced their
original formation. This seems to follow from the fact that even as
between man and woman there exist certain separations of vocation,
which, so to say, are taboo and impassable. Thus among all huntsmen,
tilling the ground is woman’s work, while among many African shepherds,
as soon as the ox-plow is used, agriculture becomes man’s work, and
then women may not, under pain of sacrilege, use the domestic cattle.[H]

[H] Similarly there are North Asiatic tribes of huntsmen, where women
are definitely forbidden to touch the hunting gear or to cross a
hunting trail.--Ratzel I, page 650.

It is likely that such religious concepts may have brought it about
that a vocation became hereditary, and then compulsorily hereditary,
especially where a tribe or a village carried on a particular craft.
This happens with all tribes in a state of nature, where intercourse
is easily possible, especially in the case of islanders. When some
such group has been conquered by another tribe, the subjects, with
their developed hereditary vocations, tend to form within the new state
entity a pure “caste.” Their caste position depends partly upon the
esteem they had heretofore enjoyed among their own people, and partly
upon the advantage which their vocation affords their new masters.
If, as was often the case, waves of conquest followed one another in
series, the formation of castes might be multiplied, especially if
in the meantime economic development had worked out many vocational
classes.

This development is probably best seen in the group of smiths, who, in
nearly all cases, have occupied a peculiar position, half feared and
half despised. In Africa especially, since the beginning of time, we
find tribes of expert smiths, as followers and dependents of shepherd
tribes. The Hyksos brought such tribes with them into the Nile country,
and perhaps owed their decisive victory to arms made by them; and
until recent times the Dinka kept the iron working Djur in a sort of
subject relation. The same applied also to the nomads of the Sahara;
while our northern sagas are filled with the tribal contrast to the
“dwarfs” and the fear of their magical powers. All the elements were at
hand in a developed state for the formation of sharply differentiated
castes.[54]

How the coöperation of religious concepts affects the beginning of
these formations may be well illustrated by an example from Polynesia.
Here, “although many natives have the ability to do ship-building,
only one privileged class may exercise the craft, so closely is the
interest of the states and the societies bound up in this art. All over
the archipelago formerly, and to this day in Fiji, the carpenters, who
are almost exclusively ship-builders, form a special caste, bear the
high sounding title of ‘the king’s workmen,’ and enjoy the prerogative
of having their own chieftains.... Everything is done in accordance
with ancient tradition; the laying the keel, the completion of the
ship, and the launching, all take place amidst religious ceremonies and
feasts.”[55]

Where superstition has been strongly developed, a genuine system
of castes may come about, based partly on economic and partly on
ethnic foundations. In Polynesia, for example, the articulation of
the classes, through the operation of the taboo, has brought about
a state of affairs very like a most thoroughgoing caste system.[56]
Similar results may be seen in Southern Arabia.[57] It is unnecessary
at this place to enlarge on the important place which religion had in
the origin and maintenance of separate castes in ancient Egypt and in
modern India.[I]

[I] Besides, it seems that the rigidity of the Indian caste-system is
not so harsh in practise. The guild seems as often to break through the
barriers of caste as the converse.--Ratzel II, page 596.

These are the elements of the primitive feudal state of higher
grade. They are more manifold and more numerous than in the lower
primitive state; but in both, legal constitution and political-economic
distribution are fundamentally the same. The products of the economic
means are still the object of the group struggle. This remains now as
ever the moving impulse of the domestic policy of the state, while the
political means continues now as ever to constitute the moving impulse
of its foreign policy in attack or in defense. Identical group theories
continue to justify, both for the upper classes and the lower, the
objects and means of external and domestic struggles.

But the development can not remain stationary. Growth differs from mere
increase in bulk; growth means a constantly heightening differentiation
and integration.

The farther the primitive feudal state extends its dominion, the more
numerous its subjects, and the denser its population, the more there
develops a political-economic division of labor, which calls forth new
needs and new means of supplying them; and the more there come into
sharp contrasts the distinctions of economic, and consequently of
social, class strata, in accordance with what I have called the “law
of the agglomeration about existing nuclei of wealth.” This growing
differentiation becomes decisive for the further development of the
primitive feudal state, and still more for its conclusion.

This conclusion is not meant to be, in any sense, the physical end
of such a state. We do not mean the death of a state, whereby such a
feudal state of the higher type disappears, in consequence of conflict
with a more powerful state, either on the same or on a higher plane
of development, as was the case of the Mogul states of India or of
Uganda in their conflicts with Great Britain. Neither does it mean
such a stagnation as that into which Persia and Turkey have fallen,
which represents for a time only a pause in development, since these
countries, either of their own force or by foreign conquest, must
soon be pushed on the way of their destiny. Neither have we meant the
rigidity of the gigantic Chinese Empire, which can last only so long as
foreign powers refrain from forcing its mysterious gates.[J]

[J] Had we the space, a detailed exposition of this exceptional
development of a feudal state would be tempting. China would be well
worth a more detailed discussion, since, in many aspects it has
approached the condition of “free citizenship” more closely than any
people of Western Europe. China has overcome the consequences of the
feudal system more thoroughly than we Europeans have; and has made,
early in its development, the great property interests in the land
harmless, so that their bastard offspring, capitalism, hardly came into
being; while in addition, it has worked out to a considerable degree
the problems of coöperative production and of coöperative distribution.

The outcome here spoken of means the further development of the
primitive feudal state, a matter of importance to our understanding of
universal history as a _process_. The principal lines of development
into which this issue branches off are twofold and of fundamentally
different character. _But this polar opposition is conditioned by
a like contrast between two sorts of economic wealth each of which
increases in accordance with the “law of agglomeration about existing
nuclei.”_ In the one case, it is movable property; in the other, landed
property. Here it is the capital of commerce, there property in land,
accumulating in the hands of a smaller and smaller number, and thereby
overturning radically the articulation of classes, and with it the
whole State.

The maritime State is the scene of the development of movable wealth;
the territorial State is the embodiment of the development of landed
property. The final issue of the first is _capitalistic exploitation_
by slavery, the outcome of the latter is, first of all, the _developed
feudal State_.

Capitalistic exploitation by slavery, the typical result of the
development of the so-called “antique States” on the Mediterranean,
does not end in the death of states, which is of no importance, but in
the death of peoples, because of the consumption of population. In the
pedigree of the historical development of the State, it forms a side
branch, from which no further immediate growth can take place.

The developed feudal State, however, represents the principal branch,
the continuation of the trunk; and is therefore the origin for
the further growth of the State. Thence it has developed into the
State governed by feudal systems; into absolutism; into the modern
constitutional State; and if we are right in our prognosis, it will
become a “free citizenship.”

So long as the trunk grew only in one direction, i. e., to include the
primitive feudal State of higher grade, our sketch of its growth and
development could and did comprise both forms. Henceforth, after the
bifurcation, our story branches and follows each branch to its last
twig.

We begin, then, with the maritime states, although they are not the
older form. On the contrary, as far back as the dawn of history clears
the fog of prehistoric existence, the first strong states were formed
as territorial states, which then, by their own powers, attained the
scale of developed feudal States. But beyond this stage, at least as
regards those States most interesting to our culture, most of them
either remained stationary or fell into the power of maritime states;
and then, infected with the deadly poison of capitalistic exploitation
through slavery, were destroyed by the same plague.

The further progress of the expanded feudal states of higher grade
could take place only after the maritime states had run their
course: mighty forms of domination and statescraft these became, and
they subsequently influenced and furthered the conformation of the
territorial states that grew from their ruins.

For that reason the story of the fate of maritime states must be first
traced, as these are the introduction to the higher forms of state
life. After first tracing the lateral branch, we shall then return to
the starting point, the primitive feudal State, follow the main trunk
to the development of the modern constitutional State, and anticipating
actual history, sketch the “free citizenship” of the future.




CHAPTER IV

THE MARITIME STATE


The course of life and the path of suffering of the State founded by
sea nomads, as has been stated above, is determined by commercial
capital; just as that of the territorial State is determined by capital
vested in realty; and, we may add, that of the modern constitutional
State by productive capital. The sea nomad, however, did not invent
trade or merchandising, fairs or markets or cities; these preëxisted,
and since they served his purpose, were now developed to suit his
interests. All these institutions, serving the economic means, the
barter for equivalents, had long since been discovered.

Here for the first time in our survey we find the economic means not
the object of exploitation by the political means, but as a coöperating
agent in originating the State, one might call it the “chain” passing
into the “lift” created by the feudal state to bring forth a more
elaborate structure. The genesis of the maritime State would not be
thoroughly intelligible, were we not to premise a statement concerning
traffic and interchange of wares in prehistoric times. Furthermore, no
prognosis of the modern state is complete, which does not take into
account the independently formed economic means of aboriginal barter.


(a) TRAFFIC IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

The psychological explanation of barter has brought forth the theory
of the marginal utility, its greatest merit. According to this theory,
the subjective valuation of any economic good decreases in proportion
to the number of objects of the same kind possessed by the same owner.
When even two proprietors meet, each having a number of similar
articles, they will gladly barter, provided political means are barred,
i. e., if both parts are apparently equally strong and well-armed, or
in the very early stage, are within the sacred circle of relationship.
By barter, each one receives property of very high subjective value,
in place of property of very low subjective value, so that both
parties are gainers in the transaction. The desire of primitive people
for bartering must be stronger than that of cultured ones. For at
this stage man does not value his own goods, but covets the things
belonging to strangers, and is hardly affected by calculated economic
considerations.

On the other hand, we must not forget that there are primitive
peoples for whom barter has no attraction whatever. “Cook tells of
tribes in Polynesia, with whom no intercourse was possible, since
presents made absolutely no impression on them, and were afterward
thrown away; everything shown them they regarded with indifference,
and with no desire to own it, while with their own things they
would not part; in fact, they had no conception of either trade or
barter.”[58] So Westermarck is of the opinion that “barter and traffic
are comparatively late inventions.” In this he stands in opposition
to Peschel, who would have it that man in the earliest known stage
of development engaged in barter. Westermarck states that there is no
proof “that the cave-dwellers of Périgord from the reindeer period
obtained their rock-crystals, their shells from the Atlantic, and the
horns of the Saiga antelope from (modern) Poland by way of barter.”[59]

In spite of these exceptions, which admit other explanations--perhaps
the natives feared sorcery--the history of primitive peoples shows that
the desire to trade and barter is a universal human characteristic.
It can, however, take effect only when these primitive men on meeting
with strangers are offered new enticing objects, since in the immediate
circle of their own blood kinsmen every one has the same kinds of
property, and in their natural communism, on the average about the same
amount.

Yet even then, barter, the beginning of all regular trading, can take
place only when the meeting with foreigners is a peaceable one. But is
there any possibility for peaceable meeting with foreigners? Is not
primitive man, through his entire life, and especially at the period
when barter begins, still under the apprehension that every one of a
different horde is an enemy to be feared as the wolf?

After trade is developed, it is, as a rule, strongly influenced by the
“political means,” “trade generally follows robbery.”[60] But its first
beginnings are chiefly the result of the economic means, the outcome of
pacific, not warlike, intercourse.

The international relations of primitive huntsmen with one another
must not be confused with those existing either between the huntsmen
or herdsmen and their peasants, or amongst the herdsmen themselves.
There are, undoubtedly, blood-feuds, or feuds because of looted women,
or possibly because of violation of the districts set aside for
hunting grounds; but these lack that strong incentive, which is the
consequence of avarice alone, of the desire to despoil other men of the
products of their labor. Therefore, the “wars” of primitive huntsmen
are scarcely real wars, but rather scuffles and single combats,
carried on frequently--as are the German student duels--according
to an established ceremonial, and prolonged only up to the point
of incapacity to fight, as one might say, “until claret has been
drawn.”[61] These tribes, numerically very weak, wisely limit bloodshed
to the indispensable amount--e. g., in case of a blood vendetta
feud--and thus avoid starting new vendetta blood feuds.

For this reason, pacific relations with their neighbors on an equal
economic scale are much stronger, and also freer from the incentive to
use political means, both among huntsmen and among primitive peasants,
than among herdsmen. There are numerous examples where the former
meet peaceably to exploit natural resources in common. “While yet
in primitive stages of civilization, great masses of people gather
together, from time to time, at places where useful objects may be
found. The Indians of a large part of America made regular pilgrimages
to the flint grounds; others assembled annually at harvest time at the
Zizania swamps of the lakes of the Northwest. The Australians, living
scattered in the Barku district, assemble from all directions for the
harvest festivals at the swamp beds of the corn bearing Marsiliacae.
When the bonga-bonga trees in Queensland produce a superabundant crop,
and a greater store is on hand than the tribe can consume, foreign
tribes are permitted to share therein.”[63] “Various tribes agree on
the common ownership of definite strips of territory, and likewise of
the quarries of phonolite for hatchets.”[64] Numerous Australian tribes
have common consultations and sessions of the elders for judgment. In
these, the remainder of the population form the bystanders, a custom
similar to the Germanic “_Umstand_” in the primitive folkmoot.[65]

It is but natural that such meetings should bring about barter. Perhaps
this explains the origin of those “weekly fairs held by the Negroes
of Central Africa in the midst of the primæval forest _under special
arrangements for the peace_,”[66] and likewise the great fairs, said
to be very ancient, of the fur hunters of the extreme north of the
Tschuktsche.

All these things presuppose the development of pacific forms of
intercourse between neighboring groups. These forms are to be found
almost universally. They could very easily be developed at this period,
since the discovery had not yet been made that men can be utilized as
labor motors. At this stage, the stranger is treated as an enemy only
in doubtful cases. If he comes with apparently peaceable intent, he is
treated as a friend. Therefore, a whole code of public law ceremonies
grew up, intended to demonstrate the pacific intent of the newcomer.[K]
One puts aside one’s arms and shows one’s unarmed hand, or one sends
heralds in advance, who are always inviolable.

[K] In this category must be reckoned the salutation, still in use in
some parts, “Peace Be With You.” It is expressive of the perversity of
Tolstoi’s later years that he misapprehends this characteristic mark of
a time when war was the normal state of affairs, as the remnant of a
golden age of peace. _The Importance of the Russian Revolution_ (German
translation by A. Hess, p. 17).

It is clear that these forms represent some kind of claim to
hospitality, and in fact it is by this guest-right that peaceful trade
is first made possible. The exchange of guest-gifts precedes, and
appears to introduce, barter proper. It becomes, therefore, important
to investigate the source of hospitality.

Westermarck, in his recent monumental work (1907), _Origin and
Development of Moral Concepts_,[68] states that the custom of
hospitality results from two causes, curiosity for news from the
stranger from afar, and still more from the fear that the stranger
may be endowed with powers of sorcery, imputed to him just because he
is a stranger.[L] In the Bible, hospitality is recommended for the
reason that one can not know that the stranger may not be an angel.
The superstitious race fears his curse (the Erinys of the Greeks) and
hastens to propitiate the stranger. Having been accepted as a guest he
is inviolable and enjoys the sacred right of the blood-related group,
and is regarded as belonging to it during his stay. Therefore he
partakes of the benefits of the aboriginal communism reigning in the
group, and shares its property. The host demands and receives whatever
he claims, the stranger obtains in turn what he asks for. When the
peaceable intercourse becomes more frequent, the mutual giving of
guest-presents may develop into a trading arrangement, because the
trader gladly returns to the spot where he found good entertainment
and a profitable exchange and where he is protected by the laws of
hospitality, instead of seeking new places, where, often with danger to
his life, he would first have to acquire the right to hospitality.

[L] This may account for the use made of old women as heralds. They
are doubly available for that purpose, since they are worthless for
warfare, and are supposed to be endowed with specific powers of sorcery
(Westermarck), even more than old men, who also are treated cautiously,
since they may soon become “ghosts.”

The existence of an “international” division of labor is, of course,
presupposed before the development of a regular trade relation can
begin. Such a division of labor exists much earlier and to a greater
extent than is generally believed. “It is quite erroneous to suppose
that the division of labor takes place only on a high scale of
economic development. There are in the interior of Africa villages of
iron-smiths, nay, of such as only turn out dart-knives; New Guinea has
its villages of potters, North America its arrow-head makers.”[69]
From such specialties there develops trade, whether through roving
merchants, or by gifts to one’s hosts, or by peace-gifts from tribe
to tribe. In North America, the Kaddu trade in bows. “Obsidian was
universally employed for arrow heads and knives; on the Yellowstone, on
the Snake River, in New Mexico, but especially in Mexico. Thence the
precious article was distributed all over the entire country as far as
Ohio and Tennessee, a distance of nearly two thousand miles.”[70]

According to Vierkandt: “From the purely home-made products of
primitive peoples, there results a system of trade totally distinct
from that prevailing under modern conditions.... Each separate tribe
has developed special aptitudes, leading to interexchange. Even among
the comparatively uncivilized Indian tribes of South America, we find
such differentiations.... By such a trade, products may be distributed
over extraordinary distances, not in any direct way through
professional traders, but through a gradual passing along from tribe
to tribe. The origin of such a trade, as Buecher has shown, is to be
traced back to the exchange of guest-gifts.”[71]

Besides this exchange of guest-gifts, a trade may grow from the peace
offerings which adversaries after a fight exchange as a sign of
reconciliation. Sartorius reports on Polynesia: “After a war between
different islands, the peace offerings for each group were something
novel; and if the present and return present pleased both parties, a
repetition took place, and thus again the way for exchange of products
was opened. But, these, in contrast to guest-gifts, were the bases of
continuing intercourse. Here, in place of the contact of individuals,
tribes and peoples met. Women are the first object of barter; they form
the connecting link between strange tribes, and according to evidence
from many sources, women are exchanged for cattle.”[72]

We meet here an object of trade, exchangeable even without
“international division of labor.” And it appears as though the
_exchange of women_ had, in many ways, smoothed the way for the
traffic in merchandise, as though it had been the first step toward
the _peaceable_ integration of tribes, which accompanied the _warlike_
integration of the formation of the State. Lippert, however, believes
that the peaceful _exchange of fire_ antedates this barter.[73]
Conceding that this custom is very ancient, he can nevertheless trace
it only from rudiments of observances and of law; and since proof is
no longer accessible, we shall not pursue the question further in this
place.

On the other hand, the exchange of women is observed universally,
and doubtless exerts an extraordinarily strong influence in the
development of peaceable intercourse between neighboring tribes,
and in the preparation for barter of merchandise. The story of the
Sabine women, who threw themselves between their brothers and their
husbands, as these were about to engage in battle, must have been an
actuality in a thousand instances in the course of the development of
the human race. All over the world, the marriage of near relatives is
considered an outrage, as “incest,” for reasons not within the scope
of this book.[74] This directs the sexual longing toward the women of
neighboring tribes, and thus makes the loot of women a part of the
primary intertribal relations; and in nearly all cases, unless strong
feelings of race counteract it, the violent carrying off of women
is gradually commuted to barter and purchase, the custom resulting
from the relative undesirability of the women of one’s own blood in
comparison to the wives to be had from other tribes.[75]*

Where division of labor made at all possible the exchange of goods, the
relations among the various tribes would thereafter be made serviceable
to it; the exogamic groups gradually become accustomed regularly to
meet on a peaceful basis. The peace, originally protecting the horde of
blood relations, thereafter comes to be extended over a wider circle.
One example from numberless instances: “Each of the two Camerun tribes
has its own ‘bush countries,’ places where its own tribesmen trade,
and where, by intermarriage, they have relatives. Here also exogamy
shows its tribe-linking power.”

These are the principal lines of growth of peaceful barter and traffic;
from the right to hospitality and the exchange of women, perhaps also
from the exchange of fire, to the trade in commodities. In addition
to this, markets and fairs, and perhaps also traders, were almost
uniformly regarded as being under the protection of a god who preserved
peace and avenged its violation. Thus we have brought the fundamentals
of this most important sociological factor to the point where the
political means enters as a cause to disturb, rearrange, and then to
develop and affect the creations of the economic means.


(b) TRADE AND THE PRIMITIVE STATE

There are two very important reasons why the robber-warrior should not
unduly interfere with such markets and fairs as he may find within his
conquered domain.

The first, which is extra-economic, is the superstitious fear that
the godhead will avenge a breach of the peace. The second, which is
economic, and probably is the more important--and I think I am the
first to point out this connection--is that the conquerors can not well
do without the markets.

The booty of the primitive victors consists of much property which is
unavailable for their immediate use and consumption. Since valuable
articles at that period exist in but few forms, while these few occur
in large quantity, the “marginal utility” of any one kind is held very
low. This applies especially to the most important product of the
political means, slaves. Let us first take up the case of the herdsman:
his need of slaves is limited by the size of his herds; he is very
likely to exchange his surplus for other objects of greater value to
him: for salt, ornaments, arms, metals, woven materials, utensils, etc.
For that reason, the herdsman is not only at all times a robber, always
in addition he is a merchant and trader and he protects trade.

He protects trade coming his way in order to exchange his loot against
the products of another civilization--from the earliest times, nomads
have convoyed the caravans passing through their steppes or deserts in
consideration of protection money--but he also protects trade even in
places conquered by him in prehistoric times. Quite the same sort of
consideration which influenced the herdsmen to change from bear stage
to bee-keeper stage, must have influenced them to maintain and protect
ancient markets and fairs. One single looting, in this case, would
mean killing the hen that lays the golden eggs. It is more profitable
to preserve the market and rather to extend the prevailing peace over
it, since there is not only the profit to be had from an exchange
of foreign wares against loot, but also the protection money, the
lords’ toll, to be collected. For that reason princes of feudal states
of every stage of development extended over markets, highways and
merchants, their especial protection, the “king’s peace,” often indeed
reserving to themselves the monopoly of foreign trade. Everywhere we
see them busily engaged in calling into being new fairs and cities by
the grant of protection and immunity.

This interest in the system of fairs and markets makes it thoroughly
credible that tribes of herdsmen respected existing market places in
their sphere of influence to such an extent that they suspended the
exertion of the political means so completely as not even to exercise
“dominion” over them. The story told by Herodotus is inherently
probable, though he was astonished that the Argippæans had a sacred
market amidst the lawless Scythian herdsmen, and that their unarmed
inhabitants were effectively protected through the hallowed peace of
their market place. Many similar phenomena make this the more easily
believable.

“No one dare harm them, since they are considered _holy_; and yet they
have no arms; but it is they who allay the quarrels of their neighbors,
and whoever has escaped to them as a runaway may not be touched by any
other man.”[76] Similar instances are found frequently: “It is always
the same story of the Argippæans, the story of the ‘holy,’ ‘unarmed,’
‘just,’ bartering, and strife-settling tribelet in the midst of a
Bedouin-like, nomadic population.”[77] Cære may be taken as an example
of a higher type. Strabo says of its inhabitants: “The Greeks thought
highly of their bravery and justice, because although powerful in a
great degree, they abstained from robbery.” Mommsen, who quotes this
passage, adds: “This does not exclude piracy, which was engaged in by
the merchants of Cære as well as by all other merchants, but rather
that Cære was a sort of free harbor for the Phœnicians as for the
Greeks.”[78]

Cære is not like the fair of the Argippæans, a market place in the
interior _of a district of land nomads, but is in the midst of a domain
of sea nomads, a port endowed with its own peace_. This is one of those
typical formations whose importance, in my estimation, has not been
appreciated at its real value. They have, it seems to me, exercised a
mighty influence on the genesis of maritime states.

Those reasons by which we saw the land nomads forced to preserve, if
not to create, market places, must with even more intensity, have
coerced the sea nomads to similar demeanor. For the transportation of
loot, especially of herds and of slaves, is difficult and dangerous on
the trails across the desert or the steppes: the slow progress invites
pursuit. But with war-canoe and “dragon-ship” this transportation
is easy and safe. For that reason, the Viking is even much more a
trader and merchant than is the herdsman. As is said in _Faust_, “War,
Commerce, and Piracy are inseparable.”


(c) THE GENESIS OF THE MARITIME STATE

In many cases, I believe, trade in the loot of piracy is the origin of
those cities around which, as political centers, the city-states of the
antique or Mediterranean civilization grew up; while in very many other
cases, the same trade coöperated to bring them to the same point of
political development.

These harbor markets developed from probably two general types: they
grew up either as piratical fortresses directly and intentionally
placed in hostile territory, or else as “merchant colonies” based on
treaty rights in the harbors of foreign primitive or developed feudal
states.

Of the first type, we have a number of important examples from ancient
history which correspond exactly to the fourth stage of our scheme,
where an armed colony of pirates plants itself down at a commercially
and strategically defendable point on the seacoast of a foreign state.
The most notable instance is Carthage; and in like manner, the Greek
sea nomads, Ionians, Dorians and Achæans, settled in their sea castles
on the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian coasts of Southern Italy, on the
islands of these seas, and on the gulfs of Southern Gaul. Phœnicians,
Etruscans,[M] Greeks, and according to modern investigation, Carians,
all about the Mediterranean, founded their “States” after the same
type, with identical class division into masters and servile peasantry
of the neighboring territory.[79]

[M] Whether the Etruscans were immigrants into Italy by land who took
up piracy after having made war successfully on land, or whether as sea
nomads they had already settled the country along the sea named after
them, has not been determined.

Some of these states on the coast developed into feudal states
of the type of the territorial states; and the master class then
became a landed aristocracy. The factors in this change were: first,
geographical conditions, lack of good harbors, and a wide stretch
of _hinterland_ cultivated by peaceful peasants; and secondly, very
probably, the acquired organization into classes taken with them from
their original homes. In many cases, they were fugitive nobles, the
vanquished of domestic feuds, or younger sons, sometimes an entire
generation of youth of both sexes, who thus started “on the viking,”
and having at home had lands and serfs, as petty lords, they again
sought in foreign lands what they regarded as their due. The occupation
of England by the Anglo-Saxons, and of Southern Italy by the Normans,
are examples of this method; so too are the Spanish and Portuguese
colonizations of Mexico and of South America. The Achæan colonies of
Greater Greece in Southern Italy furnish additional and very important
instances of this development of territorial feudal states by sea
nomads: “This Achæan League of cities was a true colonization. The
cities were without harbors--Croton only had a fair roadstead--_and
were without any trade of their own_; the Sybarite could boast of
his growing gray in his water town between his home bridges, while
buying and selling were carried on by Milesians and Etruscans. On the
other hand, the Greeks in this region not only controlled the fringe
of the shore, but ruled from sea to sea; ... the native agricultural
inhabitants were forced into a relation of clientage or serfdom, and
were required to work the farms of their masters or to pay tribute to
them.”[80] It is probable that most of the Doric colonies in Crete were
similarly organized.

But in the course of universal history these “territorial states,”
whether they arose more or less frequently, did not acquire any such
importance as did those maritime cities which devoted their principal
energies to commerce and to privateering. Mommsen contrasts in distinct
and well chosen sentences the Achæan landed squire with the “royal
merchants” of the Greek Colonies in Southern Italy: “In no way did
they spurn agriculture or the increase of territory; the Greeks were
not satisfied, at least not after they became powerful, to remain
within the confined space of a fortified commercial factory in the
midst of the country of the barbarians, as the Phœnicians had done.
Their cities were founded primarily and exclusively for purposes of
trade, and unlike the Achæan colonies, were universally situated at the
best harbors and landing places.”[81] We are certain, in the case of
the Ionic colonies, and may well assume it for the other cases, that
the founders of these cities were not landed squires, but seafaring
merchants.

But such maritime states or cities, in the strict sense, came into
being not only through warlike conquest, but also through peaceable
beginnings, by a more or less mixed _pénétration pacifique_.

Where, however, the Vikings did not meet peaceable peasants, but feudal
states in the primitive stage, willing to fight, they offered and
accepted terms of peace and settled down as colonies of merchants.

We know of such cases from every part of the world, in harbors and on
markets held on shore. To take the instances with which Germans are
most conversant, there are the settlements of North German merchants
in countries along the German ocean and the Baltic Sea, the German
Steel Yard in London, the Hansa in Sweden and Norway, on the Island
of Schönen, and in Russia, at Novgorod. In Wilna, the capital of the
Grand Dukes of Lithuania, there was such a colony; and the Fondaco
dei Tedeschi in Venice is another example of a similar institution.
The strangers in nearly every instance settle down as a compact mass,
subject to their own laws and their own jurisdiction. They often
acquire great political influence, sometimes extending to dominion over
the state. One would think the following tale of Ratzel, concerning
the coast and islands of the Indian Ocean, were a contemporaneous
narrative of the Phœnician or Greek invasion of the Mediterranean at
about 1,000 B. C.: “Whole nations have, so to say, been liquefied by
trade, especially the proverbially clever, zealous, omnipresent Malays
of Sumatra; as well as the treacherous Bugi of Celebes. These can
be met with at every place from Singapore to New Guinea. Latterly,
especially in Borneo, they have immigrated in masses on the call of
the Borneo chieftains. Their influence was so strong that they were
permitted _to govern themselves according to their own laws_, and they
felt themselves so strong _that repeatedly they attempted to achieve
independence_. The Achinese formerly occupied a similar position.
Malacca had been made the principal mart by Malays from Sumatra, and
after its decline, Achin became the most frequented harbor of this
distant east, especially for the first quarter of the seventeenth
century, the pivotal period of the development of that corner of the
world.”[82] The following, from among numberless instances, demonstrate
the universality of this form of settlement: “In Urga, _where they
politically dominate_, the merchants are crowded together into a
separate Chinese Town.”[83] In the Jewish States there were “small
colonies of foreign merchants and mechanics, set apart in distinct
quarters of the cities. Here, under the king’s protection, they could
live according to their own religious customs.”[84] We may also compare
with this, First Kings XX, 34. “King Omri of Ephraim was forced by the
military success of his opponent, the King of Damascus, to grant to
the Aramaic merchants the use of certain parts of the city of Samaria,
where under royal protection they could trade. Later, when the turn of
war favored his successor, Ahab, the latter demanded the same privilege
for the Ephraimitic merchants in Damascus.”[85] “The inhabitants of
Italy, wherever they were, held together as solid and organized
masses, the soldiers as legionaries, the merchants of all large cities
as corporations; while the Roman citizens domiciled or dwelling in the
various provincial _circuits_, were organized as a ‘convention of Roman
citizens’ with their own communal government.”[86] We may recall the
mediæval Ghettos, which, before the great persecution of the Jews in
the Middle Ages, were similar merchant colonies. The settlements of
Europeans in the ports of strong foreign empires at the present time
show similar corporate organizations, having their own constitution and
(consular) jurisdiction. China, Turkey and Morocco must continue to
bear this mark of inferiority, while recently Japan has been able to
rid herself of that badge.

The most interesting point about these colonies, at least for our
study, consists in their general tendency to extend their political
influence into complete domination. And there is good reason for this.
Merchants have a mass of movable wealth, which is likely to be used as
a decisive factor in the political upheavals constantly disturbing
all feudal states, be it in international wars between two neighboring
states, or in intra-national fights, such as wars of succession. In
addition to this the colonists, in many cases, may rely on the power of
their home state, basing their claim on ties of blood and on uncommonly
strong commercial interests; while there is besides, the fact that in
many cases they have in their warlike sailor-folk and their numerous
slaves an effective and compact force of their own, capable of
accomplishing much in a limited sphere.

The following story of the rôle played by Arab merchants in East Africa
appears to me to show a historical type heretofore not sufficiently
appreciated: “When Speke, as the first European, made this trip in
1857, the Arabs were merchants, living as aliens in the land. When
in 1861 he passed the same way, the Arabs resembled great landed
proprietors with rich estates and were waging war with the native
territorial ruler. This process, repeatedly found in many other regions
in the interior of Africa, is the necessary consequence of the balance
of power. The foreign merchants, be they Arabs or Suaheli, ask the
privilege of transit and pay tribute for it; they establish warehouses,
which the chiefs favor, as these seem both to satisfy their vanity and
to extend their connections; then incurring the suspicion, oppression
and persecution of the chiefs, the merchants refuse to pay the rack
tolls and dues, which have grown with their increased prosperity. At
last, in one of the inevitable fights for the succession, the Arabs
take the side of one pretender if he is pliable enough, and are thus
brought into internal quarrels of the country and take part in the
often endless wars.”[87]

This political activity of the merchant denizens (_metoikoi_) is
a constantly recurring type. “In Borneo there developed from the
settlements of Chinese gold diggers separate states.”[88] Properly
speaking, the entire history of colonization by Europeans is a series
of examples of the law that, with any superior force, the factories
and larger settlements of foreigners tend to grow into domination,
unless they approximate to the primal type of simple piracy, such as
the Spanish and Portuguese conquests, or the East India Companies, both
the English and the Dutch. “There lies a robber state beside the ocean,
between the Rhine and the Scheldt,” are the accusing words of the Dutch
Multatuli. All East Asiatic, American and African colonies of all
European peoples arose as one or the other of these two types.

But the aliens do not always obtain unconditional mastery. Sometimes
the host state is too strong, and the newcomers remain politically
powerless but protected aliens; as, for example, the Germans in
England. Sometimes the host state, although subjugated, becomes strong
enough to shake off the foreign domination; so, for instance, Sweden
drove out the Hanseats who had imposed on her their sovereignty. In
some cases, a conqueror overcomes both merchants and host state, and
subjugates both; as happened to the republics of Novgorod and Pskov,
when the Russians annexed them. In many cases, however, the rich
foreigners and the domestic nobility amalgamate into one group of
rulers, following the type of the formation of territorial states, in
which we saw this take place whenever two about equally strong groups
of rulers came into conflict. It seems to me that this last named
situation is the most probable assumption for the genesis of the most
important city states of antiquity, for the Greek maritime cities, and
for Rome.

Of Greek history, to use the terms of Kurt Breysig, we know only
the “Middle Ages,” of Roman history, only its “Modern Times.” For
the matters that preceded, we must be extremely careful in drawing
deductions from fancied analogies. But it seems to me that enough facts
are proved and admitted to permit the conclusion that Athens, Corinth,
Mycenæ, Rome, etc., became states in the manner already set forth.
And this would follow, even if the data from all known demography and
general history were not of such universal validity as to permit the
conclusion in itself.

We know accurately from the names of places (Salamis: Island of Peace,
equivalent to Market-Island), from the names of heroes, from monuments,
and from immediate tradition, that in many Greek harbors there existed
Phœnician factories, while the _hinterland_ was occupied by small
feudal states with the typical articulation of nobles, common freemen,
and slaves. It can not seriously be disputed that the development of
the city states was powerfully advanced by foreign influences; and
this is true, though no specific evidence can be adduced to show that
any of the Phœnician, or of the still more powerful Carian merchants
were either allowed to intermarry with the families of the resident
nobility, or were made full citizens, or finally even became princes.

The same applies to Rome, concerning which Mommsen, a cautious author,
states: “Rome owes its importance, if not its origin, to these
commercial and strategic relations. Evidence of this is found in
many traces of far greater value than the tales of historical novels
pretending to be authentic. Take an instance of the primæval relations
existing between Rome and Cære, which was for Etruria what Rome was for
Latium, and thereafter was its nearest neighbor and commercial friend;
or the uncommon importance attributed to the bridge over Tiber and the
bridge building (Pontifex Maximus) in every part of the Roman State; or
the galley in the municipal coat of arms. To this source may be traced
the primitive Roman harbor dues to which, from early times, only those
goods were subject which were intended for sale (_promercale_) and not
what entered the harbor of Ostia, for the proper use of the charterer
(_usuarium_), and which constituted therefore an impost on trade. For
that reason we find the comparatively early use of minted money, and
the commercial treaties of states oversea with Rome. In this sense,
then, Rome may, as the story of its origin states, have been rather a
created than a developed city, and among the Latin cities rather the
youngest than the eldest.”[89]

It would require the work of a lifetime of historical research to
investigate these possibilities, or rather these probabilities;
and then to write the constitutional history of these preëminently
important city states, and to draw thence the very necessary
conclusions. It seems to me that along this path there would be found
much information on many an obscure question, such as the Etruscan
dominion in Rome, or the origin of the rich families of Plebeians, or
concerning the Athenian _metoikoi_, and many other problems.

Here we can only follow the thread which holds out the hope of leading
us through the labyrinth of historical tradition to the issue.


(d) ESSENCE AND ISSUE OF THE MARITIME STATES

All these are true “States” in the sociologic sense, whether they
arose from the fortresses of sea-robbers, or from harbors of original
land nomads as merchant colonies which obtained dominion or which
amalgamated with the dominating group of the host people. For they are
nothing but the organization of the political means, their form is
domination, their content the economic exploitation of the subject by
the master group.

So far as the principle is concerned, they are not to be differentiated
from the States founded by land nomads; and yet they have taken a
different form, both from internal and external reasons, and show a
different psychology of classes.

One must not believe that class feeling was at all different in these
and in the territorial states. Here as there the master class looks
down with the same contempt on the subjects, on the “_Rantuses_,”
on the “man with the blue fingernails,” as the German patrician in
the Middle Ages looked on a being with whom, even when free born, no
intermarriage or social intercourse was permitted. Little indeed does
the class theory of the καλοκἀγαθοί (well-born) or of the patricians
(children of ancestors) differ from that of the country squires. But
other circumstances here bring about differences, consonant, naturally,
with class interests. In any district ruled by merchants, highway
robbery can not be tolerated, and therefore it is considered, e. g.,
among the maritime Greeks, a vulgar crime. The tale of Theseus would
not in a territorial state have been pointed against the highwaymen.
On the other hand, “piracy was regarded by them, in most remote
times, as a trade nowise dishonorable ... of which ample proof may be
found in the Homeric poems; while at a much later period Polycrates
had organized a well developed robber state on the Island of Samos.”
“In the _Corpus Juris_, mention is made of a law of Solon in which
the association of pirates (ἐπὶ λείαν οἰχόμενοι) is recognized as a
permissible company.”[90]

But quite apart from such details, mentioned only because they serve to
cast a clear light on the growth of the “ideologic superstructure,”[N]
the basic conditions of existence of maritime states, utterly different
from those of territorial states, called into being two exceedingly
important phenomena, which are of universal historical importance,
viz., the growth of a _democratic constitution_, whereby the gigantic
contest between the sultanism of the Orient and the civic freedom of
the West was to be fought out (according to Mommsen the true content
of universal history); and in the second place the development of
_capitalistic slave-work_, which in the end was to annihilate all these
states.

[N] How characteristic of these relations it is that Great Britain,
the only “maritime state” of Europe, even at this present day will not
surrender the right to arm privateers.

Let us first consider the inner or socio-psychological causes of this
contrast between the territorial and the maritime state.

States are maintained by the same principle from which they
arise. Conquest of land and populations is the _ratio essendi_ of
a territorial state; and by the repeated conquest of lands and
populations it must grow, until its natural growth is checked by
mountain ranges, desert, or ocean, or its sociological bounds are
determined by contact with other states of its own kind, which it can
not subjugate. The maritime state, on the other hand, came into being
from piracy and trade; and through these two means, it must strive
to extend its power. For this purpose, no extended territory need
be absolutely subjected to its sway. There is no need to carry its
development beyond the first five stages. The maritime states rarely,
and only when compelled, proceed beyond the fifth stage, and attain to
complete intra-nationality and amalgamation. Usually, it is enough if
other sea nomads and traders are kept away, if the monopoly of robbery
and trade is secured, and if the “subjects” are kept quiet by forts
and garrisons. Important places of production are, of course, actually
“dominated”; and this applies especially to mines, to a few fertile
grain belts, to woods with good lumber, to salt works, and to important
fisheries. Domination here, therefore, means permanent administration,
by making the subjects work these for the ruling class. It is only
later in the development, that there arises a taste for “lands and
serfs” and large domains for the ruling class _beyond the confines of
the narrow and original limits of the State_. This happens when the
maritime state by the incorporation of subjugated territories has
become a mixture of the territorial and the maritime forms. But even in
that case, and in contradistinction to territorial states, large landed
properties are merely a source of money rentals, and are in nearly all
cases administered as absentee-property. This we find in Carthage and
in the later Roman Empire.

The interests of the master class, which in the maritime state as well
as in every other state, governs according to its own advantage, are
different from those in the territorial state. In the latter the feudal
territorial magnate is powerful because of his ownership of lands
and people; while conversely, the patrician of the maritime city is
powerful because of his wealth. The territorial magnate can dominate
his “State” only by the number of men-at-arms maintained by him, and
in order to have as many of these as possible, he must increase his
territory as much as possible. The patrician, on the other hand, can
control his “state” only by movable wealth, with which he can hire
strong arms or bribe weak souls; such wealth is won faster by piracy
and by trade than by land wars and the possession of large estates
in distant territories. Furthermore, in order thoroughly to use such
property, he would be obliged to leave his city to settle down on it,
and to become a regular squire; because in a period when money has not
yet become general, where a profitable division of labor between town
and country has not yet come about, the exploitation of large estates
can only be carried on by actually consuming their products, and
absentee ownership as a source of income is inconceivable. Thus far,
however, we have not reached that portion of the development. We are
still examining primitive conditions. No patrician of any city-state
would, at this time, think of leaving his lively rich home, in order
to bury himself among barbarians, and thus with one move cut himself
off in his state from any political rôle. All his economic, social and
political interests impel him with one accord toward maritime ventures.
Not landed property, but movable capital, is the sinew of his life.

These were the moving causes of the actions of the master class in
the maritime cities; and even where geographical conditions permitted
an extensive expansion beyond the adjoining _hinterland_ of these
cities, they turned the weight of effort toward sea-power rather than
toward territorial growth. Even in the case of Carthage, its colossal
territory was of far less importance to it than its maritime interests.
Primarily it conquered Sicily and Corsica more in order to check the
competition of the Greek and Etruscan traders than for the sake of
owning these islands; it extended its territories toward the Lybians
largely to insure the security of its other home possessions; and
finally, when it conquered Spain, its ultimate reason was the need
of owning the mines. The history of the _Hansa_ shows many points
of similarity to the above. The majority of these maritime cities,
moreover, were not capable of subjugating a large district. Even had
there been the will to conquer, there were extraneous, geographical
conditions that hindered. All along the Mediterranean, with the
exception of some few places, the coastal plain is extremely narrow,
a small strip fenced off by high mountain ranges. That was one cause
which prevented most of the states grouped about some trading harbor
from growing to anything like the size we should naturally assume to be
probable; while in the open country, ruled by herdsmen, and this very
early, immense realms came into being. The second cause for the small
beginnings of these states is found in this, that the _hinterland_
whether in the hills or on the few plains of the Mediterranean was
occupied by warlike tribes. These tribesmen, either hunters or warlike
herdsmen, or else primitive feudal states of the same master race as
the sea nomads, were not likely to be subjugated without a severe
contest. Thus in Greece the interior was saved from the maritime states.

For these reasons the maritime State, even when most developed, always
remains centralized, one is tempted to say centered, on its trading
harbor; while the territorial State, strongly decentralized from the
start, for a long time continues to develop as it expands a still
more pronounced decentralization. Later, we shall see how this is
affected by the adoption of those forms of government and of economic
achievement which first were perfected in the “city-state,” and which
thus obtained the strength to counteract the centrifugal forces, and to
build up the central organization which is characteristic of our modern
states. This is the first great contrast between the two forms of the
State.

No less decisive is the second point of contrast, whereby the
territorial State remains tied up to natural economies as opposed to
money economies, toward which the maritime State quickly turns. This
contrast grows also out of the basic conditions of their existence.

Wherever a State lives in natural economy, money is a superfluous
luxury--so superfluous that an economy developed to the use of
money retrogrades again into a system of payments in kind as soon
as the community drops back into the primitive form. Thus after
Charlemagne had issued good coins, the economic situation expelled
them. Neustria--not to mention Austrasia--under the stress of the
migration of the peoples reverted to payment in kind. Such a system
can well do without money as a standard of values, since it is without
any developed intercourse and traffic. The lord’s tenants furnish
as tribute those things that the lord and his followers consume
immediately; while his ornaments, fine fabrics, damascened arms, or
rare horses, salt, etc., are procured in exchange with wandering
merchants for slaves, wax, furs and other products of a warlike
economic system of exchange in kind.

In city life, at any advanced stage of development, it is impossible to
exist without a common measure of values. The free mechanic in a city
can not, except in rare cases, find some other craftsman in need of the
special thing which he produces, prepared to consume it immediately.
Then, too, in cities the inevitable retail trade in food products,
where every one must purchase nearly everything required, makes the
use of coined money quite inevitable. It is impossible to conduct
trade in its more limited sense, not between merchant and customers,
but between merchant and merchant, without having a common measure of
value. Imagine the case of a trader entering a port with a cargo of
slaves, wishing to take cloth as a return cargo, and finding a cloth
merchant who at the time may not want slaves but iron, or cattle,
or furs. To accomplish this exchange, at least a dozen intermediate
trades would have to take place before the object could be achieved.
That can be avoided only if there exists some one commodity desired by
all. In the system of payment in kind of the territorial states this
may be taken by cattle or horses, since they may be used by any one at
some time; but the ship owner can not load with cattle as a means of
payment, and thus gold and silver become recognized as “money.”

From centralization and from the use of money, which are the necessary
properties of the maritime or the _city State_, as we shall hereafter
call it, its fate follows of necessity.

The psychology of the townsman, and especially of the dweller in the
maritime commercial city, is radically different from that of the
countryman. His point of view is freer and more inclusive, even though
it be more superficial; he is livelier, because more impressions strike
him in a day than a peasant in a year. He becomes used to constant
changes and news, and thus is always _novarum rerum cupidus_. He is
more remote from nature and less dependent on it than is the peasant,
and therefore he has less fear of “ghosts.” One consequence of this is
that an underling in a city State is less apt to regard the “taboo”
regulations imposed on him by the first and second estates of rulers.
And as he is compelled to live in compact masses with his fellow
subjects, he early finds his strength in numbers, so that he becomes
more unruly and seditious than the serf who lives in such isolation
that he never becomes conscious of the mass to which he belongs and
ever remains under the impression that his overlord with his followers
would have the upper hand in every fight.

This in itself brings about an ever progressive dissolution of the
rigid system of subordinated groups first created by the feudal state.
In Greece the territorial states alone were able to keep their subjects
for a long time in a state of subjection: Sparta its Helots, Thessaly
its _Penestæ_. In all the city States, on the other hand, we early
find an uprising of the proletariat against which the master class was
unable to oppose an effective resistance.

The economic situation tends toward the same result as the conditions
of settlement. Movable wealth had far less stability than landed
property: the sea is tricky, and the fortunes of maritime war and
piracy not less so. The rich man of to-day may lose all by a turn of
Fortune’s wheel; while the poorest man may, by the same swing, land
on top. But in a commonwealth based entirely on possessions, loss
of fortune brings with it loss of rank and of “class,” just as the
converse takes place. The rich Plebeian becomes the leader of the
mass of the people in their constitutional fight for equal rights and
places all his fortune at risk in that struggle. The position of the
patricians becomes untenable; when coerced they have ever conceded
the claims of the lower class. As soon as the first rich Plebeian has
been taken into their ranks, the right of rule by birth, defended as a
holy institution, has forever become impossible. Henceforth it follows
that what is fair for one is fair for the other; and the aristocratic
rule is followed first by the plutocratic, then by the democratic,
finally by the ochlocratic régime, until either foreign conquest or
the “tyranny” of some “Savior of the Sword” rescues the community from
chaos.

This end affects not only the State, but in most cases its inhabitants
so profoundly that one may speak of a literal _death of the peoples_,
caused by the _capitalistic exploitation of slave labor_. This latter
is a social institution inevitably bound to exist in every state
founded on piracy and maritime ventures and thus coming to use money as
a means of exchange. In the primitive stages of feudalism, whence it
was derived, slavery was harmless, as is true in all economic systems
based on exchange and use in kind, only to become an ulcerating cancer,
utterly destructive of the entire life of the State as soon as it is
exploited by the “capitalist” method, i. e., as soon as slave labor is
applied, not to be used in a system of a feudal payment in kind, but to
supply a market paying in money.

Numberless slaves are brought into the country by piracy, privateering,
or by the commercial wars. The wealth of their owners permits them
to work the ground more intensively, and the owners of realty within
the confines of the city limits draw ever increasing revenues from
their possessions, and become more and more greedy of land. The small
freeholder in the country, overburdened by the taxes and military
service of wars waged in the interests of this great merchant class,
sinks into debt, becomes a slave for debt, or migrates into the city
as a pauper. But even so there is no hope for him, since the removal
of the peasants has damaged the craftsmen and small traders, for the
peasants were wont to purchase in the city, while the great estates,
constantly increasing by the removal of the peasantry, supply their
own needs by their own slave products. The evil attacks other parts
of the body politic. The remaining trades are gradually usurped by
masters exploiting slave labor, which is cheaper than free labor.
The middle class thus goes to pieces; and a pauper, good-for-nothing
mob, a genuine “bob-tail proletariat” comes into being, which, by
reason of the democratic constitution achieved in the interim, is the
sovereign of the commonwealth. The full course, political as well as
military, is then a mere question of time. It may take place without
a foreign invasion; which, however, usually sets in, when by reason
of the physical breakdown caused by the immense depopulation, by the
consumption of the people in its literal sense, the final stage is
attained. This is the end of all these states. Within the scope of this
treatise we can not dilate on this phase.

Only one city State was able to maintain itself throughout the
centuries, because it was the ultimate conqueror of all the others,
and because it was enabled to counteract the consumption of population
by the only method of sanitation possible; by extensive recreations
of middle class populations, both in cities and in country districts,
as well as by vast colonizations of peasants on lands taken from the
vanquished.

The Roman Empire was that state. But even this gigantic organism
finally succumbed to the consumption of population, caused by
capitalistic slave exploitation. In the interval, however, it had
created the first _imperium_, i. e., the first tensely centralized
state on a large scale, and had overcome and amalgamated all
territorial states of both the Mediterranean shores and its neighboring
countries, and had thereby for all time set before the world the model
of such an organized dominion. In addition to this it had developed
the organization of cities and of the system of money economy to such
an extent that they never were utterly destroyed, even in the turmoil
of the barbarian migration. In consequence of this, the feudal
territorial states that occupied the territory of the former Roman
Empire either directly or indirectly received those new impulses which
were to carry them beyond the condition of the normal primitive feudal
State.




CHAPTER V

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEUDAL STATE


(a) THE GENESIS OF LANDED PROPERTY

We now return, as stated above, to that point where the primitive
feudal State gave rise to the city State as an offshoot, to follow the
upward growth of the main branch. As the destiny of the city State was
determined by the agglomeration of that form of wealth about which
the State swung in its orbit, so the fate of the territorial State is
conditioned by that agglomeration of wealth which in turn controls its
orbit, the _ownership of landed property_.

In the preceding, we followed the economic differentiation in the
case of the shepherd tribes, and showed that even here the law of the
agglomeration about existing nuclei of wealth begins to assert its
efficacy, as soon as the political means comes into play, be it in the
form of wars for booty or still more in the form of slavery. We saw
that the tribe had differentiated nobles and common freemen, beneath
whom slaves, being without any political rights, are subordinated as
a third class. This differentiation of wealth is introduced into the
primitive state, and sharpens very markedly the contrast of social
rank. It becomes still more accentuated by settlement, whereby private
ownership in lands is created. Doubtless there existed even at the time
when the primitive feudal state came into being, great differences in
the amount of lands possessed by individuals, especially if within
the tribe of herdsmen the separation had been strongly marked between
the prince-like owners of large herds and many slaves, and the poorer
common freemen. These princes occupy more land than do the small
freemen.

At first, this happens quite harmlessly, and without a trace of any
consciousness of the fact that extended possession of land will become
the means of a considerable increase of social power and of wealth.
Of this, there is at this time no question, since at this stage the
common freemen would have been powerful enough to prevent the formation
of extended landed estates had they known that it would eventually do
them harm. But no one could have foreseen this possibility. Lands, in
the condition in which we are observing them, have no value. For that
reason the object and the spoils of the contest were not the possession
of _lands_, but of _the land and its peasants, the latter being bound
to the soil_ (_glebæ adscripti_ of our later law) as labor substrat and
labor motors, from the conjunction of which there grows the object of
the political means, viz., ground rent.

Every one is at liberty to take as much of _the uncultivated land_
existing in masses as he needs and will or can cultivate. It is quite
as unlikely that any one would care to measure off for another parts
of an apparently limitless supply, as that any one would apportion the
supply of atmospheric air.

The princes of the noble clans, probably from the start, pursuant to
the usage of the tribe of herdsmen, receive more “lands and peasants”
than do the common freemen. That is their right as princes, because
of their position as patriarchs, war lords, and captains maintaining
their warlike suites of half-free persons, of servants, of clients, or
of refugees. This probably amounts to a considerable difference in the
primitive amounts of land ownership. But this is not all. The princes
need a larger surface of the “_land without peasants_” than do the
common freemen, because they bring with them their servants and slaves.
These have, however, no standing at law, and are incapable, according
to the universal concepts of folk law, of acquiring title to landed
property. Since, however, they must have land in order to live, their
master takes it for them, so as to settle them thereon. In consequence
of this, the richer the prince of the nomad tribe the more powerful the
territorial magnate becomes.

But this means that wealth, and with it social rank, is consolidated
more firmly and more durably than in the stage of herdsman
ownership. For the greatest herds may be lost, but landed property
is indestructible; and men bound to labor, bringing forth rentals,
reproduce their kind even after the most terrible slaughter, even
should they not be obtainable full grown in slave hunts.

About this fixed nucleus of wealth, property begins to agglomerate
with increasing rapidity. Harmless as was the first occupation, men
must soon recognize the fact that rental increases with the number of
slaves one can settle on the unoccupied lands. Henceforth, the external
policy of the feudal state is no longer directed toward the acquisition
of land and peasants, but rather of peasants without land, to be
carried off home as serfs, and there to be colonized anew. When the
entire state carries on the war or the robbing expedition, the nobles
obtain the lion’s share. Very often, however, they go off on their own
account, followed only by their suites, and then the common freeman,
staying at home, receives no share in the loot. Thus the vicious circle
constantly tends rapidly to enlarge with the increasing wealth of the
lands owned by the nobles. The more slaves a noble has, the more rental
he can obtain. With this, in turn, he can maintain a warlike following,
composed of servants, of lazy freemen, and of refugees. With their
help, he can, in turn, drive in so many more slaves, to increase his
rentals.

This process takes place, even where some central power exists, which,
pursuant to the general law of the people, has the right to dispose of
uncultivated lands; while it is, in many cases, not only by sufferance,
but often by the express sanction of that authority. As long as the
feudal magnate remains the submissive vassal of the crown, it lies
in the king’s interest to make him as strong as possible. By this
means his military suite, to be placed at the disposal of the crown
in times of war, is correspondingly increased. We shall adduce only
one illustration to show that the necessary consequence in universal
history is not confined to the well-known effect in the feudal states
of Western Europe, but follows from these premises even under totally
different surroundings: “The principal service in Fiji consisted in
war duty; and if the outcome was successful it meant new grants of
lands, including therein the denizens, as slaves, and thus led to the
assumption of new obligations.”[91]

This accumulation of landed property in ever increasing quantity in
the hands of the landed nobility brings the primitive feudal state of
a higher stage to the “finished feudal state” with a complete scale of
feudal ranks.

Reference to a previous work by the author, based on a study of the
sources, will show the same causal connection for German lands;[92] and
in that publication it was pointed out that in all the instances noted
a process takes place, identical in its principal lines of development.
It is only on this line of reasoning that one can explain the fact,
to take Japan as an example, that its feudal system developed into
the precise details which are well known to the students of European
history, although Japan is inhabited by a race fundamentally different
from the Arians; and besides (a strong argument against giving too
great weight to the materialistic view of history) the process of
agriculture is on a totally different technical basis, since the
Japanese are not cultivators with the plow, but with the hoe.

In this instance, as throughout this book, it is not the fortune of
a single people that is investigated; it is rather the object of the
author to narrate the typical development, the universal consequences,
of the same basic traits of mankind wherever they are placed.
Presupposing a knowledge of the two most magnificent examples of the
expanded feudal state, Western Europe and Japan, we shall, in general,
limit ourselves to cases less well known, and so far as possible give
the preference to material taken from ethnography, rather than from
history in its more restricted sense.

The process now to be narrated is a change, gradually consummated but
fundamentally revolutionary, of the political and social articulation
of the primitive feudal state: _the central authority loses its
political power to the territorial nobility, the common freeman sinks
from his status, while the “subject” mounts_.


(b) THE CENTRAL POWER IN THE PRIMITIVE FEUDAL STATE

The patriarch of a tribe of herdsmen, though endowed with the authority
which flows from his war-lordship and sacerdotal functions, generally
has no despotic powers. The same may be said of the “king” of a small
settled community, where, generally speaking, he would exercise very
limited command. On the other hand, as soon as some military genius
manages to fuse together numerous tribes of herdsmen into one powerful
mass of warriors, despotic centralized power is the direct, inevitable
consequence.[93] As soon as war exists, the truth of the Homeric

    οὐκ ἀγαθὴ πολυκοιρανιὴ εἶς κοίρανος ἔστω
    εἶς βασιλεύς,[O]

is admitted by the most unruly tribes, and becomes a fact to be
acted on. The free primitive huntsmen render to their elected chief
unconditioned obedience, while on the war-path; the free Cossacks
of the Ukraine, recognizing no authority in times of peace, submit
to their _hetman’s_ power of life and death in times of war. This
obedience toward their war-lord is a trait common to every genuine
warrior psychology.

[O] “The rule of the many is not a good thing, over the many there
should be one king.”

The leaders of the great migrations of nomads are all powerful despots:
Attila, Omar, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Mosilikatse, Ketchwayo.
Similarly, we find that whenever a mighty territorial state has
come into being as the result of the welding together of a number
of primitive feudal states, there existed in the beginning a strong
central authority. Examples of this may be seen in the case of Sargon
Cyrus, Chlodowech, Charlemagne, Boleslaw the Red. Sometimes, especially
as long as the main state has not yet reached its geographical or
sociologic bounds, the centralized authority is maintained intact in
the hands of a series of strong monarchs, which degenerates, in some
instances, to the maddest despotism and insanity of some of the Cæsars:
especially do we find flagrant examples of this in Mesopotamia and
in Africa. We shall merely touch on this phase: the more so, as it
has little general effect on the final development of the forms of
government. This point should, however, be stated, that the development
of the form of government of a despotism depends in the main, on what
the _sacerdotal_ status of the rulers may be, in addition to their
position as war-lords, and whether or not they hold the monopoly of
trade as an additional regalian right.

The combination of Cæsar and Pope tends in all cases to develop the
extreme forms of despotism; while the partition of spiritual and
temporal functions brings it about that their exponents mutually check
and counterbalance one another. A characteristic example may be found
in the conditions prevailing among the Malay states of the East Indian
Archipelago, genuine “maritime states,” whose genesis is an exact
counterpart of that of the Greek maritime states. Generally speaking,
the prince has just as little power among these, as, shall we say, the
king at the opening of the history of the Attic states. The chieftains
of the clans (in Sulu the Dato, in Achin the Panglima), as in the case
of Athens, have the real power. But where, “as in Tobah, religious
motives endow the rulers with the position of a Pope in miniature, an
entirely different phase is found. The Panglima then depend entirely
on the Rajah, and are merely officials.”[94] To refer to a well-known
fact, when the aristocrats and chiefs of the clans in Athens and in
Rome abolished the kingdom, they preserved at least the old _title_,
and granted its use to a dignitary otherwise politically impotent,
in order that the gods might have their offerings presented in the
accustomed manner. For the same reason, in many cases, the descendant
of the former tribal king is preserved as a dignitary, otherwise
totally powerless, while the actual power of government has long since
been transferred to some war chief; as in the later Merovingian Empire,
the Carolingian Mayors of the palace (Majordomus) ruled alongside a
“long locked king,” _rex crinitus_, of the race of Merowech, so, in
Japan, the Shogun ruled beside the Mikado, and in the Empire of the
Incas, the commander of the Inca beside the Huillcauma, who had been
gradually limited to his sacerdotal functions.[P][95]

[P] In Egypt we find a similar state of affairs, beside the bigoted
Amenhotep IV., the Majordomus of the palace Haremheb, who “managed to
unite in his hands the highest military and administrative functions of
the empire, until he exercised the powers of a regent of the state.”
Schneider, _Civilization and Thought of the Ancient Egyptians_.
Leipzig, 1907, page 22.

In addition to the office of supreme pontiff, the power of the head of
the state is frequently increased enormously by the trading monopoly, a
function exercised by the primitive chieftains as a natural consequence
of the peaceful barter of guest-gifts. Such a trade monopoly, for
example, was exercised by King Solomon; and latterly by the Roman
Emperor Friedrich II.[Q][96]

[Q] Cf. _Acta Imperii_, or _Huillard-Breholles, H. D. Fred.
II._--_Translator._

As a rule, the negro chieftains are “monopolists of trading”;[97] as
is the King of Sulu.[98] Among the Galla, wherever the supremacy of a
head chief is acknowledged, he becomes “as a matter of course, the
tradesman for his tribe; since none of his subjects is allowed to trade
with strangers directly.”[99] Among the Barotse and Mabunda, the king
is “according to the strict interpretation of the law, the only trader
of his country.”[100]

Ratzel notes, in telling language, the importance of this factor:
“In addition to his witchcraft, the chief increases his power by a
_monopoly of trading_. Since the chief is the sole intermediary in
trade, everything desired by his subjects passes through his hands,
and he becomes the donor of all longed-for gifts, the fulfiller of the
fondest wishes. In such a system, there lie certainly the possibilities
of great power.”[101] If, in conquered districts, where the power of
government is apt to be more tensely exercised, there is added the
monopoly of trade, the royal power may become very great.

It may be stated as a general rule, that even in the apparently most
extreme cases of _despotism_, no monarchical _absolutism_ exists. The
ruler may, undeterred by fear of punishment, rage against his subject
class; but he is checked in no small degree by his feudal followers.
Ratzel, in speaking of the subject generally, remarks: “The so-called
‘court assemblage’ of African or of ancient American chiefs is probably
always a council.... Although we meet with traces of absolutism with
all peoples on a low scale, even where the form of government is
republican, the cause of absolutism is not in the strength of either
the state or of the chieftain, but in the moral weakness of the
individual, who succumbs without any effective resistance to the powers
wielded over him.”[102] The kingdom of the Zulu is a limited despotism,
in which very powerful ministers of state (Induna) share the power;
with other Caffir tribes it is a council, sometimes dominating both
people and chieftains.[103] In spite of this control “under Tshaka
every sneezing or hawking in the presence of the tyrant, as well as
every lack of tears at the death of some royal kinsman, was punished
with death.”[104] The same limitation applies to the West African
kingdoms of Dahomy and Ashanti, notorious because of their frightful
barbarities. “In spite of the waste of human life, in war, slave trade,
and human sacrifices, there existed at no place absolute despotism....
Bowditch remarks on the similarity of the system prevailing in Ashanti,
with its ranks and orders, with the old Persian system as described by
Herodotus.”[105]

One must be very careful, and this may again be insisted upon, not
to confuse despotism with absolutism. Even in the feudal states of
Western Europe, the rulers exercised, in many cases, power of life and
death, free from the trammels of law; but nevertheless such a ruler was
impotent as against his “magnates.” So long as he does not interfere
with the privileges of the classes, he need not restrain his cruelty,
and he may even occasionally sacrifice one of the great men; but woe to
him were he to dare to touch the economic privileges of his magnates.
It is possible to study this very characteristic phase, completely
free, from the standpoint of law, and yet closely hemmed in by
political checks, in the great East African empires: “The government
of Waganda and Wanyoro is, in theory, based on the rule of the king
over the whole territory; but in reality this is only the semblance of
government, since, as a matter of fact, the lands belong to the supreme
chieftains of the empire. It was they who represented the popular
opposition to foreign influences, in the time of Mtesa; and Muanga did
not dare, for fear of them, to carry out any innovations. Although the
kingship is limited in reality, yet in form it occupies an imposing
position in unessentials. The ruler is absolute master over the lives
and limbs of his subjects, the mass of the people, and feels himself
restrained only in the narrowest circle of the chief courtiers.”[106]

Precisely the same statement applies to the inhabitants of Oceania, to
mention the last of the great societies that created states: “At no
place does one find an entire absence of a representative mediation
between prince and people.... The aristocratic principle corrects
the patriarchal. Therefore, the extremes of _despotism_ depend more
on class and caste pressure than on the overpowering will of any
individual.”[107]


(c) THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DISINTEGRATION OF THE PRIMITIVE FEUDAL
STATE

Space forbids our detailing the innumerable shadings under which the
patriarchal-aristocratic (in some cases plutocratic) mixture of form
of government in the primitive feudal state is shown in either an
ethnographic, historical or juristic survey. This is likewise of the
greatest importance for the subsequent development.

It is indifferent how much power the ruler may have had at the
beginning, an inevitable fate breaks down his power in a short while;
and does this, one may say, the faster, the greater that power was, i.
e., the larger the territory of the primitive feudal state of higher
grade.

Taking into account the process already set forth, which, through the
occupation and settlement of unused lands by means of newly acquired
slaves, made for the increase of power of the separate nobles, a
result came about which might prove uncomfortable for the central
power. Mommsen in speaking of the Celts says: “When in a clan numbering
about eighty thousand armed men, a single chieftain could appear at
convocation with ten thousand followers, exclusive of his serfs and
debtors, it becomes clear that such a noble was rather an independent
prince than a mere citizen of his clan.”[108] And the same may apply to
the “Heiu” of the Somali, where a great landed proprietor maintained
hundreds of families in dependence on his lands, “so that conditions
in Somaliland tend to recall those existing in mediæval Europe during
feudal times.”[109]

Although such a preponderance of isolated territorial magnates can come
about in the feudal state of low development, it nevertheless reaches
its culmination in the feudal state of higher grade, the great feudal
state; this happens by reason of the increased power given to the
landlords by the bestowal of _public official functions_.

The more the state expands, the more must official power be delegated
by the central government to its representatives on the borders and
marches, who are constantly threatened by wars and insurrectionary
outbreaks. In order to preserve his bailiwick in safety for the state,
such an official must be endowed with supreme military powers, joined
with the functions of the highest administrative officials. Even
should he not require a large number of civil employees, he still must
have a permanent military force. And how is he to pay these men? With
one possible exception, to be noted hereafter, there are no taxes
which flow into the treasury of the central government and then are
poured back again over the land, since these presuppose an economic
development existing only where money is employed. But in communities
having a system of payments in kind, such as these “territorial
states” all are, there are no taxes payable in money. For that reason,
the central government has no alternative but to turn over to the
counts, or border wardens, or satraps, the income of its territorial
jurisdiction. Such an official, then, receives the dues of the
subjects, determines when and where forced labor is to be rendered,
receives the deodands, fees and penalties payable in cattle, etc.; and
in consideration of these must maintain the armed force, place definite
numbers of armed men at the disposal of the central government, build
and maintain highways and bridges, feed and stable the ruler and his
following, or his “royal messengers,” and finally, furnish a definite
“Sergeantry” consisting of highly valuable goods, easily transported to
the court, such as horses, cattle, slaves, precious metals, wines, etc.

In other words, he receives an immensely large fief for his services.
If previously he was not, he now becomes the greatest man in his
country, though before he probably was the most powerful landlord in
his official district. He will hereafter do exactly what his equals
in rank are doing, although they may not have his official position;
that is to say, he will, only on a larger scale, continue to settle
new lands with ever newly recruited serfs. By this he increases his
military strength; and this must be wished for and aided by the
central government. For it is the fate of these states, that they must
fatten those very local powers, that are to engulf them.

Conditions arise which enable the warden of the marches to impose the
terms of his military assistance, especially in the inevitable feuds
which arise over the right of succession to the central government.
Thereby he obtains further valuable concessions, especially the
formal acknowledgment of the heritability of his official fief, so
that office and lands come to be held by an identical tenure. By
this means, he gradually becomes almost independent of the central
authority, and the complaint of the Russian peasant, “The sky is high
up and the Tsar is far off,” tends to become of universal application.
Take this characteristic example from Africa: “The empire of Lunda
is an absolute feudal state. The chieftains (Muata, Mona, Muene) are
permitted independent action in all internal affairs, so long as it
pleases the Muata Jamvo. Usually, the great chieftains, living afar,
send their caravans with their tribute once a year to the Mussumba;
but _those living at too great a distance, sometimes for long periods
omit making any payments of their tribute_; while similar chiefs in the
neighborhood of the capital forward tribute many times a year.”[110]

Nothing can show more plainly than this report, how, because of
inadequate means of transportation, extent of distance becomes
politically effective in these states loosely held together and in a
state of payment in kind. One is tempted to say that the independence
of the feudal masters grows in proportion to the square of their
distance from the seat of the central authority. The crown must pay
more and more for their services, and must gradually confirm them in
all the sovereign powers of the state, or else permit their usurpation
of these powers after they have seized them one after the other. Such
are heritability of fiefs, tolls on highways and commerce, (in a later
stage the right of coinage), high and low justice, the right to exact
for private gain the public duties of repair of ways and bridges (the
old English _trinodis necessitas_) and the disposal of the military
services of the freemen of the country.

By these means, the powerful frontier wardens gradually attain an
ever greater, and finally a complete, _de facto_ independence, even
though the _formal_ bond of feudal suzerainty may for a long time
apparently keep together the newly developed principalities. The
reader, of course, recalls instances of these typical transitions;
all mediæval history is one chain of them; not only the Merovingian
and Carolingian Empires, not only Germany, but also France, Italy,
Spain, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, as well as Japan and China,[111]
have passed through this process of decomposition, not only once,
but repeatedly. And this is no less true of the feudal states of
Mesopotamia: great empires follow each other, acquire power, burst
asunder time after time, and again are re-united. In the case of
Persia, we are expressly told: “Separate states and provinces, by a
successful revolt, obtained freedom for a longer or shorter time, and
the ‘great king’ at Susa did not always have the power to force them
to return to their obedience; in other states, the satraps or warlike
chieftains ruled arbitrarily, carrying on the government faithlessly
and violently, either as independent rulers or tributary under-kings of
the king of kings. The Persian world-empire went to its disintegration
an agglomeration of states and lands, without any general law, without
ordered administration, without uniform judicial system, without order
and enforcement of law, and without possibility of help.”[112]

A similar fate overtook its neighbor in the valley of the Nile:
“Princes spring from the families of the usurpers, free landlords,
who pay land-taxes to nobody but to the king, and rule over certain
strips of land, or districts. These district princes govern a territory
specifically set apart as pertaining to their official position, and
separate from their family possessions.

“Later successful warlike operations, perhaps filling in the gap
between the Ancient and the Middle (Egyptian) Empire, _together with
the gathering in of captives of the wars, who could be utilized as
labor motors_, brought a more stringent exploitation of the subjects,
a definite determination of the tributes. During the Middle Empire,
the power of the princes of the clans rose to an enormous height,
they maintained great courts, imitating the splendor of the royal
establishment.”[113] “With the decline of the royal authority
during a period of decay, the higher officials use their power for
personal aims, in order to make their offices hereditary within their
families.”[R][114]

[R] Maspero says, _New Light on Ancient Egypt_, pp. 218-9: “Until
then, in fact, the high priest had been chosen and nominated by the
king; from the time of Rameses III. he was always chosen from the same
family, and the son succeeded his father on the pontifical throne. From
that time events marched quickly. The Theban mortmain was doubled with
a veritable seigniorial fief, which its masters increased by marriages
with the heirs of neighboring fiefs, by continual bequests from one
branch of the family to the other, and by _the placing of cadets of
each generation at the head of the clergy of certain secondary towns_.
The official protocol of the offices filled by their wives shows that a
century or a century and a half after Rameses III., almost the whole of
the Thebaid, about a third of the Egyptian territory was in the hands
of the High Priest of Ammon and of his family.”--_Translator’s Note
(and italics)._

But the operation of this historical law is not restricted to the
“historical” peoples. In speaking of the feudal states of India,
Ratzel states: “Even beyond Radshistan, the nobles often enjoyed a
great measure of independence, so that even in Haiderabad, after the
Nizam had acquired the sole rule over the country, the Umara or Nabobs
maintained troops of their own, independently of the army of the Nizam.
These smaller feudatories did not comply with the increased demands of
modern times as regards the administration of Indian states as often as
did the greater princes.”[115]

In Africa finally, great feudal states come and pass away, as do
bubbles arising and bursting from the stream of eternally similar
phenomena. The powerful Ashanti empire, within one and a half
centuries, has shriveled to less than one-fifth of its territory;[116]
and many of the empires that the Portuguese encountered have since
disappeared without leaving a trace of their existence. And yet these
were strong feudal powers: “Stately and cruel negro empires, such as
Benin, Dahomy or Ashanti, resemble in many respects ancient Peru or
Mexico, having in their vicinity politically disorganized tribes. The
hereditary nobility of the Mfumus, sharply separated from the rest of
the state, had mainly the administration of the districts, and together
with the more transitory nobility of service, formed in Loango strong
pillars of the ruler and his house.”[117]

But whenever such a state, once powerful, has split into a number of
territorial states either _de facto_ or juristically independent, the
former process begins anew. The great state gobbles up the smaller
ones, until a new empire has arisen. “The greatest territorial magnates
later become emperors,” says Meitzen laconically of Germany.[118] But
even this great demesne vanishes, split up by the need of equipping
warlike vassals with fiefs. “The Kings soon found that they had donated
away all their belongings; their great territorial possessions in the
Delta had melted away,” says Schneider (l. c. page 38) of the Pharaohs
of the sixth dynasty. The same causes brought about like effects in
the Frankish Empire among both Merovingians and Carolingians; and later
in Germany in the case of the Saxon and Hohenstaufen Emperors.[119]
Additional references are unnecessary, as every one is familiar with
these instances.

In a subsequent part of this treatise, we shall examine into the causes
that finally liberated the primitive feudal state from this witch’s
curse, this circling from agglomeration to disintegration without end.
Our present task is to take up the _social_ side of the process, as
we have already taken up the historical phase of it. It changes the
articulation of classes in the most decisive manner.

The common freemen, the lower strata of the dominating group, are
struck with overpowering force. They sink into bondsmenship. Their
decay must go along with that of the central power; since both, allied
one might say, by nature, are menaced simultaneously by the expanding
power of the great territorial lords. The crown controls the landed
magnate so long as the levy of the common freemen of the district is
a superior force to his guards, to his “following.” But a fatal need,
already set forth, impels the crown to deliver over the peasants to
the landed lordling, and from the moment when the county levy has
become weaker than his guards, the free peasants are lost. Where the
sovereign powers of the state are delegated to the territorial magnate,
i. e., where he has developed more or less into an independent lord of
the region, the overthrow of the liberties of the peasants is carried
out, at least in part, under the color of law, by forcing excessive
military services, which ruin the peasants, and which are required the
more often as the dynastic interests of the territorial lord require
new lands and new peasants, or by abusing the right to compulsory
labor, or by turning the administration of public justice into military
oppression.

The common freemen, however, receive the final blow either by the
formal delegation or by the usurpation of the most important powers
of the crown, the disposition of unoccupied lands or “commons.”
Originally, this land belonged to all the “folk” in common; i. e., to
the freemen for common use; but in accordance with an original custom,
probably universal, the patriarch enjoys disposal of it. This right of
disposition passes to the territorial magnate with the remaining royal
privileges--and thus he has obtained the power to strangle any few
remaining freemen. He now declares all unoccupied lands his property,
_and forbids their settlement by free peasants_, while those only are
permitted access who recognize his superior lordship; i. e., who have
commended themselves to him, or are his serfs.

That is the last nail in the coffin of the common freemen. Heretofore
their equality of possessions has been in some way guaranteed.
Even if a peasant had twelve sons, his patrimony was not split up,
because eleven of them broke new hides of land in the commons of the
community, or else in the general land not yet distributed to other
villages. That is henceforth impossible; hides tend to divide where
large families grow up, others are united when heir and heiress marry:
henceforth there come into existence “laborers,” recruited from the
owners of half, a quarter, or even an eighth of a hide who help work
a larger area. Thus the free peasantry splits into rich and poor;
this begins to loosen the bond which hitherto had made the bundle of
arrows unbreakable. When, therefore, some comrade is overwhelmed by the
exactions of the lord and has become his liegeman, or if bond peasants
are settled among the original owners, either to occupy some hide
vacated by the extinction of the family or fallen into the hands of the
lord because of the indebtedness of its occupant, then every social
cohesion is loosened; and the peasantry, split apart by class and by
economic contrasts, is handed over without power of resistance to the
magnate.

On the other hand, the result is the same where the magnate has no
usurped regalian powers of the state. In such cases, open force and
shameless violation of rights accomplish the same ends. The ruler,
far off and impotent, bound to rely on the good will and help of the
violators of law and order, has neither the power nor the opportunity
of interference.

There is hardly any need of adducing instances. The free peasantry
of Germany were put through the process of expropriation and
declassification at least three times. Once it happened in Celtic
times.[120] The second overthrow of the free peasants of the old German
Empire took place in the ninth and tenth centuries. The third tragedy
of the same form began with the fifteenth century, in the countries
formerly Slavic, which they had conquered and colonized.[121] The
peasants fared worse in those lands, in the “republics of nobles,”
where there was no monarchical central authority, whose community of
interests with their subjects tended to deprive oppression of its
worse features. The Celts in the Gaul of Cæsar’s time are one of the
earliest examples. Here “the great families exercised an economic,
military and political preponderance. They monopolized the leases of
the lucrative rights of the state. They forced the common freemen,
overwhelmed by the taxes which they had themselves imposed, to
borrow of them, and then, first as their debtors, afterward legally
as their serfs, to surrender their liberty. For their own advantage
they developed the system of followers: i. e., the privilege of the
nobility to have about them a mass of armed servants in their pay,
called _ambacti_, with whose aid they formed a state within a state.
Relying on these, their own men-at-arms, they defied the lawful
authorities and the levies of the freemen, and thus were able to burst
asunder the commonwealth.... The only protection to be found was in
the relation of serfdom, where personal duty and interest required the
lord to protect his clients and to avenge any wrong to his men. Since
the state no longer had the power to protect the freemen, these in
growing numbers became the vassals of some powerful noble.”[122] We
find these identical conditions fifteen hundred years later in Kurland,
Livonia, in Swedish Pomerania, in Eastern Holstein, in Mecklenburg,
and especially in Poland. In the German territories the petty nobles
subjugated their peasantry, while in Poland their prey was the
formerly free and noble Schlachziz. “Universal history is monotonous,”
says Ratzel. The same procedure overthrew the peasantry of ancient
Egypt: “After a warlike _intermezzo_, there follows a period in the
history of the Middle Empire, which brings about a deterioration of
the position of the peasantry in Lower Egypt. The number of landlords
decreases, while their territorial growth and power increases. The
tribute of the peasants is hereafter determined by an exact assessment
on their estates, and definitely fixed by a sort of Doomsday Book.
Because of this pressure, many peasants soon enter the lord’s court or
the cities of the local rulers, and take employment there either as
servants, mechanics, or even as overseers in the economic organization
of these manors or courts. In common with any available captives, they
contribute to the extension of the prince’s estates, and to further the
general expulsion of the peasantry from their holdings.”[128]

The example of the Roman Empire shows, as nothing else can, how
inevitable this process becomes. When we first meet Rome in history
the conception of serfdom or bondage has already been forgotten. When
the “modern period” of Rome opens, only slavery is known. And yet,
within fifteen centuries, the free peasantry again sink into economic
dependence, after Rome has become an overextended, unwieldy empire,
whose border districts have more and more dissolved from the central
control. The great landed proprietors, having been endowed with the
lower justice and police administration on their own estates have
“reduced their servants, who may originally have been free proprietors
of the ‘_ager privatus vectigalis_’ to a state of servitude, and
have thus developed a sort of actual _glebæ adscriptus_, within the
boundaries of their ‘immunities.’”[124] The invading Germans found
this feudal order worked out in Gaul and the other provinces. At this
particular time, the immense difference formerly existing between
slaves and free settlers (_coloni_) had been completely obliterated,
first in their economic position, and then, naturally, in their
constitutional rights.

Wherever the common freemen sink into political and economic dependence
on the great territorial magnates, when, in other words, they become
bound either to the court or to the lands, the social group formerly
subject to them tend in a corresponding measure to improve their
status. Both layers tend to meet half-way, to approximate their
position, and finally to amalgamate. The observations just made
concerning the free settlers and the agricultural slaves of the later
Roman Empire hold true everywhere. Thus in Germany, freemen and serfs
together formed, when fused, the economic and legally unital group of
_Grundholde_, or men bound to the soil.[125]

The elevation of the former “subjects,” hereafter for the sake of
brevity to be called “plebs,” flows from the same source as the
debasement of the freeman, and arises by the same necessity from the
very foundations on which these states are themselves erected, viz.,
the agglomeration of the landed property in ever fewer hands.

The plebs are the natural opponents of the central government--since
that is their conqueror and tax imposer; while they naturally oppose
the common freemen, who despise them and oppress them politically,
besides crowding them back economically. The great magnate also is the
natural opponent of the central government--an impediment in his path
toward complete independence, and he is at the same time also a natural
enemy of the common freemen, who in turn not only support the central
government; but also block with their possessions his path toward
territorial dominion, while with their claims to equality of political
rights they annoy his princely pride. Since the political and social
interests of the territorial princes and of the plebs coincide, they
must become allies; the prince can attain complete independence only
if, in his fight for power against the crown and the common freemen,
he controls reliable warriors and acquiescent taxpayers; the plebs
can only then be freed from their pariah-like declassification, both
economically and socially, if the hated and proud common freemen are
brought down to their level.

This is the second time that we have noted the identity of interest
between the princes and their subjects. The first time we found a
weakly developed solidarity in our second stage of state formation.
This causes the semi-sovereign prince to treat his dependent tenants
as kindly as he ill-treats the free peasants of his territory; in
consequence, they will fight the more willingly for him and contribute
taxes, while the more readily will the oppressed freemen succumb to
the pressure, especially as their share of political power in the
state, coincident with the decline of the central power, has become
only a meaningless phrase. In some cases, as in Germany toward the
end of the tenth century, this was done with full consciousness of
its effects[126]--some prince exercises a particularly “mild” rule,
in order to draw the subjects of a neighboring potentate into his
lands, and thus to increase his own strength in war and taxation,
and to weaken his opponent’s. The plebs come to possess, both legally
and actually, constantly increasing rights, enlarged privileges of
the law of ownership, perhaps self-government in common affairs,
and their own administration of justice; thus they rise in the same
degree as the common freemen sink, until the two classes meet and they
are amalgamated into one body on approximately the same jural and
economic plane. Half serfs, half subjects of a state, they represent
a characteristic formation of the feudal state, which does not as
yet recognize any clear distinction between public and private law;
in its turn an immediate consequence of its own historical genesis,
_the dominion in the form of a state for the sake of economic private
rights_.


(d) THE ETHNIC AMALGAMATION

The juristic and social amalgamation of the degraded freemen and
the uplifted plebs henceforth inevitably tends toward ethnic
interpenetration. While at first the subject peoples were not allowed
either to intermarry or to have social intercourse with the freemen,
now no such obstacles can be maintained; in any single village the
social class is no longer determined by descent from the ruling race,
but rather by wealth. And the case may frequently arise where the
pure-blooded descendant of the warrior herdsman must earn his living
as a field hand in the hire of the equally pure-blooded descendant of
the former serfs. The social group of the subjects is now composed of a
part of the former ethnic master group and a part of the former subject
group.

We say from a part only, because the other part has by this time been
amalgamated with the other part of the old ethnic master group into a
unital social class. In other words, a part of the plebs has not only
attained the position to which the mass of the common freemen have
sunk, but has climbed far beyond it, in that it has been completely
received into the dominating group, which in the meantime, has not only
risen enormously, but has been as greatly diminished in numbers.

And that, too, is a universal process found in all history; because
everywhere it follows with equally compelling force from the very
premises of feudal dominion. The _primus inter pares_, whether the
holder of the central power or some local potentate, taking the rank
of a prince, requires more supple tools for his dominion than are to
be found among his “peers.” The latter represent a class whom he must
put down if he wants to rise--and that is and must be the aim of every
one, since in this stage aiming for power is identical with the aim of
self-preservation. In this effort he is opposed by his obnoxious and
stiff-necked cousins and by his petty nobles--and for this reason, we
find at every court, from that of the sovereign king of a mighty feudal
empire down to the lord of what is hardly more than a big estate,
men of insignificant descent as confidential officials alongside
representatives of the master group, who in many cases under the mask
of officials of the prince, as a matter of fact, are “ephors,” sharers
of the power of the prince as the plenipotentiaries of their group.
Let us but recall the Induna at the court of the Bantu kings. There
is no wonder, then, that the prince rather places confidence in his
own men than in these annoying and pretentious advisers, in men whose
position is indissolubly bound up with his own, and who would be ruined
by his fall.[S]

[S] One of the most notable instances may be found in the case of
Markward of Annweiler, Marquis of Ancona and Duke of Ravenna, seneschal
of Henry VI., who after the death of the Emperor Henry VI. disputed the
power of the Regent Constance acting for her son, Frederick II. (See
Boehmer-Ficker, _Regesta Imperii_, V, vol. 1, No. 511. v. ad. annum
1197.)--_Translator._

Here, too, historical references are nearly superfluous. Every one
is familiar with the fact that at the courts of the Western European
feudal kingdoms, besides the relatives of the king and some noble
vassals, there were also elements from the lower groups, occupying high
positions, clerics and great warriors of the plebeian class. Among the
immediate following of Charlemagne all the races and peoples of his
empire were represented. Also in the tales of Theodoric the Goth in
the Dietrich Saga of the _Niebelungen Lied_, this rise of brave sons
of the subject races finds its reflection. In addition to these, there
follow some less well-known instances.

In Egypt, as far back as the Old Empire, there is found alongside the
royal officials of the feudal nobility, who are the descendants of the
Shepherd conquerors, administering their districts as representatives
of the crown, with plenary powers as deputies, “_a mass of court
officials_ trusted with determined functions of government.” It
“originated with the _servants_ employed at the courts of the princes,
_such as prisoners of war, refugees etc._”[127] The fable of Joseph
shows a state of affairs known at that time to be a usual occurrence,
of the rise of a slave to the position of an all powerful minister
of state. At the present day such a career is within the realm of
possibility at any oriental court, such as Persia, Turkey, or Morocco,
etc. In the case of old Marshal Derflinger, in the time of Friedrich
Wilhelm I., the Great Elector, at a much later date, we have an
example from the transition of the developed feudal state to a more
modern form of the state, which might be multiplied by the examples of
innumerable other brave swordsmen.

Let us add a few instances from the peoples “disregarded by history.”
Ratzel tells of the realm of Bornu: “The freemen have not lost the
consciousness of their free descent, in contrast with the slaves of
the sheik; but the rulers place more confidence in their slaves than
in their own kinsmen and free associates of their tribe. They can
count on the devotion of the former. Not only positions at court, but
the defense of the country was from ancient times preferably confided
to slaves. The brothers of the prince, as well as the more ambitious
or more efficient sons, are objects of suspicion; and while the most
important places at court are in the hands of slaves, the princes are
put at posts far from the seat of government. Their salaries are paid
from the incomes of the offices and the taxes from the provinces.”[128]

Among the Fulbe “society is divided into princes, chieftains, commons
and slaves. The slaves of the king play a great rôle as soldiers and
officials, and may hope for the highest offices in the state.”[129]

This nobility of the court’s creation may, in certain cases, be
admitted to the great imperial offices, so that according to the method
stated above, it may achieve the sovereignty over a territory. In the
developed feudal state, it represents the high nobility; and usually
manages to preserve its rank, even when some more powerful neighbor
has mediatized it by incorporating the state. The Frankish higher
nobility certainly contains such elements from the original lower
group;[130] and since from its blood the entire upper nobility of the
European civilized states has been descended at least in direct line by
marriage, we find an ethnic amalgamation, both in the present day group
of subjects and in the highest order of the ruling class. And the same
applies to Egypt: “With the sinking of the royal authority in the time
of the decay, the higher officials abuse their power for personal ends,
to make their offices hereditary in their families, and thereby to call
into existence an official nobility not differentiated from the rest
of the population.”[131]

And finally, the same process, from the same causes, takes hold of
the present middle class, the lower stratum of the master class,
the officials and officers of the great feudatories. At first there
still exists a social difference between, on the one hand, the free
vassals, the subfeudatories of the great landlord, kinsmen, younger
sons of other noble families, impoverished associates from the same
district, in isolated cases freeborn sons of peasants, free refugees
and professional ruffians of free descent; and on the other, if the
term may be allowed, the subalterns of the guards of plebeian descent.
But lack of freedom advances, while freedom sinks in social value; and
here too the ruler places more reliance on his creatures than on his
peers. Here also, sooner or later, the process of amalgamation becomes
complete. In Germany, as late as 1085, the non-free nobility of the
court ranks between “_servi et litones_” while a century afterward
it is placed with the “_liberi et nobiles_.” In the course of the
thirteenth century, it has been completely absorbed, along with the
free vassals, into the nobility by chivalry. The two orders in the
meantime tend to become equal economically; both have subinfeudations,
fiefs on the obligation of service in warfare, and the service feuds of
the bondsmen; while all the fiefs of the “ministerials” or sergeants
have in the meantime become as heritable as are those of the free
vassals, as much so as are the patrimonies of the few surviving smaller
territorial lords belonging to the original nobility, who may still
have escaped the grasp of the great territorial principalities.

In ways quite analogous to this the development went on in all other
feudal states of Western Europe; while its exact counterpart is found
in the extremest Orient on the edge of the Eurasian continent, in
Japan. The daimio are the higher nobility; the samurai, the chivalry,
the nobility of the sword.


(e) THE DEVELOPED FEUDAL STATE

With this the feudal state has reached its pinnacle. It forms,
politically and socially, a hierarchy of numerous strata; of which, in
all cases, the lower is bound to render service to the next above it,
and the superior is bound to render protection to the one below. The
pyramid rests on the laboring population, of whom the major part are as
yet peasants; the surplus of their labor, the ground rental, the entire
“surplus value” of the economic means is used to support the upper
strata of society. This ground rent from the majority of estates is
turned over to the small holders of fiefs, except where these estates
are still in the immediate possession of the prince or of the crown and
have not as yet been granted as fiefs. The holders of them are bound in
return to provide the stipulated military service, and also, in certain
cases, to render labor of an economic value. The larger vassal is in
turn bound to serve the great tenants of the crown; who in their turn
are, at least at strict law, under similar obligation toward the bearer
of the central power; while emperor, king, sultan, shah, or Pharaoh
in their turn, are regarded as the vassals of the tribal god. Thus
there starts from the fields, whose peasantry support and nourish all,
and mounts up to the “king of heaven” an artificially graded order of
ranks, which constricts so absolutely all the life of the state, that
according to custom and law neither a bit of land nor a man can be
understood unless within its fold. Since all rights originally created
for the common freemen have either been resumed by the state, or else
have been distorted by the victorious princes of territories, it comes
about that a person not in some feudal relation to some superior must
in fact be “without the law,” be without claim for protection or
justice, i. e., be outside the scope of that power which alone affords
justice. Therefore the rule, _nulle terre sans seigneur_, appearing to
us at first blush as an ebullition of feudal arrogance, is as a matter
of fact the codification of an existing new state of law, or at the
very least the clearing away of some archaic remnants, no longer to be
tolerated, of the completely discarded _primitive_ feudal state.

Those philosophers of history who pretend to explain every historic
development from the quality of “races,” give as the center of their
strategic position the alleged fact, that only the Germans, thanks
to their superior “political capacity,” have managed to raise the
artistic edifice of the developed feudal state. Some of the vigor of
this argument has departed, since the conviction began to dawn on them
that in Japan, the Mongol race had accomplished this identical result.
No one can tell what the negro races might have done, had not the
irruption of stronger civilizations barred their way, and yet Uganda
does not differ very greatly from the empires of the Carolingians or of
Boleslaw the Red, except that men did not have in Uganda any “values of
tradition” of mediæval culture: and these values were not any merit of
the Germanic races, but a gift wherewith fortune endowed them.

Shifting the discussion from the negro to the “Semites,” we find the
charge made that this race has absolutely no capacity for the formation
of states. And yet we find, thousands of years ago, this same feudal
system developed, by Semites, if the founders of the Egyptian kingdom
were Semites. One would think the following description of Thurnwald
were taken from the period of the Hohenstaufen emperors: “Whoever
entered the following of some powerful one, was thereafter protected
by him as though he had been the head of the family. This relation ...
betokens a fiduciary relation similar to vassalage. This relation of
protection in return for allegiance tends to become the basis of the
organization of all Egyptian society. It is the basis of the relations
of the feudal lord to his sergeants and peasants, as it is that of the
Pharaoh to his officials. The cohesion of the individuals in groups
subject to common protecting lords, is founded on this view, even up to
the apex of the pyramid, to the king himself regarded as ‘the vicar of
his ancestors,’ as the vassal of the gods on earth.... Whosoever stands
without this social grasp, a ‘man without a master,’ is without the
pale of protection and therefore without the law.”[133]

The hypothesis of the endowment of any particular race has not been
used by us, and we have no need of it. As Herbert Spencer says, it is
the stupidest of all imaginable attempts to construct a philosophy of
history.

The first characteristic of the developed feudal state is the manifold
gradation of ranks built up into the one pyramid of mutual dependence.
Its second distinctive mark is the amalgamation of the ethnic groups,
originally separated.

The consciousness formerly existent of difference of _races_ has
disappeared completely. There remains only the _difference of classes_.

Henceforth we shall deal only with social classes, and no longer
with ethnic groups. The social contrast is the only ruling factor
in the life of the state. Consistently with this the ethnic group
consciousness changes to a class consciousness, the theories of the
group, to the theories of the class. Yet they do not thereby change in
the least their essence. The new dominating classes are just as full
of their divine right as was the former master group, and it soon is
seen that the new nobility of the sword manages to forget, quickly and
thoroughly, its descent from the vanquished group; while the former
freemen now declassed, or the former petty nobles sunk in the social
scale, henceforth swear just as firmly by “natural law” as did formerly
only the subjected tribes.

The developed feudal state is, in its essentials, exactly the same
thing as it was when yet in the second stage of state formation.
Its form is that of dominion, its reason for being, the political
exploitation of the economic means, limited by public law, which
compels the master class to give the correlative protection, and which
guarantees to the lower class the right of being protected, to the
extent that they are kept working and paying taxes, that they may
fulfil their duty to their masters. In its essentials government has
not changed, it has only been disposed in more grades; and the same
applies to the exploitation, or as the economic theory puts it, “the
distribution” of wealth.

Just as formerly, so now, the internal policy of these states swings in
that orbit prescribed by the parallelogram of the centrifugal thrust
of the former group contests, now class wars, counteracted by the
centripetal pull of the common interests. Just as formerly, so now, its
foreign policy is determined by the striving of its master class for
new lands and serfs, a thrust for extension caused at the same time by
the still existing need of self-preservation. Although differentiated
much more minutely, and integrated much more powerfully, the developed
feudal state is in the end nothing more than the primitive state
arrived at its maturity.




CHAPTER VI

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL STATE


If we understand the outcome of the feudal state, in the sense given
above, as further organic development either forward or backward
conditioned by the power of inner forces, but not as a physical
termination, brought about or conditioned by outside forces, then we
may say that the outcome of the feudal state is determined essentially
by the independent development of social institutions called into being
by the economic means.

Such influences may come also from without, from foreign states
which, thanks to a more advanced economic development, possess a
more tensely centralized power, a better military organization, and
a greater forward thrust. We have touched on some of these phases.
The independent development of the Mediterranean feudal states was
abruptly stopped by their collision with those maritime states,
which were on a much higher plane of economic growth and wealth,
and more centralized, such as Carthage, and more especially Rome.
The destruction of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great may
be instanced in this connection, since Macedonia had at that time
appropriated the economic advances of the Hellenic maritime states.
The best example within modern times is the foreign influence in the
case of Japan, whose development was shortened in an almost incredible
manner by the military and peaceful impulses of Western European
civilization. In the space of barely one generation it covered the road
from a fully matured feudal state to the completely developed modern
constitutional state.

It seems to me that we have only to deal with an abbreviation of
the process of development. As far as we can see--though henceforth
historical evidence becomes meager, and there are scarcely any examples
from ethnography--the rule may be stated that forces from within,
even without strong foreign influences, lead the matured feudal state,
with strict logical consistency, on the same path to the identical
conclusion.

The creators of the economic means controlling this advance are the
cities and their system of money economy, which gradually supersedes
the system of natural economy, and thereby dislocates the axis about
which the whole life of the state swings; in place of landed property,
mobile capital gradually becomes preponderant.


(a) THE EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTRY

All this follows as a natural consequence of the basic premise of the
feudal state. The more the great private landlords become a landed
nobility, the more in the same measure must the feudal system of
natural economy break to pieces. The more great landed property rights
become vested in and nurtured by the princes of territorial states,
the more is the feudal system based on payments in kind bound to
disintegrate; one may say that the two keep step in this development.

So long as the ownership of great estates is comparatively limited, the
primitive principle of the bee-keeper, allowing his peasants barely
enough for subsistence, can be carried out. When, however, these
expand into territorial dimensions, and include, as is regularly the
case, accretions of land which are the results of successful warfare,
or by the relinquishment and subinfeudation through heritage or
political marriages of smaller land owners, scattered widely about the
country and far from the master’s original domains, then the policy
of the bee-keeper can no longer be carried out. Unless, therefore,
the territorial magnate means to keep in his pay an immense mass of
overseers, which would be both expensive and politically unwise, he
would have to impose on his peasants some fixed tribute, partly rental
and partly tax. The economic need of an administrative reform unites,
therefore, with the political necessity, to elevate the “plebs,” in
the way which has already been discussed.

The more the territorial magnate ceases to be a private landlord,
the more exclusively he tends to become a subject of public law,
viz., prince of a territory, the more the solidarity mentioned above,
between prince and people grows. We saw that some few magnates even
as far back as the period of transition from great landed estates to
principalities, found it to their greatest interest to carry on a
“mild” government. This accomplished the result, not only of educating
their plebs to a more virile consciousness toward the state, but also
had the effect of making it easy for the few remaining common freemen
to give up their political rights in return for protection; while it
was still more important, in that it deprived their neighbors and
rivals of their precious human material. When the territorial prince
has finally reached complete _de facto_ independence, his self interest
must prompt him steadfastly to persevere in the path thus begun. Should
he, however, again invest his bailiffs or officers with lands and
peasants, he will still have the most pressing political interest to
see to it that his subjects are not delivered over to them without
restraint. In order to retain his control, the prince will limit the
right of the “knights” to incomes from lands to definite payments in
kind and limited forced labor, reserving to himself that required in
the public interests, such as forced labor on highways or on bridges.
We shall soon come to see that the circumstance that in all developed
feudal states the peasants have at least two masters claiming service,
is decisive for their later rise.

For all these reasons, the services to be required of peasants in a
developed feudal state must in some fashion be limited. Henceforth,
all surplus belongs to him free from the control of the landlord.
With this change, the character of landed property has been utterly
revolutionized. Heretofore the landlord, as of right, was entitled to
the entire revenue saving only what was absolutely necessary to permit
his peasants to subsist and continue their brood; while hereafter, the
total product of his work, as of right, belongs to the peasant, saving
only a fixed charge for his landlord as ground rent. The possession
of vast landed estates has developed into (_manorial_) _rights. This
completes the second important step taken by humanity toward its goal._
The first step was taken when man made the transition from the stage
of bear to that of the bee-keeper, and thereby discovered slavery;
this step abolishes slavery. Laboring humanity, heretofore only _an
object_ of the law, now for the first time becomes an entity capable
of enjoying rights. The _labor motor_, without rights, belonging to
its master, and without effective guarantees of life and limb, has now
become the taxpaying subject of some prince. Henceforth the economic
means, now for the first time assured of its success, develops its
forces quite differently. The peasant works with incomparably more
industry and care, obtains more than he needs, and thereby calls
into being the “city” in the economic sense of the term, viz., the
industrial city. The surplus produced by the peasantry calls into
being a demand for objects not produced in the peasant economy; while
at the same time, the more intensive agriculture brings about a
reduction of those industrial by-products heretofore worked out by the
peasant house industry.

Since agriculture and cattle-raising absorb in ever increasing degrees
the energies of the rural family, it becomes possible and necessary to
divide labor between original production and manufacture; the village
tends to become primarily the place of the former, the industrial city
comes into being as the seat of the latter.


(b) THE GENESIS OF THE INDUSTRIAL STATE

Let there be no misunderstanding: we do not maintain that the city
comes thus into being, but only the _industrial city_. There has been
in existence the real historical city, to be found in every developed
feudal state. Such cities came into being either because of a purely
political means, as a stronghold,[134] or by the coöperation of
the political with economic means, _as a market place_, or because
of some religious need, as the environs of some temple.[T] Wherever
such a city in the historical sense exists in the neighborhood, the
newly arising industrial city tends to grow up about it; otherwise it
develops spontaneously from the existing and matured division of labor.
As a rule, it will in its turn grow into a stronghold and have its own
places of worship.

[T] “Every place of worship gathers about it dwellings of the priests,
schools, and rest-houses for pilgrims.”--Ratzel, l. c. II., p. 575.

Naturally, every place toward which great pilgrimages proceed becomes
an extended trade center. We may see the remembrances thereof in the
fact that the great wholesale markets, held at stated times in Northern
Europe, are called _Messen_ from the religious ceremony.

These are but accidental historical admixtures. In its strict economic
sense “city” means the place of the economic means, or the exchange
and interchange for equivalent values between rural production and
manufacture. This corresponds to the common use of language, by which a
stronghold however great, an agglomeration of temples, cloisters and
places of pilgrimage however extensive, were they conceivable without
any place for exchange, would be designated after their external
characteristics as “like a city” or “resembling a city.”

Although there may have been few changes in the exterior of the
historical city, there has taken place an internal revolution on
a magnificent scale. _The industrial city is directly opposed to
the state._ As the state is the developed political means, _so the
industrial city is the developed economic means_. The great contest
filling universal history, nay its very meaning, henceforth takes place
between city and state.

The city as an economic, political body undermines the feudal system
with political and economic arms. With the first the city _forces_,
with the second it _lures_, their power away from the feudal master
class.

This process takes place in the field of politics by the interference
of the city, now a center of its own powers, in the political mechanism
of the developed feudal state, between the central power and the local
territorial magnates and their subjects. The cities are the strongholds
and the dwelling places of warlike men, as well as depots of material
for carrying on war (arms, etc.); and later they become central
supply reservoirs for money used in the contests between the central
government and the growing territorial princes, or between these in
their internecine wars. Thus they are important strategic points or
valuable allies; and may by far-sighted policy acquire important rights.

As a rule, the cities take the part of the crown in fights against
the feudal nobles, from social reasons, because the landed nobles
refuse to recognize the social equality, demanded as of right by
their more wealthy citizens; from political reasons, because the
central government, thanks to the solidarity between prince and
people, is more apt to be influenced by common interests than is
the territorial magnate, who serves only his private interests; and
finally from economic reasons, because city life can prosper only in
peace and safety. The practises of chivalry, such as club law, and
private warfare, and the knights’ practise of looting caravans are
irreconcilable with the economic means; and therefore, the cities are
faithful allies of the guardians of peace and justice, first to the
emperor, later on, to the sovereign territorial prince; and when the
armed citizenship breaks and pillages some robber baron’s fortress,
the tiny drop reflects the identical process happening in the ocean of
history.

In order successfully to carry this political rôle the city must
attract as many citizens as possible, an endeavor also forced on it
by purely economic considerations, since both divisions of labor and
wealth increase with increased citizenship. Therefore cities favor
immigration with all their powers; and once more show in this the polar
contrast of their essential difference from the feudal landlords. The
new citizens thus attracted into the cities are withdrawn from the
feudal estates, which are thereby weakened in power of taxation and
military defense in proportion as the cities are strengthened. The
city becomes a mighty competitor at the auction, wherein the serf is
knocked down to the highest bidder, to the one, that is to say, who
offers the most rights. The city offers the peasant _complete liberty_,
and in some cases house and courtyard. The principle, “city air frees
the peasant” is successfully fought out; and the central government,
pleased to strengthen the cities and to weaken the turbulent nobles,
usually confirms by charter the newly acquired rights.

_The third great move in the progress of universal history is to be
seen in the discovery of the honor of free labor_; or better in its
rediscovery, it having been lost sight of since those far-off times in
which the free huntsman and the subjugated primitive tiller enjoyed
the results of their labor. As yet the peasant bears the mark of the
pariah and his rights are little respected. But in the wall-girt,
well-defended city, the citizen holds his head high. He is a freeman in
every sense of the word, free even at law, since we find in the grants
of rights to many early enfranchised cities (_Ville-franche_) the
provision that a serf residing therein “a year and a day” undisturbed
by his master’s claim is to be deemed free.

Within the city walls there are still various ranks and grades of
political status. At first the old settlers, the men of rank equal
with the nobles of the surrounding country, the ancient freemen of the
burgh, refuse to the newcomers, usually poor artisans or hucksters, the
right of sharing in the government. But, as we saw in the case of the
maritime cities, such gradations of rank can not be maintained within
a business community. The majority, intelligent, skeptical, closely
organized and compact, forces the concession of equal rights. The only
difference is that the contest is longer in a developed feudal state,
because now the fight concerns not only the parties at interest. The
great territorial magnates of the neighborhood and the princes hinder
the full development of the forces by their interference. In the
maritime states of the ancient world, there was no _tertius gaudens_
who could derive any profit from the contests within the city, since
outside the cities there existed no system of powerful feudal lords.

These then, are the political arms of the cities in their contest with
the feudal state: alliances with the crown, direct attack, and the
enticing away of the serfs of the feudal lords into the enfranchising
air of the city. Its economic weapons are no less effective, the change
from payments in kind to the system of _money as a means of exchange_
is inseparably connected with civic methods, is the means whereby the
method of payment in kind is utterly destroyed, and with it the feudal
state.


(c) THE INFLUENCES OF MONEY ECONOMY

The sociological process set into motion by the system of money economy
is so well known and its mechanics are so generally recognized, that a
few suggestions will suffice.

Here, as in the case of the maritime states, the consequence of the
invading money system is that the _central government becomes almost
omnipotent, while the local powers are reduced to complete impotence_.

Dominion is not an end in itself, but merely the means of the rulers
to their essential object, the enjoyment without labor of articles
of consumption as many and as valuable as possible. During the
prevalence of the system of natural economy there is no other way of
obtaining them save by dominion; the wardens of the marches and the
territorial princes obtain their wealth by their political power. The
more peasants who are owned, the greater is the military power and
the larger the scope of the territory subjected, and thus the greater
are the revenues. As soon, however, as the products of agriculture
are exchangeable for enticing wares, it becomes more rational for
every one primarily a private man, i. e., for every feudal lord not a
territorial prince--and this now includes the knights--to decrease as
far as possible the number of peasants, and to leave only such small
numbers as can with the utmost labor turn out the greatest product from
the land, and to leave these as little as possible. The net product
of the real estate, thus tremendously increased, is now taken to the
markets and sold for goods, and is no longer used to keep a fencible
body of guards. Having dissolved this following, the knight becomes
simply the manager of a knight’s fee.[U] With this event, as with one
blow, the central power, that of king or territorial prince, is without
a rival for the dominion, and has become politically omnipotent. The
unruly vassals, who formerly made the weak kings tremble, after a short
attempt at joint rule during the time of the government of the feudal
estates, have changed into the supple courtiers, begging favors at the
hands of some absolute monarch, like Louis XIV. And he furthermore
has become their last resort, since the military power, now solely
exercised by him as the paymaster of the forces, alone can protect them
from the ever-immanent revolt of their tenants, ground to the bone.
While in the time of natural economy the crown was in nearly every
instance allied with peasants and cities against nobility, we now have
the union of the absolute kings, born from the feudal state, with
their nobility, against the representatives of the economic means.

[U] See reference as to the meaning of _Rittergutsbesitz_, ante, page
84.--_Translator._

Since the days of Adam Smith it has been customary to state this
fundamental revolution in some such form, as though the foolish nobles
had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, when they traded their
dominion for foolish articles of luxury. No view can be more erroneous.
Individuals often err in the safe-guarding of their interests: _a class
for any prolonged period never is in error_.

The fact of the matter is, that the system of money payments
strengthened the central power so mightily and immediately, that even
without the interposition of the agrarian upheaval, any resistance
of the landed nobility would have been senseless. As is shown in the
history of antiquity, the army of a central government, financially
strong, is always superior to feudal levies. Money permits the armament
of peasant sons, and the drilling of them into professional soldiers,
whose solid organization is always superior to the loose confederation
of an armed mass of knights. Besides, at this stage, the central
government could also count on the aid of the well-armed squares of the
urban guilds.

Gunpowder did the rest in Western Europe. Firearms, however, are a
product that can be turned out only in the industrial establishments
of a wealthy city. Because of these technical military reasons, even
that feudal landlord who might not care for the newly established
luxuries and who might only be desirous of maintaining or increasing
his independent position, must subject his territories to the same
agrarian revolution; since, in order to be strong, he now before all
else must have _money_, which in the new order of things, has become
the _nervus rerum_, either to buy arms or to engage mercenaries. A
second capitalistic wholesale undertaking, therefore, has come into
being through the system of payments in money; besides the wholesale
management of landed estates, war is carried on as a great business
enterprise--the condottieri appear on the stage. The market is full of
material for armies of mercenaries, the discharged guards of the feudal
lords and the young peasants whose lands have been taken up by the
lords.

There are instances where some petty noble may mount to the throne of
some territorial principality, as happened many a time in Italy, and as
was accomplished by Albrecht Wallenstein, even as late as the period
of the Thirty Years’ War. But that is a matter of individual fate, not
affecting the final result. The local powers disappear from the contest
of political forces as independent centers of authority and retain
the remnant of their former influence only so long as they serve the
princes as a source of supplies; that is, the state composed of its
feudal estates.

The infinite increase in the power of the crown is then enhanced by a
second creation of the system of payment in money, by _officialdom_.
We have told in detail of the vicious circle which forced the feudal
state into a cul-de-sac between agglomeration and dissolution, as long
as its bailiffs had to be paid with “lands and peasants” and thereby
were nursed into potential rivals of their creator. With the advent of
payments in money, the vicious circle is broken. Henceforth the central
government carries on its functions through paid employees, permanently
dependent on their paymaster.[135] Henceforth there is possible a
permanently established, tensely centralized government, and empires
come into being, such as had not existed since the developed maritime
states of antiquity, which also were founded on the payments in money.

This revolution of the political mechanism was everywhere put into
motion by the development of the money economy--with but one exception,
as far as I can see, viz., Egypt.

Here, according to the statement of experts, no definite information is
to be had, and it seems that the system of money exchanges appears as a
matured institution only in Greek times. Until that time, the tribute
of the peasants was paid in kind;[136] and yet we find, shortly after
the expulsion of the Shepherd Kings, during the New Empire (_circa_
sixteenth century B. C.), that the absolutism of the kings was fully
developed: “The military power is upheld by foreign mercenaries, the
administration is carried on by a _centralized body of officials_
dependent on the royal favor, _while the feudal aristocracy has
disappeared_.”[137]

It may seem that this exception proves the rule. Egypt is a country
of exceptional geographic conformation. Jammed into a narrow compass,
between mountains and the desert, a natural highway, the River Nile,
traverses its entire length, and permits the transportation of bulky
freight with much greater facility than the finest road. And this
highway made it easy for the Pharaoh to assemble the taxes of all his
districts in his own storehouses, the so-called “houses”[138] and from
them to supply his garrisons and civil employees with the products
themselves _in natura_. For that reason Egypt, after it has once
become unified into an empire, stays centralized, until foreign powers
extinguish its life as a “state.” “This circumstance is the source of
the enormous and plenary power exercised by the Pharaoh where payments
are still made in kind; the exclusive and immediate control of the
objects of daily consumption are in his hand. The ruler distributes
to his employees only such quantities of the entire mass of goods as
appears to him good and proper; and since the articles of luxury are
nearly all exclusively in his hands, he enjoys on this account also an
extraordinary plenitude of power.”[139]

With this one exception, where a mighty force executes the task, the
power of circulating money seems in all cases to have dissolved the
feudal state.

The cost of the revolution fell on peasants and cities. When peace is
made, the crown and the petty nobles mutually sacrifice the peasantry,
dividing them, so to say, into two ideal halves; the crown grants to
the nobility the major part of the peasants’ common lands, and the
greatest part of their working powers that are not yet expropriated;
the nobility concedes to the crown the right of recruiting and of
taxing both peasantry and cities. The peasant, who had grown wealthy in
freedom, sinks back into poverty and therefore into social inferiority.
The former feudal powers now unite as allies to subjugate the cities,
except where, as in Upper Italy, these become feudal central powers
themselves. (And even in that case they for the most part all fall
into the power of captains of mercenaries, condottieri.) The power of
attack of the adversaries has become stronger, the power of the cities
has diminished. For with the decay of the peasantry, their purchase
power diminishes and with it the prosperity of the cities, based
thereon. The small cities in the country stagnate and become poorer,
and being now incapable of defense, fall a prey to the absolutist rule
of the territorial princes; the larger cities, where the demand for
the luxuries of the nobles has brought into being a strong trading
element, split up into social groups and thus fritter away their
political strength. The immigration now pouring into their walls is
composed of discharged and broken mercenaries, dispossessed peasants,
pauperized mechanics from the smaller towns; it is in other words a
_proletarian_ immigration. For the first time there appears, in the
terminology of Karl Marx, the “free laborer,” in masses, competing
with his own class in the labor markets of the cities. And again, the
“law of agglomeration” enters to form effective class and property
distinctions, and thus to tear apart the civic population. Wild fights
take place in the cities between the classes; through which the
territorial prince, in nearly every instance, again succeeds in gaining
control. The only cities that can permanently escape the deadly embrace
of the prince’s power are the few genuine “maritime states,” or “city
states.”

As in the case of the maritime states, the pivot of the state’s life
has again shifted over to another place. Instead of circling about
wealth vested in landed estates, it now turns about capitalized wealth,
because in the meantime property in real estate has itself become
“capital.” _Why is it that the development does not, as in the case of
the maritime states, open out into the capitalistic expropriation of
slave labor?_

There are two controlling reasons, one internal, the other external.
The external reason is to be found in this, that slave hunting on a
profitable scale is scarcely possible at this time in any part of the
world, since nearly all countries within reach are also organized
as strong states. Wherever it is possible, as for instance, in the
American colonies of the West European powers, it develops at once.

The external reason may be found in the circumstance that the
peasant of the interior countries, in contrast to the conditions
prevailing in the maritime states, is subject, not to one master, but
to at least two[V] persons entitled to his service, his prince and
his landlord. Both resist any attempt to diminish their peasants’
capacity for service, since this is essential to their interests.
Especially strong princes did much for their peasants, e. g., those of
Brandenburg-Prussia. For this reason, the peasants, although exploited
miserably, yet retained their personal liberty and their standing as
subjects endowed with personal rights in all states where the feudal
system had been fully developed when the system of payments in money
replaced that of payments in kind.

[V] In mediæval Germany the peasants pay tribute in many cases not only
to the landlord and to the territorial prince, but also to the provost
and to the bailiff.

The evidence that this explanation is correct may be found in the
relations of those states which were gripped by the system of exchange
in money, before the feudal system had become worked out.

This applies especially to those districts of Germany formerly occupied
by Slavs, but particularly to _Poland_. In these districts, the feudal
system had not yet been worked out as thoroughly as in the regions
where the demand for grain products in the great western industrial
centers had changed the nobles, the subjects of public law, into the
owners of a _Rittergut_,[W] the subjects of private economic interests.
In these districts, the peasants were subject to the duty of rendering
service only to _one_ master, who was both their liege lord and
landlord; and because of that, there came into being the republics of
nobles mentioned above, which, as far as the pressure of their more
progressed neighbors would permit, tended to approach the capitalistic
system of exploiting of slave labor.[140]

[W] See foot-note on page 84.

The following is so well known that it can be stated briefly. The
system of exchange by means of money matures into capitalism, and
brings into being new classes in juxtaposition to the landowners; the
capitalist demands equal rights with the formerly privileged orders,
and finally obtains them by revolutionizing the lower plebs. In this
attack on the sacredly established order of things, the capitalists
unite with the lower classes, naturally under the banner of “natural
law.” But as soon as the victory has been achieved, the class based on
movable wealth, the so-called middle class, turns its arms on the lower
classes, makes peace with its former opponents, and invokes in its
reactionary fight on the proletarians, its late allies, the theory of
legitimacy, or makes use of an evil mixture of arguments based partly
on legitimacy and partly on pseudo-liberalism.

In this manner the state has gradually matured from the primitive
robber state, through the stages of the developed feudal state, through
absolutism, to the modern constitutional state.


(d) THE MODERN CONSTITUTIONAL STATE

Let us give the mechanics and kinetics of the modern state a moment’s
time.

In principle, it is the same entity as the primitive robber state or
the developed feudal state. There has been added, however, one new
element--_officialdom_, which at least will have this object, that
in the contest of the various classes, it will represent the common
interests of the state as a whole. In how far this purpose is subserved
we shall investigate in another place. Let us at this time study the
state in respect to those characteristics which it has brought over
from its youthful stages.

Its _form_ still continues to be domination, its content still remains
the exploitation of the economic means. The latter continues to be
limited by public law, which on the one hand protects the traditional
“distribution” of the total products of the nation; while on the
other it attempts to maintain at their full efficiency the taxpayers
and those bound to render service. The internal policy of the state
continues to revolve in the path prescribed for it by the parallelogram
of the centrifugal force of class contests and the centripetal impulse
of the common interests in the state; and its foreign policy continues
to be determined by the interests of the master class, now comprising
besides the landed also the moneyed interests.

In principle, there are now, as before, only two classes to be
distinguished: one a ruling class, which acquires more of the total
product of the labor of the people--the economic means--than it has
contributed, and a subject class, which obtains less of the resultant
wealth than it has contributed. Each of these classes, in turn,
depending on the degree of economic development, is divided into more
or fewer sub-classes or strata, which grade of according to the
fortune or misfortune of their economic standards.

Among highly developed states there is found introduced between the two
principal classes a transitional class, which also may be subdivided
into various strata. Its members are bound to render service to the
upper class, while they are entitled to receive service from the
classes below them. To illustrate with an example, we find in the
ruling class in modern Germany at least three strata. First come
the great landed magnates, who at the same time are the principal
shareholders in the larger industrial undertakings and mining
companies: next stand the captains of industry and the “bankocrats,”
who also in many cases have become owners of great estates. In
consequence of this they quickly amalgamate with the first layer.
Such, for example, are the Princes Fugger, who were formerly bankers
of Augsburg, and the Counts of Donnersmarck, owners of extensive mines
in Silesia. And finally there are the petty country nobles, whom we
shall hereafter term _junker_ or “squires.” The subject class, at all
events, consists of petty peasants, agricultural laborers, factory and
mine hands, with small artisans and subordinate officials. The “middle
classes” are the classes of the transition: composed of the owners of
large and medium-sized farms, the small manufacturers, and the best
paid mechanics, besides those rich “bourgeois,” such as Jews, who have
not become rich enough to overcome certain traditional difficulties
which oppose their arrival at the stage of intermarriage with the
upper class. All these render unrequited service to the upper class,
and receive unrequited service from the lower classes. This determines
the result which occurs either to the stratum as a whole or to the
individuals in it; that is to say, either a complete acceptance into
the upper class, or an absolute sinking into the lower class. Of the
(German) transitional classes, the large farmers and the manufacturers
of average wealth have risen, while the majority of artisans have
descended to the lower classes. We have thus arrived at the kinetics of
classes.

The interests of every class set in motion an actual body of associated
forces, which impel it with a definite momentum toward the attainment
of a definite goal. All classes whatever have the same goal; viz., the
total result of the productive labor of all the denizens of a given
state. Every class attempts to obtain as large a share as possible
of the national production; and since all strive for identically the
same object, the _class contest_ results. This contest of classes
is the content of all history of states, except in so far as the
interest of the state as a whole produces common actions. These
we may at this point disregard, since they have been given undue
prominence by the traditional method of historical study, and lead
to one-sided views. Historically this class contest is shown to be a
_party fight_. A party is originally and in its essence nothing save
an organized representation of a class. Wherever a class, by reason
of social differentiation, has split up into numerous sub-classes
with varied separate interests, the party claiming to represent it
disintegrates at the earliest opportunity into a mass of tiny parties,
and these will either be allies or mortal enemies according to the
degree of divergence of the class interests. Where on the other hand
a former class contrast has disappeared by social differentiation,
the two former parties amalgamate in a short time into a new party.
As an example of the first case we may recall the splitting off
of the artisans and Anti-Semite parties from the party of German
Liberalism, as a consequence of the fact that the first represented
descending groups, while the latter represented ascending ones. A
characteristic example of the second category may be found in the
political amalgamation which bound together into the farmers’ union
the petty landed squires of the East Elbian country with West Elbian
rich peasants on large plantations. Since the petty squire sinks and
the farmer rises, they meet half-way. All party policy can have but one
meaning, viz., to procure for the class represented as great a share
as is possible of the total national production. In other words, the
preferred classes intend to maintain their share, at the very least,
at the ancient scale, and if possible, to increase it toward such a
maximum as shall permit the exploited classes just a bare existence, to
keep them fit to do their work, just as in the bee-keeper stages. Their
object is to confiscate the entire surplus product of the economic
means, a surplus which increases enormously as population becomes
more dense and division of labor more specialized. On the other hand,
the group of exploited classes would like to reduce their tribute to
the zero-point, and to consume the entire product themselves; and the
transitional classes work as much as possible toward the reduction of
their tribute to the upper classes, while at the same time they strive
to increase their unrequited income from the classes underneath.

This is the aim and the content of all party contests. The ruling class
conducts this fight with all those means which its acquired dominion
has handed down to it. In consequence of this, the ruling class sees
to it that legislation is framed in its interest and to serve its
purpose--class legislation. These laws are then applied in such wise
that the blunted back of the sword of justice is turned upward, while
its sharpened edge is turned downward--class justice. The governing
class in every state uses the administration of the state in the
interest of those belonging to it under a twofold aspect. In the first
place it reserves to its adherents all prominent places and all offices
of influence and of profit, in the army, in the superior branches of
government service, and in places on the bench; and secondly, by these
very agencies, it directs the entire policy of the state, causes its
class-politics to bring about commercial wars, colonial policies,
protective tariffs, legislation in some degree improving the conditions
of the laboring classes, electoral reform policies, etc. As long as the
nobles ruled the state, they exploited it as they would have managed an
estate; when the bourgeoisie obtain the mastery, the state is exploited
as though it were a factory. And the class-religion covers all defects,
as long as they can be endured, with its “don’t touch the foundation
of society.”

There still exist in the public law a number of political privileges
and economic strategic positions, which favor the master class: such
as, in Prussia, a system of voting which gives the plutocrats an
undue advantage over the less favored classes, a limitation of the
constitutional rights of free assembly, regulations for servants, etc.
For that reason, the _constitutional fight_, carried on over thousands
of years and dominating the life of the state, is still uncompleted.
The fight for improved conditions of life, another phase of the party
and class struggle, usually takes place in the halls of legislative
bodies, but often it is carried on by means of demonstrations in the
streets, by general strikes, or by open outbreaks.

But the plebs have finally and definitely learned that these remnants
of feudal strategic centers, do not, except in belated instances,
constitute the final stronghold of their opponents. It is not in
political, but rather in economic conditions that the cause must
be sought, which has brought it about that even in the modern
constitutional state, the “distribution of wealth” has not been changed
in principle. Just as in feudal times, the great mass of men live in
bitter poverty; even under the best conditions, they have the meager
necessities of life, earned by hard, crushing, stupefying forced
labor, no longer exacted by right of political exploitation, but just
as effectively forced from the laborers by their economic needs. And
just as before in the un-reformed days, the narrow minority, a new
master class, a conglomerate of holders of ancient privileges and of
newly rich, gathers in the tribute, now grown to immensity; and not
only does not render any service therefor, but flaunts its wealth in
the face of labor by riotous living. The class contest henceforth
is devoted more and more to these economic causes, based on vicious
systems of distribution; and it takes shape in a hand-to-hand fight
between exploiters and proletariat, carried on by strikes, coöperative
societies and trades unions. The economic organization first forces
recognition, and then equal rights; then it leads and finally controls
the political destinies of the labor party. In the end therefore the
trade union controls the party. Thus far the development of the state
has progressed in Great Britain and in the United States.

Were it not that there has been added to the modern state an entirely
new element, its _officialdom_, the constitutional state, though more
finely differentiated and more powerfully integrated, would, so far as
form and content go, be little different from its prototypes.

As a matter of principle, the state officials, paid from the funds
of the state, are removed from the economic fights of conflicting
interests; and therefore it is rightly considered unbecoming for any
one in the service of the government to be taking part in any money
making undertaking, and in no well ordered bureaucracy is it tolerated.
Were it possible ever thoroughly to realize the principle, and did not
every official, even the best of them, bring with him that concept
of the state held by the class from which he originated, one would
find in officialdom, as a matter of fact, that moderating and order
making force, removed from the conflict of class interests, whereby the
state might be led toward its new goal. It would become the fulcrum of
Archimedes whence the world of the state might be moved.

But the principle, we are sorry to say, can not be carried out
completely; and furthermore, the officials do not cease being real men,
do not become mere abstractions without class consciousness. This may
be quite apart from the fact that, in Europe at least, a participation
in a definite form of undertakings--viz., handling large landed
estates--is regarded as a favorable means of getting on in the service
of the state, and will continue to be so as long as the landed nobility
preponderates. In consequence of this, many officials on the Continent,
and one may even say the most influential officials, are subject to
pressure by enormous economic interests; and are unconsciously, and
often against their will, brought into the class contests.

There are factors, such as extra allowances made by either fathers or
fathers-in-law, or hereditary estates, and affinity to the persons in
control of the landed and moneyed interest or allied with them, whereby
the solidarity of interest among the ruling class is if anything
increased from the fact that these officials, practically without
exception, are taken from a class with whom since their boyhood days
they have been on terms of intimacy. Were there, however, no such unity
of economic interests the demeanor of the officials would be influenced
entirely by the pure interests of the state.

For this reason, as a rule, the most efficient, most objective and
most impartial set of officials is found in poor states. Prussia, for
example, was formerly indebted to its poverty for that incomparable
body of officials who handled it through all its troubles. These
employees of the state were actually, in consonance with the rule laid
down above, dissociated completely from all interests in money making,
directly or indirectly.

This ideal body of officials is a rare occurrence in the more wealthy
states. The plutocratic development draws the individual more and
more into its vortex, robbing him of his objectivity and of his
impartiality. And yet the officials continue to fulfil the duty which
the modern state requires of them, to preserve the interests of the
state as opposed to the interests of any class. And this interest is
preserved by them, even though against their will, or at least without
clear consciousness of the fact, in such manner that the economic
means, which called the bureaucracy into being, is in the end advanced
on its tedious path of victory, as against the political means. No
one doubts that the officials carry on class politics, prescribed for
them by the constellation of forces operating in the state; and to
that extent, they certainly do represent the master class from which
they sprang. But they do ameliorate the bitterness of the struggle, by
opposing the extremists in either camp, and by advocating amendments
to existing law, when the social development has become ripened for
their enactment, without waiting until the contest over these has
become acute. Where an efficient race of princes governs, whose
momentary representative adopts the policy of King Frederick, which was
to regard himself only as “the first servant of the state,” what has
been said above applies to him in an increased degree, all the more
so as his interests, as the permanent beneficiary of the continued
existence of the state, would before all else prompt him to strengthen
the centripetal forces and to weaken the centrifugal powers. In the
course of the preceding we have in many instances noted the natural
solidarity between prince and people, as an historic force of great
value. In the completed constitutional state, in which the monarch in
but an infinitesimally small degree is a subject of private economic
interests, he tends to be almost completely “an official.” This
community of interests is emphasized here much more strongly than in
either the feudal state or the despotically governed state, where the
dominion, at least for one-half its extent, is based on the private
economic interests of the prince.

Even in a constitutional state, the outer form of government is not
the decisive factor; the fight of the classes is carried on and leads
to the same result in a republic as in a monarchy. In spite of this,
it must be admitted that there is more probability, that, other things
being equal, the curve of development of the state in a monarchy will
be more sweeping, with less secondary incurvity, because the prince is
less affected by momentary losses of popularity, is not so sensitive
to momentary gusts of disapproval, as is a president elected for a
short term of years, and he can therefore shape his policies for longer
periods of time.

We must not fail to mention a special form of officialdom, the
scientific staffs of the universities, whose influence on the upward
development of the state must not be underestimated. Not only is this
a creation of the economic means, as were the officials themselves,
but it at the same time represents an historical force, _the need of
causality_, which we found heretofore only as an ally of the conquering
state. We saw that this need created superstition while the state was
on a primitive stage; its bastard, the taboo, we found in all cases
to be an effective means of control by the master class. From these
same needs then, _science_ was developed, attacking and destroying
superstition, and thereby assisting in preparation of the path of
evolution. That is the incalculable historical service of science and
especially of the universities.




CHAPTER VII

THE TENDENCY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE


We have endeavored to discover the development of the state from its
most remote past up to present times, following its course like an
explorer, from its source down the streams to its effluence in the
plains. Broad and powerfully its waves roll by, until it disappears
into the mist of the horizon, into unexplored and, for the present-day
observer, undiscoverable regions.

Just as broadly and powerfully the stream of history--and until the
present day all history has been the history of states--rolls past
our view, and the course thereof is covered by the blanketing fogs of
the future. Shall we dare to set up hypotheses concerning the future
course, until “with unrestrained joy he sinks into the arms of his
waiting, expectant father”? (Goethe’s _Prometheus_.) Is it possible to
establish a scientifically founded prognosis in regard to the future
development of the state?

I believe in this possibility. The tendency[141] of state development
unmistakably leads to one point: seen in its essentials the state
will cease to be the “developed political means” and will become “a
freemen’s citizenship.” In other words, its outer shell will remain in
essentials the form which was developed in the constitutional state,
under which the administration will be carried on by an officialdom.
But the content of the states heretofore known will have changed its
vital element by the disappearance of the economic exploitation of one
class by another. And since the state will, by this, come to be without
either classes or class interests, the bureaucracy of the future will
truly have attained that ideal of the impartial guardian of the common
interests, which nowadays it laboriously attempts to reach. The “state”
of the future will be “society” guided by self-government.

Libraries full of books have been written on the delimitation of the
concepts “state” and “society.” The problem, however, from our point of
view has an easy solution. The “state” is the fully developed political
means, society the fully developed economic means. Heretofore state and
society were indissolubly intertwined: in the “freemen’s citizenship,”
there will be no “state” but only “society.”

This prognosis of the future development of the state contains by
inclusion all of those famous formulæ, whereby, the great philosophical
historians have endeavored to determine the “resulting value” of
universal history. It contains the “progress from warlike activity to
peaceful labor” of St. Simon, as well as Hegel’s “development from
slavery to freedom”; the “evolution of humanity” of Herder, as well as
“the penetration of reason through nature” of Schleiermacher.

Our times have lost the glad optimism of the classical and of the
humanist writers; sociologic pessimism rules the spirit of these latter
days. The prognosis here stated can not as yet claim to have many
adherents. Not only do the persons obtaining the profits of dominion,
thanks to their obsession by their class spirit, regard it as an
incredible concept; those belonging to the subjugated class as well
regard it with the utmost skepticism. It is true that the proletarian
theory, as a matter of principle, predicts identically the same result.
But the adherents of that theory do not believe it possible by the path
of evolution but only through revolution. It is then thought of as a
picture of a “society” varying in all respects from that evolved by the
progress of history; in other words, as an organization of the economic
means, as a system of economics without competition and market, as
collectivism. The anarchistic theory makes form and content of the
“state” as inseparable as heads and tails of the coin; no “government”
without exploitation! It would therefore smash both the form and the
content of the state, and thus bring on a condition of anarchy, even
if thereby all the economic advantages of a division of labor should
have to be sacrificed. Even so great a thinker as the late Ludwig
Gumplowicz, who first laid the foundation on which the present theory
of the state has been developed, is a sociological pessimist; and from
the same reasons as are the anarchists, whom he combated so violently.
He too regards as eternally inseparable form and content, government
and class-exploitation; since he however, and I think correctly,
does not consider it possible that many people may live together
without some coercive force vested in some government, he declares the
class-state to be an “immanent” and not only an historical category.

Only a small fraction of social liberals, or of liberal socialists,
believe in the evolution of a society without class dominion and
class exploitation which shall guarantee to the individual, besides
political, also economic liberty of movement, within of course the
limitations of the economic means. That was the _credo_ of the old
social liberalism, of pre-Manchester days, enunciated by Quesnay and
especially by Adam Smith, and again taken up in modern times by Henry
George and Theodore Hertzka.

This prognosis may be substantiated in two ways, one through history
and philosophy, the other by political economy, as a tendency of
the development of the state, and as a tendency of the evolution of
economics, both clearly tending toward _one_ point.

The tendency of the _development of the state_ was shown in the
preceding as a steady and victorious combat of economic means against
political means. We saw that, in the beginning, the right to the
economic means, the right to equality and to peace, was restricted
to the tiny circle of the horde bound together by ties of blood, an
endowment from pre-human conditions of society;[142] while without the
limits of this isle of peace raged the typhoon of the political means.
But we saw expanding more and more the circles from which the laws of
peace crowded out their adversary, and everywhere we saw their advance
connected with the advance of the economic means, of the barter of
groups for equivalents, amongst one another. The first exchange may
have been the exchange of fire, then the barter of women, and finally
the exchange of goods, the domain of peace constantly extending its
borders. It protected the market places, then the streets leading to
them, and finally it protected the merchants traveling on these streets.

In the course of this discussion it was shown how the “state” absorbed
and developed these organizations making for peace, and how in
consequence these drive back ever further right based on mere might.
Merchants’ law becomes city law; the industrial city, the developed
economic means, undermines the feudal state, the developed political
means; and finally the civic population, in open fight, annihilates the
political remnants of the feudal state, and re-conquers for the entire
population of the state freedom and right to equality, _urban_ law
becomes public law and finally international law.

Furthermore, on no horizon can be seen any force now capable of
resisting effectively this heretofore efficient tendency. On the
contrary, the interference of the past, which temporarily blocked the
process, is obviously becoming weaker and weaker. The international
relations of commerce and trade acquired among the nations a
preponderating importance over the diminishing warlike and political
relations; and in the intra-national sphere, by reason of the same
process of economic development, movable capital, the creation of the
right to peace, preponderates in ever increasing measure over landed
property rights, the creation of the right of war. At the same time
superstition more and more loses its influence. And therefore one is
justified in concluding that the tendency so marked will work out to
its logical end, excluding the political means and all its works, until
the complete victory of the economic means is attained.

But it may be objected that in the modern constitutional state all the
more prominent remnants of the antique law of war have already been
chiseled out.

On the contrary, there survives a considerable remnant of these
institutions, masked it is true in economic garb, and apparently no
longer a legal privilege but only economic right, _the ownership of
large estates--the first creation and the last stronghold of the
political means_. Its mask has preserved it from undergoing the fate of
all other feudal creations. And yet this last remnant of the right of
war is doubtless the last unique obstacle in the pathway of humanity;
and doubtless the _development of economics_ is on its way to destroy
it.

To substantiate these remarks I must refer the reader to other books,
wherein I have given the detailed evidence of the above and can not in
the space allotted here repeat it at large.[143] I can only re-state
the principal points made in these books.

There is no difference in principle between the distribution of the
total products of the economic means among the separate classes of a
constitutional state, the so-called “capitalistic distribution,” from
that prevailing in the feudal state.

All the more important economic schools coincide in finding the cause
in this, that the supply of “free” laborers (i. e., according to Karl
Marx politically free and economically without capital) perpetually
exceeds the demand, and that hence there exists “the social relation of
capital.” There “are constantly two laborers running after one master
for work, and lowering, for one another, the wages”; and therefore the
“surplus value” remains with the capitalist class, while the laborer
never gets a chance to form capital for himself and to become an
employer.

Whence comes this surplus supply of free laborers?

The explanation of the “bourgeois” theory, according to which this
surplus supply is caused by the overproduction of children by
proletarian parents, is based on a logical fallacy, and is contradicted
by all known facts?[144]

The explanation of the proletarian theory according to which the
capitalistic process of production itself produces the “free laborers,”
by setting up again and again new labor-saving machines, is also
based on a logical fallacy and is likewise contradicted by all known
facts.[145]

The evidence of all facts shows rather, and the conclusion may be
deduced without fear of contradiction, _that the oversupply of “free
laborers” is descended from the right of holding landed property in
large estates_; and that emigration into towns and oversea from these
landed properties are the causes of the capitalistic distribution.

Doubtless there is a growing tendency in economic development whereby
the ruin of vast landed estates will be accomplished. The system
is their bleeding to death, without hope of salvation, caused by
the freedom of the former serfs--the necessary consequence of the
development of the cities. As soon as the peasants had obtained the
right of moving about without their landlords’ passport (German
_Freizuegigkeit_), there developed the chance of escape from the
countries which formerly oppressed them. The system of emigration
created “the competition from oversea,” together with the fall,
on the Continent, of prices for farm products, and made necessary
perpetually rising wages. By these two factors ground rent is reduced
from two sides, and must gradually sink to the zero point, since here
too no counterforce is to be recognized whereby the process might be
diverted.[146] Thus the system of vast territorial estates falls apart.
When, however, it has disappeared, there can be no oversupply of “free
laborers.” On the contrary “two masters will run after one laborer and
must raise the price on themselves.” There will be no “surplus value”
for the capitalist class, because the laborer himself can form capital
and himself become an employer. By this the last remaining vestige
of the political means will have been destroyed, and economic means
alone will exercise sway. The _content_ of such a society is the “pure
economics”[147] of the equivalent exchange of commodities against
commodities, or of labor force against commodities, and the political
_form_ of this society will be the “freemen’s citizenship.”

This theoretical deduction is moreover confirmed by the _experience
of history_. Wherever there existed a society in which vast estates
did not exist to draw an increasing rental, there “pure economics”
existed, and society approximated the form of the state to that of the
“freemen’s citizenship.”

Such a community was found in the Germany of the four centuries[148]
from about A. D. 1000, when the primitive system of vast estates was
developed into the socially harmless dominion over vast territories,
until about the year 1400, when the newly arisen great properties,
created by the political means, the robber wars in the countries
formerly Slavic, shut the settlers from the westward out of lands
eastward of the Elbe.[149] Such a community was the Mormon state of
Utah, which has not been greatly changed in this respect, where a
wise land legislation permitted only small and moderate sized farm
holdings.[150] Such a community was to be found in the city and county
of Vineland, Iowa, U. S. A.,[151] as long as every settler could obtain
land, without increment of rent. Such a commonwealth is, beyond all
others, New Zealand, whose government favors with all its power the
possession of small and middle-sized holdings of land, while at the
same time it narrows and dissolves, by all means at its command the
great landed properties, which by the way, owing to lack of surplus
laborers, are almost incapable of producing rentals.[152]

In all these cases there is an astoundingly equalized well-being, not
perhaps mechanically equal; but there is no wealth. _Because well-being
is the control over articles of consumption, while wealth is the
dominion over mankind._ In no such cases are the means of production,
“capital,” “producing any surplus values”; there are no “free laborers”
and no capitalism, and the political form of these communities
approximates very closely to a “freemen’s citizenship,” and tends to
approximate it more and more, so far as the pressure of the surrounding
states, organized from and based on the laws of war, permit its
development. The “state” decomposes, or else in new countries such as
Utah or New Zealand, it returns to a rudimentary stage of development;
while the free self-determination of free men, scarcely acquainted
with a class fight constantly tends to pierce through ever more
thoroughly. Thus in the German Empire there was a parallel development
between the political rise of the unions of the imperial free cities,
the decline of the feudal states, the emancipation of the crafts, then
still comprising the entire “plebs” of the cities, and the decay of the
patrician control of the city government. This beneficent development
was stopped by the erection of new primitive feudal states on the
easterly border of the former German Empire, and thus the economic
blossom of German culture was ruined. Whoever believes in a conscious
purpose in history may say that the human race was again required to
pass through another school of suffering before it could be redeemed.
The Middle Ages had discovered the system of free labor, but had not
developed it to its full capacity or efficiency. It was reserved for
the new slavery of capitalism to discover and develop the incomparably
more efficient system of coöperating labor, the division of labor in
the workshops, in order to crown man as the ruler of natural forces, as
king of the planet. Slavery of antiquity and of modern capitalism was
once necessary; now it has become superfluous. According to the story,
every free citizen of Athens disposed of five human slaves; but we
have supplied to our fellow citizens of modern society a vast mass of
enslaved power, slaves of steel, that do not suffer in creating values.
Since then we have ripened toward a civilization as much higher than
the civilization of the time of Pericles, as the population, power and
riches of the modern communities exceeds those of the tiny state of
Athens.

Athens was doomed to dissolution--by reason of slavery as an economic
institution, by reason of the political means. Having once entered that
pathway, there was no outlet except death to the population. Our path
will lead to life.

The same conclusion is found by either the historical-philosophical
view, which took into account the tendency of the _development of the
state_, or the study of political economy, which regards the tendency
of _economic development_; viz., that the economic means wins along
the whole line, while the political means disappears from the life of
society, in that one of its creations, which is most ancient and most
tenacious of life; capitalism decays with large landed estates and
ground rentals.

This has been the path of suffering and of salvation of humanity, its
Golgotha and its resurrection into an eternal kingdom--from war to
peace, from the hostile splitting up of the hordes to the peaceful
unity of mankind, from brutality to humanity, from the exploiting State
of robbery to the Freemen’s Citizenship.




NOTES


[1] “History is unable to demonstrate any one people, wherein the first
traces of division of labor and of agriculture do not coincide with
such agricultural exploitations, wherein the efforts of labor were
not apportioned to one and the fruits of labor were not appropriated
by some one else, wherein, in other words, the division of labor
had not developed itself as the subjection of one set under the
others.”--Robertus-Jagetzow, _Illumination on the social question_,
second edition. Berlin, 1890, p. 124. (Cf. _Immigration and Labor. The
economic aspects of European Immigration to the United States_, by Dr.
Isaac A. Hourwich. Putnam’s, N. Y., 1912.--_Translator._)

[2] Achelis, _Die Ekstase in ihrer kulturellen Bedeutung_, vol. 1 of
_Kulturprobleme der Gegenwart_, Berlin, 1902.

[3] Grosse, _Formen der Familie_. Freiburg and Leipzig, 1896, p. 39.

[4] Ratzel, _Völkerkunde_. Second Edition. Leipzig and Wien, 1894-5,
II, p. 372.

[5] _Die Soziale Verfassung des Inkareichs._ Stuttgart, 1896, p. 51.

[6] _Siedlung und Agrarwesen der Westgermanen, etc._ Berlin, 1895, I,
p. 273.

[7] l. c. I, p. 138.

[8] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 702.

[9] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 555.

[10] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 555.

[11] For example with the Ovambo according to Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 214,
who in part “seem to be found in slavelike status,” and according to
Laveleye among the ancient Irish (_Fuidhirs_).

[12] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 648.

[13] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 99.

[14] Lippert, _Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit_. Stuttgart, 1886, II,
p. 302.

[15] Lippert, l. c. II, p. 522.

[16] _Römische Geschichte._ Sixth Edition. Berlin, 1874, I, p. 17.

[17] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 518.

[18] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 425.

[19] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 545.

[20] Ratzel, l. c. II, pp. 390-1.

[21] Ratzel, l. c. II, pp. 390-1.

[22] Lippert, l. c. I, p. 471.

[23] Kulischer, “The history of the development of interest from
capital.” _Jahrbücher für National Œkonomie._ III series, vol. 18, p.
318, Jena, 1899: (Says Strabo: “Plunderers and from the scant supplies
of their native land covetous of the lands of others.”)

[24] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 123.

[25] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 591.

[26] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 370.

[27] Ratzel, l. c. II, pp. 390-1.

[28] Ratzel, l. c. II, pp. 388-9.

[29] Ratzel, l. c. II, pp. 103-04.

[30] Thurnwald, _Staat und Wirtschaft im altem Ægypten. Zeitschrift für
Soz. Wissenchaft_, vol. 4 1901, pp. 700-01.

[31] Ratzel, l. c. II, pp. 404-05. (Gumplowicz, _Rassenkampf_, p. 264:
“Egypt, rich and self-sufficient, says Ranke, invited the avarice
of neighboring tribes, who served other gods. Under the name of the
Shepherd peoples, foreign dynasts and foreign tribes ruled Egypt for
centuries.

“Truly, the summary of universal history could not be begun with more
characteristic words than those of Ranke. For in the words applied
to Egypt the quintessence of the whole history of mankind is summed
up.”--_Translator._)

[32] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 165.

[33] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 485.

[34] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 480.

[35] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 165.

[36] Buhl, _Soziale Verhältnisse der Israeliten_, p. 13.

[37] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 455.

[38] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 628.

[39] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 625.

[40] Cieza de Leon, “Seg. parte de la crónica del Peru.” P. 75, cit. by
Cunow, _Inkareich_ (p. 62, note 1).

[41] Cunow, l. c. p. 61.

[42] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 346.

[43] Ratzel, l. c. II, pp. 36-7.

[44] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 221. (Cf. remarks by Hon. A. J. Sabath,
M. C., _Sociological Argument on Workman’s Compensation Bill_, p. 498,
Senate Document 338, Sixty-second Congress, Second Session, Volume
I. See also _Congressional Record_ for March 1, 1913, Sixty-second
Congress, Third Session, pp. 4503, 4529, _et seq._--_Translator._)

[45] “Among the Wahuma women occupy a higher position than among the
negroes, and are watched carefully by their men. This makes mixed
marriages difficult. The mass of the Waganda even to-day would not
have remained a genuine negro tribe ‘of dark chocolate colored skin
and short wool hair’ were it not that the two peoples are strictly
opposed to one another as peasants and herdsmen, rulers and subjects,
as despised and honored, in spite of the relations entered into among
the upper classes. In this peculiar position, they represent a typical
phenomenon, which is found repeated at many other points.”--Ratzel, l.
c. II, p. 177. [46] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 178.

[47] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 198.

[48] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 476.

[49] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 453.

[50] Kopp, _Griechische Staatsaltertümer_, 2, _Aufl._ Berlin, 1893, p.
23.

[51] Uhland, _Alte hoch und niederdeutsche Volkslieder_ I (1844), p.
339 cited by Sombart: _Der moderne Kapitalismus_, Leipzig, 1902, I, pp.
384-5.

[52] Inama-Sternegg, _Deutsche Wirtsch.-Gesch._ I, Leipzig, 1879, p. 59.

[53] Westermarck, _History of Human Marriage_, London, 1891, p. 368.

[54] Cf. Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 81.

[55] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 156.

[56] Ratzel, l. c. I, pp. 259-60.

[57] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 434.

[58] I. Kulischer, l. c., p. 317, where other examples may be found.

[59] Westermarck, _History of Human Marriage_, p. 400, which contains a
number of ethnographical examples. [60] Westermarck, l. c., p. 546.

[61] Cf. Ratzel, l. c. I, pp. 318, 540.

[62] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 106.

[63] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 335.

[64] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 346.

[65] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 347.

[66] Buecher, _Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft_, Second Edition,
Tübingen, 1898, p. 301.

[67] Cf., Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 271, speaking of the islanders of
the Pacific Ocean: “Intercourse from tribe to tribe is carried on
by inviolable heralds, preferably old women. These act also as
intermediary agents in trades.” See also page 317 for the same
practises among the Australians.

[68] German Translation by L. Katscher. Leipzig, 1907.

[69] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 81.

[70] Ratzel, l. c. I, pp. 478-9.

[71] A. Vierkandt, _Die wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse der Naturvölker.
Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft_, II, pp. 177-8.

[72] Kulischer, l. c. pp. 320-1.

[73] Lippert, l. c. I, p. 266, _et seq._

[74] Cf. Westermarck, _History of Human Marriage_.

[75] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 27.

[76] Herodotus IV, 23, cited by Lippert, l. c. I, p. 459.

[77] Lippert, l. c. II, p. 170.

[78] Mommsen, l. c. I, p. 139.

[79] Similar conditions may be observed among the islanders near India.
Here the Malays are vikings. “Colonization is an important factor,
as conquest and settlement oversea ... reminding one of the great
rôle played in ancient Hellas by the roving tribes.... Every strip of
coast line shows foreign elements, who enter uncalled for and in most
instances spreading damage among the natives. The right of conquest was
granted by the rulers of Tornate to noble dynasts, who later on became
semi-sovereign viceroys on the islands of Buru, Serang, etc.” [80]
Mommsen, l. c. I, p. 132.

[81] Mommsen, l. c. I, p. 134.

[82] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 160.

[83] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 558.

[84] Buhl, l. c., p. 48.

[85] Buhl, l. c., pp. 78-79.

[86] Mommsen, l. c. II, p. 406.

[87] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 191; cf. also pp. 207-8.

[88] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 363.

[89] Mommsen, l. c., p. 46.

[90] Both cited by Kulischer, l. c., p. 319, from: Buechsenschuetz,
_Besitz und Erwerb im grieschischen Altertum_; and Goldschmidt,
_History of the Law of Commerce_.

[91] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 263.

[92] F. Oppenheimer’s _Grossgrundeigentum und soziale Frage_. Book Two,
Chapter I. Berlin, 1898.

[93] Nomadism is exceptionally characterized by the facility with
which, from patriarchal conditions, despotic functions are developed
with most far-reaching powers. Ratzel, l. c. Vol. II, pp. 388-9.

[94] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 408.

[95] Cunow, l. c. pp. 66-7. Similarly among the inhabitants of the
Malay Islands numerous examples are found in Radak (Ratzel, l. c. I, p.
267).

[96] Buhl, l. c., p. 17.

[97] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 66.

[98] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 118.

[99] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 167.

[100] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 218.

[101] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 125.

[102] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 124.

[103] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 118.

[104] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 125.

[105] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 346.

[106] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 245.

[107] Ratzel, l. c. I. pp. 267-8.

[108] Mommsen, l. c. III, pp. 234-5.

[109] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 167.

[110] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 229.

[111] Ratzel, l. c. I, p. 128.

[112] Weber’s _Weltgeschichte_, III, p. 163.

[113] Thurnwald, l. c., pp. 702-3.

[114] Thurnwald, l. c., p. 712; cf. Schneider, _Kultur und Denken der
alten ÆEgypter_, Leipzig, 1907, p. 38.

[115] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 599.

[116] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 362.

[117] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 344.

[118] Meitzen, l. c. II, p. 633.

[119] Inama-Sternegg, l. c. I, pp. 140-1.

[120] Mommsen, l. c. V, p. 84.

[121] Cf. the detailed exposition of this in F. Oppenheimer’s
_Grossgrundeigentum und die soziale Frage_, Book II, Chap. 3.

[122] Mommsen, l. c. III, pp. 234-5.

[123] Thurnwald, l. c., p. 771.

[124] Meitzen, l. c. I, pp. 362f.

[125] Inama-Sternegg, l. c. I, pp. 373, 386.

[126] Cf. F. Oppenheimer’s _Grossgrundeigentum_, p. 272.

[127] Thurnwald, l. c., p. 706.

[128] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 503.

[129] Ratzel, l. c. II, p. 518.

[130] Meitzen, l. c. I, p. 579: “At the time of the compilation of the
Lex Salica, the ancient racial nobility had been reduced to common
freemen or else had been annihilated. The officials, on the other
hand, are rated at threefold wergeld, 600 solidi, and if one be ‘_puer
regis_’ 300 solidi.”

[131] Thurnwald, l. c. p. 712.

[132] Inama-Sternegg, l. c. II, p. 61.

[133] Thurnwald, l. c., p. 705.

[134] “The larger camps of the army of the Rhine obtained their
municipal annexes partly through army suttlers and camp followers,
and particularly through the veterans, who after the completion of
their services remained in their accustomed quarters. Thus there arose
distinct from the military quarters proper, a distinct town of cabins
(_Canabæ_). In all parts of the Empire, and especially in the various
Germanias, there arose in the course of time, from these camps of the
legionaries, and particularly from the headquarter stations, cities in
the modern sense.”--Mommsen, l. c. V, p. 153.

[135] Eisenhardt, _Gesch. der National Oekonomie_, p. 9: “Aided by the
new and more liquid means of payment in cash, it became possible to
call into being a new and more independent establishment of soldiers
and of officials. As they were paid only periodically it became
impossible for them to make themselves independent (as the feudatories
had done) and then to turn on their paymaster.” [136] Thurnwald, l.
c., p. 773.

[137] Thurnwald, l. c., p. 699.

[138] Thurnwald, l. c., p. 709.

[139] Thurnwald, l. c., p. 711.

[140] Cf. with this F. Oppenheimer’s _Grossgrundeigentum etc._, Book
II, Chap. 3.

[141] “Tendency, i. e., a law, whose absolute execution is checked by
countervailing circumstances, or is by them retarded, or weakened.”
Marx, _Kapital_, vol. III, p. 215.

[142] Cf. the excellent work of Peter Kropotkin, _Mutual Aid in its
Development_.

[143] Cf. F. Oppenheimer, _Die Siedlungsgenossenschaft etc._, Berlin,
1896, and his _Grossgrundeigentum und soziale Frage_, Berlin, 1898.

[144] Cf. F. Oppenheimer, _Bevölkerungsgesetz des T. R. Malthus_.
_Darstellung and Kritik_, Berlin-Bern, 1901.

[145] Cf. F. Oppenheimer, _Grundgesetz der Marxschen
Gesellschaftslehre, Darstellung und Kritik_, Berlin, 1903.

[146] Cf. F. Oppenheimer, _Grundgesetz der Marxschen
Gesellschaftslehre_, Part IV., particularly, the twelfth chapter:
“Tendency of the Capitalistic Development.”

[147] Cf. F. Oppenheimer, _Grossgrundeigentum und soziale Frage_,
Berlin, 1898. Book I, Chapter 2, Section 3, “Philosophy of the Social
Body,” pp. 57 _et seq._

[148] Cf. F. Oppenheimer, _Grossgrundeigentum_, Book II, Chap. 2, Sec.
3, p. 322.

[149] Cf. F. Oppenheimer, _Grossgrundeigentum_, Book II, Chap. 3, Sec.
4, especially pp. 423 _et seq._

[150] Cf. F. Oppenheimer, “Die Utopie als Tatsache,” _Zeitschrift für
Sozial-Wissenschaft_, 1899, Vol. II, pp. 190 _et seq._

[151] Cf. F. Oppenheimer, _Siedlungsgenossenschaft_, pp. 477 _et seq._

[152] Cf. André Siegfried, _La démocratie en Nouvelle Zelande_, Paris,
1904.




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.

The spelling of non-English words was not checked.

Simple typographical errors were corrected.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Page 100: Closing quotation mark added after “valuable consignments.”

Page 126 or 127: Missing footnote anchor “62”.

Page 128 or 129: Missing footnote anchor “67”.

Pages 134-138: Missing footnote anchor “75”.

Pages 207-208: Missing footnote anchors “123” through “127”.

Pages 220-225: Missing footnote anchor “132”.

Page 254: Paragraph beginning “The external reason” probably should be
“The internal reason”.