CHAPTER III PRIMITIVE LIFE 26. Savagery, Barbarism and Civilization.-Until within recent years the story of the primitive life of our race was not thought to be of much importance. It was not understood to have covered any great periods of time or to have had any important part in the making up of the usages and the institutions of civilized life. It was generally thought that the difference between savage people and civilized people was largely a matter of races. It was not generally thought that the races now civilized were at any time themselves savages. It was historically known that all had been in barbarism.1 It is now known that all were in savagery before they were in barbarism, just as all were in barbarism before they were in civilization. The distance which lies between savagery and civilization is not a matter of the different natural endowments of the different races. It is a matter of the different degrees of development of the different races.2 27. The Order of Development.-It is now a matter 1. Ancient Society: Lewis H. Morgan, pp. 3-18; Tylor: Primitive Culture, Vol. I., Chap. 2. 2. Morgan: Ancient Society, pp. 3-18; Tylor: Primitive Culture. Vol. I., Chap. 2. of agreement among scholars that just as a chemist may put certain substances into a crucible and predict the result of applying heat and the steps by which the result is reached; and that, just as another familiar with the experiment could come upon the scene in the midst of the proceeding and tell all the steps which had gone before and all which were to follow, so if a student of primitive society is given certain habits or customs of a people, he can determine the stage of its growth, and so be able to tell, with great certainty, not only the steps which it has taken, but many of its current habits and customs, and can tell, with equal certainty, the next step in its progress. You can tell such a student the implements found in the graves of an ancient people, and he can tell you much of their forms of government, the nature of their sex relations and the kind of houses which they built.3 28. If a race is found which has not developed the use of the bow and arrow, it may be quite safely inferred that promiscuous sex relations, no permanent dwellings and only the most primitive forms of government will be found characteristic of that race. If a savage or barbarian race be found without slaves, it may be predicted, with equal certainty, that the private ownership of land, the use of money or a market, will not be found among the practices of that race. 29. Object Lessons in History.-In this way the rude tribes which still linger in their infancy reveal to us what the life of our own race was when in like infancy. Hence it follows that modern scholarship has not only multiplied the years allotted to the early life of the race, but it has made this study of primitive man of the utmost importance, because here can be studied in the simplicity of their beginnings, the usages and the institutions of our civilized life. Civili 3. Morgan: Ancient Society, Preface and First Three Chapters. zation was not invented. It was born and has grown out of the humblest and most natural beginnings.1 30. Primitive Man Not Helpless.-Again, it has been the custom to assume that man commenced his career full-grown, with wants and faculties much as he now has them, and to have proceeded to establish the home, the industry, the commerce, and the government of the world by a kind of inspired contrivance. When scholarship learned to deny all this and to insist on the lowly origin and slow development, not only of man himself, but also of all the usages and institutions of society which he posseses, it spoke so frequently of primitive man as "without experience and utterly helpless" as to become misleading with regard to the facts of our early life.5 For it is certain that the first man that ever lived did not suddenly awaken from his animal antecedents and look around for food and shelter in keeping with the tastes and necessities of man as we know him. Modern science attempts to prove that the first man came into the world, like the last one, by being born into it. He might have been a slight improvement on his mother, but he took the food and shelter which she provided and asked no questions. If she was the last in the series to be called brute and her child the first in the series to be called man, it is only reasonable to assume that both the mother and her child inherited and possessed all of the higher cunning, instincts and habits which can now be found among the lower animals. The bird and her woven nest, the bee and its matted storehouse, the beaver and its dam, the squirrel 4. "The social system is not the creation of any man or set of men, but has grown of itself out of the tendency among men to secure the things they wish for the least exertion."-Baker: Monopolies and the People, p. 141. See also Morgan: Ancient Society, Preface and First Three Chapters. 5. Mason: Woman's Share in Primitive Culture, Introduction. Clodd: Childhood of the World. and its store of food-these would lead us to think that the first man, the superior of all these, with his limited wants, his ample inheritance of cunning, instinct and habit from his animal ancestry and the untaken earth at his disposal, would find the question of subsistence an easier one than the average resident of a back alley in a modern factory town. He was never "without experience and utterly helpless." 31. The Roots of Civilization.-It is now admitted that the usages and institutions of modern society "find not only their antecedent roots in barbarism, but their germs in savagery." It seems that it might be further said that these germs were themselves given vitality and form during the preceding countless centuries when man's animal ancestry had not yet advanced to the forms of life which finally and distinctively mark the life of man. If this is so, not only can we gather the meaning of our institutions from the early life of man, but from the instincts and habits of all natural life we may obtain hints which may prove helpful in the interpretation of the usages and institutions of modern society.7 If we would understand modern usages and institu 6. Morgan: Ancient Society, p. 4. * * 7. "The struggle for existence among men is probably as severe as that among the lower forms of organic life. Among men, as among animals or plants, we find a number of young brought into being which is far in excess of the number that reaches maturity. But while the intensity of the struggle is the same, the conditions under which it is waged are different in certain important respects. In the first place, the human struggle is between groups more than between individuals. In the second place, it is a struggle for domination more than for annihilation, a struggle which has in it the possibility of losing part of its character as a strife, and giving place to an arrangement for mutual service between those whose interests at first seemed to conflict. Neither of these things is wholly confined to the human race. * * The race of ants which has proved stronger in the fight [mark the word "fight"] no longer regards the members of the weaker race as rivals to be killed, but as helpers to be utilized in labor for which the fighting race is unfitted. Under such circumstances we find institutions and usages which are in many respects strikingly like those of semi-civilized man."-Hadley: Economics, pp. 19 * 20. tions, we must seek the reasons for their existence in the humble beginnings of the primitive life of man. The family, the church, the state, the workshop, the market, agriculture, mining, transportation, literature and art -all these have come to be what they are, not by the invention, contrivance or decree of any man or million of men, but as the result of struggle and the slow growth of the life of the race through a thousand centuries.8 32. The Struggle for Existence Fundamental. - And this long struggle has always been at bottom a struggle for existence; that is, for the means of life, a struggle for food, fuel, clothing, shelter. This struggle necessarily always comes first in all personal and social life. Only when this struggle has been successfully made can there be any struggle for the higher comforts and refinements of modern civilization. The claim is not that man has no other interests than these. It is, that his other interests cannot exist at all unless these things are first provided. The fact is, that the whole race has been so completely engaged in securing these things, or in seeking to possess these things, * * 8. "The key to the enigma of the universe is found in the doctrine of evolution. * To the physical, animal, vegetable, and even mineral worlds, the doctrine of evolution equally applies, and its significance is not confined to a necessary connection between the terms 'evolution,' 'man,' and 'monkey,' so often now-a-days found unalterably associated in the minds of the ignorant. The doctrine is a fundamental conception of all science-mental, moral, and physical. study of evolution in all its branches is the study of history; but history of different kinds. The study of the evolution of society is history in its highest and truest sense.' ."-Melville: The Evolution of Modern Society in Its Historical Aspect; Smithsonian Report, 1891, pp. 507 21. * # The Socialism is, after all, in its fundamental conception, only the logical application of the scientific theory of natural evolution to economic phenomena."-Ferri: Socialism and Modern Science, p. 94. 9. "The secret of progress, the perpetual satisfying of wants followed by the springing up of new wants, is the secret of individual unrest and disappointment."-Toynbee: Notes and Jottings. "The prime factors in social progress are the Community and its Environment. The environment of a community comprises all the circumstances, adjacent or remote, to which the community may be in |