Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin (ebook reader play store .txt) 📕

in London, vol. i; in Miss Beatrice Potter’s “Pages from a Work Girl’s Diary” (Nineteenth Century, September 1888, p. 310); and so on. ↩

Samuel Plimsoll, Our Seamen, cheap edition, London, 1870, p. 110. ↩

Our Seamen, u.s., p. 110. Mr. Plimsoll added: “I don’t wish to disparage the rich, but I think it may be reasonably doubted whether these qualities are so fully developed in them; for, notwithstanding that not a few of them are not unacquainted with the claims, reasonable or unreasonable, of poor relatives, these qualities are not in such constant exercise. Riches seem in so many cases to smother the manliness of their possessors, and their sympathies become, not so much narrowed as⁠—so to speak⁠—stratified: they are reserved for the sufferings of their own class, and also the woes of those above them. They seldom tend downwards much, and they are far more likely to admire an act of courage⁠ ⁠… than to admire the constantly exercised fortitude and the tenderness which are the daily characteristics of a British workman’s life”⁠—and of the workmen all over the world as well. ↩

Life of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder, vol. i, pp. 137⁠–⁠138. ↩

See Marriage Customs in Many Lands, by H. N. Hutchinson, London, 1897. ↩

Many new and interesting forms of these have been collected by Wilhelm Rudeck, Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland, analyzed by Durckheim in Annuaire Sociologique, ii, 312. ↩

A Servio Tullio populus romanus relatus in censum, digestus in classes, curiis atque collegiis distributus (E. Martin-Saint Léon, Histoire des corporations de métiers depuis leurs origines jusqu’à leur suppression en 1791, etc., Paris, 1897). ↩

The Roman sodalitia, so far as we may judge (E. Martin-Saint Léon, Histoire des corporations de métiers depuis leurs origines jusqu’à leur suppression en 1791, etc., Paris, 1897, p. 9), corresponded to the Kabyle çofs. ↩

It is striking to see how distinctly this very idea is expressed in the well-known passage of Plutarch concerning Numa’s legislation of the trade-colleges:⁠—“And through this,” Plutarch wrote, “he was the first to banish from the city this spirit which led people to say: ‘I am a Sabine,’ or ‘I am a Roman,’ or ‘I am a subject of Tatius,’ and another: ‘I am a subject of Romulus’ ”⁠—to exclude, in other words, the idea of different descent. ↩

The work of H. Schurtz, devoted to the “age-classes” and the secret men’s unions during the barbarian stases of civilization (Altersklassen und Männerverbände: eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft, Berlin, 1902), which reaches me while I am reading the proofs of these pages, contains numbers of facts in support of the above hypothesis concerning the origin of guilds. The art of building a large communal house, so as not to offend the spirits of the fallen trees; the art of forging metals, so as to conciliate the hostile spirits; the secrets of hunting and of the ceremonies and mask-dances which render it successful; the art of teaching savage arts to boys; the secret ways of warding off the witchcraft of enemies and, consequently, the art of warfare; the making of boats, of nets for fishing, of traps for animals, and of snares for birds, and finally the women’s arts of weaving and dyeing⁠—all these were in olden times as many “artifices” and “crafts,” which required secrecy for being effective. Consequently, they were transmitted from the earliest times, in secret societies, or “mysteries,” to those only who had undergone a painful initiation. H. Schurtz shows now that savage life is honeycombed with secret societies and “clubs” (of warriors, of hunters), which have as ancient an origin as the marriage “classes” in the clans, and contain already all the elements of the future guild: secrecy, independence from the family and sometimes the clan, common worship of special gods, common meals, jurisdiction within the society and brotherhood. The forge and the boathouse are, in fact, usual dependencies of the men’s clubs; and the “long houses” or “palavers” are built by special craftsmen who know how to conjure the spirits of the fallen trees. ↩

Colophon

Mutual Aid
was published in 1902 by
Peter Kropotkin.

Weijia Cheng
sponsored the production of this ebook for
Standard Ebooks.
It was produced by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2003 by
Charles Aldarondo
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at
Google Books.

The cover page is adapted from
Flock of Geese,
a painting completed in 1883 by
Elizabeth Nourse.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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