## Preface to the First Edition, 1884

The following chapters are, in a sense,
the execution of a bequest. No less a man than Karl Marx had made it one of his
future tasks to present the results of Morgan’s researches in the light of the
conclusions of his own — within certain limits, I may say our — materialistic
examination of history, and thus to make clear their full significance. For
Morgan in his own way had discovered afresh in America the materialistic
conception of history discovered by Marx forty years ago, and in his comparison
of barbarism and civilization it had led him, in the main points, to the same
conclusions as Marx. And just as the professional economists in Germany were
for years as busy in plagiarizing Capital as they were persistent in attempting
to kill it by silence, so Morgan's Ancient Society [1] received precisely the same treatment from the
spokesmen of “prehistoric” science in England. My work can only provide a
slight substitute for what my departed friend no longer had the time to do. But
I have the critical notes which he made to his extensive extracts from Morgan,
and as far as possible I reproduce them here.

According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history
is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate
essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side,
the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing,
dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side,
the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The
social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and
a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the
stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.

The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its
products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society,
the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. However,
within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of
labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange,
differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others,
and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the
course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new
conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete
upheaval. In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old
society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new
society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which
are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which
the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and
in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles
that have hitherto formed the content of all written history.

It is Morgan’s great merit that he has discovered and reconstructed in its
main lines this prehistoric basis of our written history, and that in the
kinship groups of the North American Indians he has found the key to the most
important and hitherto insoluble riddles of earliest Greek, Roman and German
history. His book is not the work of a day. For nearly forty years he wrestled
with his material, until he was completely master of it. But that also makes
his book one of the few epoch-making works of our time.

In the following presentation, the reader will in general easily distinguish
what comes from Morgan and what I have added. In the historical sections on
Greece and Rome I have not confined myself to Morgan’s evidence, but have added
what was available to me. The sections on the Celts and the Germans are in the
main my work; Morgan had to rely here almost entirely on secondary sources, and
for German conditions — apart from Tacitus — on the worthless and
liberalistic falsifications of Mr. Freeman. The treatment of the economic
aspects, which in Morgan’s book was sufficient for his purpose but quite
inadequate for mine, has been done afresh by myself. And, finally, I am, of
course, responsible for all the conclusions drawn, in so far as Morgan is not
expressly cited.

Footnotes

[1] Ancient Society, or
Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to
Civilization, by Lewis H. Morgan, London, Macmillan & Co., 1877. The book
was printed in America and is peculiarly difficult to obtain in London. The
author died some years ago. [For the purposes of this edition, all references
to Ancient Society are from the Charles H. Kerr edition, Chicago. — Ed.]

## Preface to the Fourth Edition, 1891

The earlier large editions of this work have been out of print

now for almost half a year, and for some time the publisher has been asking me

to prepare a new edition. Until now, more urgent work kept me from doing so.

Since the appearance of the first edition seven years have elapsed, during

which our knowledge of the primitive forms of the family has made important

advances. There was, therefore, plenty to do in the way of improvements and

additions; all the more so as the proposed stereotyping of the present text

will make any further alterations impossible for some time.

I have accordingly submitted the whole text to a careful revision and made a

number of additions which, I hope, take due account of the present state of

knowledge. I also give in the course of this preface a short review of the

development of the history of the family from Bachofen to Morgan; I do so

chiefly because the chauvinistically inclined English anthropologists are still

striving their utmost to kill by silence the revolution which Morgan’s

discoveries have effected in our conception of primitive history, while they

appropriate his results without the slightest compunction. Elsewhere also the

example of England is in some cases followed only too closely.

My work has been translated into a number of other languages. First,

Italian: L’origine delta famiglia, delta proprieta privata e dello stato,

versions riveduta dall’autore, di Pasquale Martignetti, Benevento, 1885.

Then, Rumanian: Origina famdei, proprietatei private si a statului, traducere

de Joan Nadeide, in the Yassy periodical Contemporanul, September, 1885, to

May, 1886. Further, Danish: Familjens, Privatejendommens og Statens Oprindelse,

Dansk, af Forfattern gennemgaaet Udgave, besorget af Gerson Trier, Kobenhavn,

1888. A French translation by Henri Rave, based on the present German edition,

is on the press.

Before the beginning of the sixties, one cannot speak of a history of

the family. In this field, the science of history was still completely under

the influence of the five books of Moses. The patriarchal form of the family,

which was there described in greater detail than anywhere else, was not only

assumed without question to be the oldest form, but it was also identified

– minus its polygamy – with the bourgeois family of today, so that

the family had really experienced no historical development at all; at most it

was admitted that in primitive times there might have been a period of sexual

promiscuity. It is true that in addition to the monogamous form of the family,

two other forms were known to exist – polygamy in the Orient and

polyandry in India and Tibet; but these three forms could not be arranged in

any historical order and merely appeared side by side without any connection.

That among some peoples of ancient history, as well as among some savages still

alive today, descent was reckoned, not from the father, but from the mother,

and that the female line was therefore regarded as alone valid; that among many

peoples of the present day in every continent marriage is forbidden within

certain large groups which at that time had not been closely studied –

these facts were indeed known and fresh instances of them were continually

being collected. But nobody knew what to do with them, and even as late as E.

B. Tylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind, etc. (1865) they

are listed as mere “curious customs”, side by side with the

prohibition among some savages against touching burning wood with an iron tool

and similar religious mumbo-jumbo.

The history of the family dates from 1861, from the publication of

Bachofen’s Mutterrecht. [Mother-right, matriarchate – Ed.] In this

work the author advances the following propositions:

(1) That originally man lived in a state of sexual

promiscuity, to describe which Bachofen uses the mistaken term

“hetaerism”;

(2) that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of

paternity, and that descent could therefore be reckoned only in the female

line, according to mother-right, and that this was originally the case amongst

all the peoples of antiquity;

(3) that since women, as mothers, were the only parents of

the younger generation that were known with certainty, they held a position of

such high respect and honor that it became the foundation, in Bachofen’s

conception, of a regular rule of women (gynaecocracy);

(4) that the transition to monogamy, where the woman belonged

to one man exclusively, involved a violation of a primitive religious law (that

is, actually a violation of the traditional right of the other men to this

woman), and that in order to expiate this violation or to purchase indulgence

for it the woman had to surrender herself for a limited period.

Bachofen finds the proofs of these assertions in innumerable passages of

ancient classical literature, which he collected with immense industry.

According to him, the development from “hetaerism” to monogamy and

from mother-right to father-right is accomplished, particularly among the

Greeks, as the consequence of an advance in religious conceptions, introducing

into the old hierarchy of the gods, representative of the old outlook, new

divinities, representative of the new outlook, who push the former more and

more into the background. Thus, according to Bachofen, it is not the

development of men’s actual conditions of life, but the religious

reflection of these conditions inside their heads, which has brought about the

historical changes in the social position of the sexes in relation to each

other. In accordance with this view, Bachofen interprets the Oresteia of

Aschylus as the dramatic representation of the conflict between declining

mother-right and the new father-right that arose and triumphed in the heroic

age. For the sake of her paramour, Ægisthus, Clytemnestra slays her husband,

Agamemnon, on his return from the Trojan War; but Orestes, the son of Agamemnon

and herself, avenges his father’s murder by slaying his mother. For this

act he is pursued by the Furies, the demonic guardians of mother-right,

according to which matricide is the gravest and most inexpiable crime. But

Apollo, who by the voice of his oracle had summoned Orestes to this deed, and

Athena, who is called upon to give judgment – the two deities who here

represent the new patriarchal order – take Orestes under their

protection; Athena hears both sides. The whole matter of the dispute is briefly

summed up in the debate which now takes place between Orestes and the Furies.

Orestes contends that Clytemnestra has committed a double crime; she has slain

her husband and thus she has also slain his father. Why should the Furies

pursue him, and not her, seeing that she is by far the more guilty? The answer

is striking: “She was not kin by blood to the man she slew.”

The murder of a man not related by blood, even if he be the husband of the

murderess, is expiable and does not concern the Furies; their office is solely

to punish murder between blood relations, and of such murders the most grave

and the most inexpiable, according to mother-right, is matricide. Apollo now

comes forward in Orestes’ defense; Athena calls upon the Areopagites

– the Athenian jurors – to vote; the votes for Orestes’

condemnation and for his acquittal are equal; Athena, as president, gives her

vote for Orestes and acquits him. Father-right has triumphed over mother-right,

the “gods of young descent,” as the Furies themselves call them,

have triumphed over the Furies; the latter then finally allow themselves to be

persuaded to take up a new office in the service of the new order.

This new but undoubtedly correct interpretation of the Oresteia is one of

the best and finest passages in the whole book, but it proves at the same time

that Bachofen believes at least as much as Æschylus did in the Furies, Apollo,

and Athena; for, at bottom, he believes that the overthrow of mother-right by

father-right was a miracle wrought during the Greek heroic age by these

divinities. That such a conception, which makes religion the lever of world

history, must finally end in pure mysticism, is clear. It is therefore a tough

and by no means always a grateful task to plow through Bachofen’s solid

tome. But all that does not lessen his importance as a pioneer. He was the

first to replace the vague phrases about some unknown primitive state of sexual

promiscuity by proofs of the following facts: that abundant traces survive in

old classical literature of a state prior to monogamy among the Greeks and

Asiatics when not only did a man have sexual intercourse with several women,

but a woman with several men, without offending against morality; that this

custom did not disappear without leaving its traces in the limited surrender

which was the price women had to pay for the right to monogamy; that therefore

descent could originally be reckoned only in the female line, from mother to

mother; that far into the period of monogamy, with its certain or at least

acknowledged paternity, the female line was still alone recognized; and that

the original position of the mothers, as the only certain parents of their

children, secured for them, and thus for their whole sex, a higher social

position than women have ever enjoyed since. Bachofen did not put these

statements as clearly as this, for he was hindered by his mysticism. But he

proved them; and in 1861 that was a real revolution.

Bachofen’s massive volume was written in German, the language of the

nation which at that time interested itself less than any other in the

prehistory of the modern family. Consequently, he remained unknown. His first

successor in the same field appeared in 1865, without ever having heard of

Bachofen.

This successor was J. F. McLennan, the exact opposite of his predecessor.

Instead of a mystic of genius, we have the dry-as-dust jurist; instead of the

exuberant imagination of a poet, the plausible arguments of a barrister

defending his brief. McLennan finds among many savage, barbarian, and even

civilized peoples of ancient and modern times a form of marriage in which the

bridegroom, alone or with his friends, must carry off the bride from her

relations by a show of force. This custom must be the survival of an earlier

custom when the men of one tribe did in fact carry off their wives by force

from other tribes. What was the origin of this “marriage by

capture”? So long as men could find enough women in their own tribe,

there was no reason whatever for it. We find, however, no less frequently that

among undeveloped peoples there are certain groups (which in 1865 were still

often identified with the tribes themselves) within which marriage is

forbidden, so that the men are obliged to take their wives, and women their

husbands, from outside the group; whereas among other peoples the custom is

that the men of one group must take their wives only from within their own

group. McLennan calls the first peoples “exogamous” and the second

“endogamous”; he then promptly proceeds to construct a rigid

opposition between exogamous and endogamous “tribes.” And although

his own investigations into exogamy force the fact under his nose that in many,

if not in most or even in all, cases, this opposition exists only in his own

imagination, he nevertheless makes it the basis of his whole theory. According

to this theory, exogamous tribes can only obtain their wives from other tribes;

and since in savagery there is a permanent state of war between tribe and

tribe, these wives could only be obtained by capture. McLennan then goes on to

ask: Whence this custom of exogamy? The conception of consanguinity and incest

could not have anything to do with it, for these things only came much later.

But there was another common custom among savages–the custom of killing

female children immediately after birth. This would cause a surplus of men in

each individual tribe, of which the inevitable and immediate consequence would

be that several men possessed a wife in common: polyandry. And this would have

the further consequence that it would be known who was the mother of a child,

but not who its father was: hence relationship only in the female line, with

exclusion of the male line – mother-right. And a second consequence of

the scarcity of women within a tribe – a scarcity which polyandry

mitigated, but did not remove – was precisely this systematic, forcible

abduction of women from other tribes.

As exogamy and polyandry are referable to one and the same

cause – a want of balance between the sexes–we are forced to regard

all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous ... Therefore we

must hold it to be beyond dispute that among exogamous races the first system

of kinship was that which recognized blood-ties through mothers only.

(McLennan, Studies in Ancient History, 1886. Primitive

Marriage, p. 124)

It is McLennan’s merit to have directed attention to the general

occurrence and great importance of what he calls exogamy. He did not by any

means discover the existence of exogamous groups; still less did he understand

them. Besides the early, scattered notes of many observers (these were

McLennan’s sources), Latham (Descriptive Ethnology, 1859) had given a

detailed and accurate description of this institution among the Indian Magars,

and had said that it was very widespread and occurred in all parts of the world

– a passage which McLennan himself cites. Morgan, in 1847, in his letters

on the Iroquois (American Review) and in 1851 in The League of the

Iroquois, had already demonstrated the existence of exogamous groups among

this tribe and had given an accurate account of them; whereas McLennan, as we

shall see, wrought greater confusion here with his legalistic mind than

Bachofen wrought in the field of mother-right with his mystical fancies. It is

also a merit of McLennan that he recognized matrilineal descent as the earlier

system, though he was here anticipated by Bachofen, as he later acknowledged.

But McLennan is not clear on this either; he always speaks of “kinship

through females only,” and this term, which is correct for an earlier

stage, he continually applies to later stages of development when descent and

inheritance were indeed still traced exclusively through the female line, but

when kinship on the male side was also recognized and expressed. There you have

the pedantic mind of the jurist, who fixes on a rigid legal term and goes on

applying it unchanged when changed conditions have made it applicable no

longer.

Apparently McLennan’s theory, plausible though it was, did not seem

any too well established even to its author. At any rate, he himself is struck

by the fact that “it is observable that the form of capture is now most

distinctly marked and impressive just among those races which have male

kinship” (should be “descent in the male line”). (Ibid., p.

140) And again: “It is a curious fact that nowhere now, that we are aware

of, is infanticide a system where exogamy and the earliest form of kinship

co-exist.” (Ibid., p. 146.) Both these facts flatly contradict his method

of explanation, and he can only meet them with new and still more complicated

hypotheses.

Nevertheless, his theory found great applause and support in England.

McLennan was here generally regarded as the founder of the history of the

family and the leading authority on the subject. However many exceptions and

variations might be found in individual cases, his opposition of exogamous and

endogamous tribes continued to stand as the recognized foundation of the

accepted view, and to act as blinders, obstructing any free survey of the field

under investigation and so making any decisive advance impossible. Against

McLennan’s exaggerated reputation in England – and the English

fashion is copied elsewhere – it becomes a duty to set down the fact that

he has done more harm with his completely mistaken antithesis between exogamous

and endogamous “tribes” than he has done good by his research.

Facts were now already coming to light in increasing number which did not

fit into his neat framework. McLennan knew only three forms of marriage:

polygyny, polyandry and monogamy. But once attention had been directed to the

question, more and more proofs were found that there existed among undeveloped

peoples forms of marriage in which a number of men possessed a number of women

in common, and Lubbock (The Origin of Civilization, 1870) recognized

this group marriage (“communal marriage”) as a historical fact.

Immediately afterwards, in 1871, Morgan came forward with new and in many

ways decisive evidence. He had convinced himself that the peculiar system of

consanguinity in force among the Iroquois was common to all the aboriginal

inhabitants of the United States and therefore extended over a whole continent,

although it directly contradicted the degrees of relationship arising out of

the system of marriage as actually practiced by these peoples. He then induced

the Federal government to collect information about the systems of

consanguinity among the other peoples of the world and to send out for this

purpose tables and lists of questions prepared by himself. He discovered from

the replies: (1) that the system of consanguinity of the American Indians was

also in force among numerous peoples in Asia and, in a somewhat modified form,

in Africa and Australia; (2) that its complete explanation was to be found in a

form of group marriage which was just dying out in Hawaii and other

Australasian islands; and (3) that side by side with this form of marriage a

system of consanguinity was in force in the same islands which could only be

explained through a still more primitive, now extinct, form of group marriage.

He published the collected evidence, together with the conclusions he drew from

it, in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity, 1871, and thus carried the

debate on to an infinitely wider field. By starting from the systems of

consanguinity and reconstructing from them the corresponding forms of family,

he opened a new line of research and extended our range of vision into the

prehistory of man. If this method proved to be sound, McLennan’s pretty

theories would be completely demolished.

McLennan defended his theory in a new edition of Primitive Marriage

(Studies in Ancient History, 1876). Whilst he himself constructs a

highly artificial history of the family out of pure hypotheses, he demands from

Lubbock and Morgan not merely proofs for every one of their statements, but

proofs as indisputably valid as if they were to be submitted in evidence in a

Scottish court of law. And this is the man who, from Tacitus’ report on

the close relationship between maternal uncle and sister’s son among the

Germans (Germania, Chap. 20), from Caesar’s report that the

Britons in groups of ten or twelve possessed their wives in common, from all

the other reports of classical authors on community of wives among barbarians,

calmly draws the conclusion that all these peoples lived in a state of

polyandry! One might be listening to a prosecuting counsel who can allow

himself every liberty in arguing his own case, but demands from defending

counsel the most formal, legally valid proof for his every word.

He maintains that group marriage is pure imagination, and by so doing falls

far behind Bachofen. He declares that Morgan’s systems of consanguinity

are mere codes of conventional politeness, the proof being that the Indians

also address a stranger or a white man as brother or father. One might as well

say that the terms “father,” “mother,”

“brother,” “sister” are mere meaningless forms of

address because Catholic priests and abbesses are addressed as

“father” and “mother,” and because monks and nuns, and

even freemasons and members of English trade unions and associations at their

full sessions are addressed as “brother” and “sister.”

In a word, McLennan’s defense was miserably feeble.

But on one point he had still not been assailed. The opposition of exogamous

and endogamous “tribes” on which his whole system rested not only

remained unshaken, but was even universally acknowledged as the keystone of the

whole history of the family. McLennan’s attempt to explain this

opposition might be inadequate and in contradiction with his own facts. But the

antithesis itself, the existence of two mutually exclusive types of

self-sufficient and independent tribes, of which the one type took their wives

from within the tribe, while the other type absolutely forbade it – that

was sacred gospel. Compare, for example, Giraud-Teulon’s Origines de

la Famille (1874) and even Lubbock’s Origin of Civilization

(fourth edition, 1882).

Here Morgan takes the field with his main work, Ancient Society

(1877), the work that underlies the present study. What Morgan had only dimly

guessed in 1871 is now developed in full consciousness. There is no antithesis

between endogamy and exogamy; up to the present, the existence of exogamous

“tribes” has not been demonstrated anywhere. But at the time when

group marriage still prevailed – and in all probability it prevailed

everywhere at some time – the tribe was subdivided into a number of

groups related by blood on the mother’s side, gentes, within which it was

strictly forbidden to marry, so that the men of a gens, though they could take

their wives from within the tribe and generally did so, were compelled to take

them from outside their gens. Thus while each gens was strictly exogamous, the

tribe embracing all the gentes was no less endogamous. Which finally disposed

of the last remains of McLennan’s artificial constructions.

But Morgan did not rest here. Through the gens of the American Indians, he

was enabled to make his second great advance in his field of research. In this

gens, organized according to mother-right, he discovered the primitive form out

of which had developed the later gens organized according to father-right, the

gens as we find it among the ancient civilized peoples. The Greek and Roman

gens, the old riddle of all historians, now found its explanation in the Indian

gens, and a new foundation was thus laid for the whole of primitive history.

This rediscovery of the primitive matriarchal gens as the earlier stage of

the patriarchal gens of civilized peoples has the same importance for

anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology and

Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy. It enabled Morgan

to outline for the first time a history of the family in which for the present,

so far as the material now available permits, at least the classic stages of

development in their main outlines are now determined. That this opens a new

epoch in the treatment of primitive history must be clear to everyone. The

matriarchal gens has become the pivot on which the whole science turns; since

its discovery we know where to look and what to look for in our research, and

how to arrange the results. And, consequently, since Morgan’s book,

progress in this field has been made at a far more rapid speed.

Anthropologists, even in England, now generally appreciate, or rather

appropriate, Morgan’s discoveries. But hardly one of them has the honesty

to admit that it is to Morgan that we owe this revolution in our ideas. In

England they try to kill his book by silence, and dispose of its author with

condescending praise for his earlier achievements; they niggle endlessly over

details and remain obstinately silent about his really great discoveries. The

original edition of Ancient Society is out of print; in America there

is no sale for such things; in England, it seems, the book was systematically

suppressed, and the only edition of this epochmaking work still circulating in

the book trade is – the German translation.

Why this reserve? It is difficult not to see in it a conspiracy of silence;

for politeness’ sake, our recognized anthropologists generally pack their

writings with quotations and other tokens of camaraderie. Is it, perhaps,

because Morgan is an American, and for the English anthropologists it goes

sorely against the grain that, despite their highly creditable industry in

collecting material, they should be dependent for their general points of view

in the arrangement and grouping of this material, for their ideas in fact, on

two foreigners of genius, Bachofen and Morgan? They might put up with the

German – but the American? Every Englishman turns patriotic when he comes

up against an American, and of this I saw highly entertaining instances in the

United States. Moreover, McLennan was, so to speak, the officially appointed

founder and leader of the English school of anthropology. It was almost a

principle of anthropological etiquette to speak of his artificially constructed

historical series – child-murder, polygyny, marriage by capture,

matriarchal family – in tones only of profoundest respect. The slightest

doubt in the existence of exogamous and endogamous “tribes” of

absolute mutual exclusiveness was considered rank heresy. Morgan had committed

a kind of sacrilege in dissolving all these hallowed dogmas into thin air. Into

the bargain, he had done it in such a way that it only needed saying to carry

immediate conviction; so that the McLennanites, who had hitherto been

helplessly reeling to and fro between exogamy and endogamy, could only beat

their brows and exclaim: “How could we be such fools as not to think of

that for ourselves long ago?”

As if these crimes had not already left the official school with the option

only of coldly ignoring him, Morgan filled the measure to overflowing by not

merely criticizing civilization, the society of commodity production, the basic

form of present-day society, in a manner reminiscent of Fourier, but also by

speaking of a future transformation of this society in words which Karl Marx

might have used. He had therefore amply merited McLennan’s indignant

reproach that “the historical method is antipathetical to Mr.

Morgan’s mind,” and its echo as late as 1884 from Mr. Professor

Giraud-Teulon of Geneva. In 1874 (Origines de la Famille) this same

gentleman was still groping helplessly in the maze of the McLennanite exogamy,

from which Morgan had to come and rescue him!

Of the other advances which primitive anthropology owes to Morgan, I do not

need to speak here; they are sufficiently discussed in the course of this

study. The fourteen years which have elapsed since the publication of his chief

work have greatly enriched the material available for the study of the history

of primitive human societies. The anthropologists, travelers and primitive

historians by profession have now been joined by the comparative jurists, who

have contributed either new material or new points of view. As a result, some

of Morgan’s minor hypotheses have been shaken or even disproved. But not

one of the great leading ideas of his work has been ousted by this new

material. The order which he introduced into primitive history still holds in

its main lines today. It is, in fact, winning recognition to the same degree in

which Morgan’s responsibility for the great advance is carefully

concealed. [1]

Frederick Engels

London, June 16, 1891

Footnotes

[1] On the voyage back from

New York in September, 1888, I met a former member of Congress for the district

of Rochester, who had known Lewis Morgan. Unfortunately, he could not tell me

very much about him. He said that Morgan had lived in Rochester as a private

individual, occupied only with his studies. His brother was a colonel, and had

held a post in the War Department in Washington; it was through him that Morgan

had managed to interest the Government in his researches and to get several of

his works published at public expense. While he was a member of Congress, my

informant had also on more than one occasion used his influence on

Morgan’s behalf.

## I. Stages of Prehistoric Culture

MORGAN is the first man who, with expert knowledge, has attempted to

introduce a definite order into the history of primitive man; so long

as no important additional material makes changes necessary, his

classification will undoubtedly remain in force.

Of the three main epochs – savagery, barbarism, and civilization – he

is concerned, of course, only with the first two and the transition to

the third. He divides both savagery and barbarism into lower, middle,

and upper stages according to the progress made in the production of

food; for, he says:

Upon their skill in this direction, the whole question of human

supremacy on the earth depended. Mankind are the only beings who

may be said to have gained an absolute control over the

production of food ... It is accordingly probable that the great

epochs of human progress have been identified, more or less

directly, with the enlargement of the sources of subsistence.

[Morgan, op. cit., p. 19. -Ed.]

The development of the family takes a parallel course, but here the

periods have not such striking marks of differentiation.

### I. Savagery

(a.) LOWER STAGE. Childhood of the human race. Man still lived in

his original habitat, in tropical or subtropical forests, and was

partially at least a tree-dweller, for otherwise his survival among

huge beasts of prey cannot be explained. Fruit, nuts and roots served

him for food. The development of articulate speech is the main result

of this period. Of all the peoples known to history none was still at

this primitive level. Though this period may have lasted thousands of

years, we have no direct evidence to prove its existence; but once the

evolution of man from the animal kingdom is admitted, such a

transitional stage must necessarily be assumed.[A]

(b.) MIDDLE STAGE. Begins with the utilization of fish for food

(including crabs, mussels, and other aquatic animals), and with the use

of fire. The two are complementary, since fish becomes edible only by

the use of fire. With this new source of nourishment, men now became

independent of climate and locality; even as savages, they could, by

following the rivers and coasts, spread over most of the earth. Proof

of these migrations is the distribution over every continent of the

crudely worked, unsharpened flint tools of the earlier Stone Age, known

as “palaeoliths,” all or most of which date from this period. New

environments, ceaseless exercise of his inventive faculty, and the

ability to produce fire by friction, led man to discover new kinds of

food: farinaceous roots and tubers, for instance, were baked in hot

ashes or in ground ovens. With the invention of the first weapons,

club and spear, game could sometimes be added to the fare. But the

tribes which figure in books as living entirely, that is, exclusively,

by hunting never existed in reality; the yield of the hunt was far too

precarious. At this stage, owing to the continual uncertainty of food

supplies, cannibalism seems to have arisen, and was practiced from now

onwards for a long time. The Australian aborigines and many of the

Polynesians are still in this middle stage of savagery today.[B]

(c.) UPPER STAGE. Begins with the invention of the bow and arrow,

whereby game became a regular source of food, and hunting a normal

form of work. Bow, string, and arrow already constitute a very

complex instrument, whose invention implies long, accumulated

experience and sharpened intelligence, and therefore knowledge of many

other inventions as well. We find, in fact, that the peoples

acquainted with the bow and arrow but not yet with pottery (from which

Morgan dates the transition to barbarism) are already making some

beginnings towards settlement in villages and have gained some control

over the production of means of subsistence; we find wooden vessels and

utensils, finger-weaving (without looms) with filaments of bark;

plaited baskets of bast or osier; sharpened (neolithic) stone tools.

With the discovery of fire and the stone ax, dug-out canoes now become

common; beams and planks arc also sometimes used for building houses.

We find all these advances, for instance, among the Indians of

northwest America, who are acquainted with the bow and arrow but not

with pottery. The bow and arrow was for savagery what the iron sword

was for barbarism and fire-arms for civilization – the decisive

weapon.[C]

### 2. Barbarism

(a.) LOWER STAGE. Dates from the introduction of pottery. In many

cases it has been proved, and in all it is probable, that the first

pots originated from the habit of covering baskets or wooden vessels

with clay to make them fireproof; in this way it was soon

discovered that the clay mold answered the purpose without any inner

vessel.

Thus far we have been able to follow a general line of development

applicable to all peoples at a given period without distinction of

place. With the beginning of barbarism, however, we have reached a

stage when the difference in the natural endowments of the two

hemispheres of the earth comes into play. The characteristic feature

of the period of barbarism is the domestication and breeding of animals

and the cultivation of plants. Now, the Eastern Hemisphere, the

so-called Old World, possessed nearly all the animals adaptable to

domestication, and all the varieties of cultivable cereals except one;

the Western Hemisphere, America, had no mammals that could be

domesticated except the llama, which, moreover, was only found in one

part of South America, and of all the cultivable cereals only one,

though that was the best, namely, maize. Owing to these differences in

natural conditions, the population of each hemisphere now goes on its

own way, and different landmarks divide the particular stages in each

of the two cases.

(b.) MIDDLE STAGE. Begins in the Eastern Hemisphere with

domestication of animals; in the Western, with the cultivation, by

means of irrigation, of plants for food, and with the use of adobe

(sun-dried) bricks and stone for building.

We will begin with the Western Hemisphere, as here this stage was never

superseded before the European conquest.

At the time when they were discovered, the Indians at the lower stage

of barbarism (comprising all the tribes living east of the Mississippi)

were already practicing some horticulture of maize, and possibly also

of gourds, melons, and other garden plants, from which they obtained a

very considerable part of their food. They lived in wooden houses in

villages protected by palisades. The tribes in the northwest,

particularly those in the region of the Columbia River, were still at

the upper stage of savagery and acquainted neither with pottery nor

with any form of horticulture. The so-called Pueblo Indians of New

Mexico, however, and the Mexicans, Central Americans, and Peruvians at

the time of their conquest were at the middle stage of barbarism. They

lived in houses like fortresses, made of adobe brick or of stone, and

cultivated maize and other plants, varying according to locality and

climate, in artificially irrigated plots of ground, which supplied

their main source of food; some animals even had also been domesticated

– the turkey and other birds by the Mexicans, the llama by the

Peruvians. They could also work metals, but not iron; hence they were

still unable to dispense with stone weapons and tools. The Spanish

conquest then cut short any further independent development.

In the Eastern Hemisphere the middle stage of barbarism began with the

domestication of animals providing milk and meat, but horticulture

seems to have remained unknown far into this period.[D] It was,

apparently, the domestication and breeding of animals and the formation

of herds of considerable size that led to the differentiation of the

Aryans and Semites from the mass of barbarians. The European and

Asiatic Aryans still have the same names for cattle, but those for

most of the cultivated plants are already different.

In suitable localities, the keeping of herds led to a pastoral life:

the Semites lived upon the grassy plains of the Euphrates and Tigris,

and the Aryans upon those of India and of the Oxus and Jaxartes, of the

Don and the Dnieper. It must have been on the borders of such pasture

lands that animals were first domesticated. To later generations,

consequently, the pastoral tribes appear to have come from regions

which, so far from being the cradle of mankind, were almost

uninhabitable for their savage ancestors and even for man at the lower

stages of barbarism. But having once accustomed themselves to pastoral

life in the grassy plains of the rivers, these barbarians of the middle

period would never have dreamed of returning willingly to the native

forests of their ancestors. Even when they were forced further to the

north and west, the Semites and Aryans could not move into the forest

regions of western Asia and of Europe until by cultivation of grain

they had made it possible to pasture and especially to winter their

herds on this less favorable land. It is more than probable that among

these tribes the cultivation of grain originated from the need for

cattle fodder and only later became important as a human food supply.

The plentiful supply of milk and meat and especially the beneficial

effect of these foods on the growth of the children account perhaps for

the superior development of the Aryan and Semitic races. It is a fact

that the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, who are reduced to an almost

entirely vegetarian diet, have a smaller brain than the Indians at the

lower stage of barbarism, who eat more meat and fish.[E] In any case,

cannibalism now gradually dies out, surviving only as a religious act

or as a means of working magic, which is here almost the same thing.

(c.) UPPER STAGE. Begins with the smelting of iron ore, and passes

into civilization with the invention of alphabetic writing and its use

for literary records. This stage (as we have seen, only the Eastern

Hemisphere passed through it independently) is richer in advances in

production than all the preceding stages together. To it belong the

Greeks of the heroic age, the tribes of Italy shortly before the

foundation of Rome, the Germans of Tacitus and the Norsemen of the

Viking age.[F]

Above all, we now first meet the iron plowshare drawn by cattle, which

made large-scale agriculture, the cultivation of fields, possible, and

thus created a practically unrestricted food supply in comparison with

previous conditions. This led to the clearance of forest land for

tillage and pasture, which in turn was impossible on a large scale

without the iron ax and the iron spade. Population rapidly increased

in number, and in small areas became dense. Prior to field

agriculture, conditions must have been very exceptional if they allowed

half a million people to be united under a central organization;

probably such a thing never occurred.

We find the upper stage of barbarism at its highest in the Homeric

poems, particularly in the Iliad. Fully developed iron tools, the

bellows, the hand-mill, the potter’s wheel, the making of oil and wine,

metal work developing almost into a fine art, the wagon and the

war-chariot, ship-building with beams and planks, the beginnings of

architecture as art, walled cities with towers and battlements, the

Homeric epic and a complete mythology – these are the chief legacy

brought by the Greeks from barbarism into civilization. When we

compare the descriptions which Caesar and even Tacitus give of the

Germans, who stood at the beginning of the cultural stage from which

the Homeric Greeks were just preparing to make the next advance, we

realize how rich was the development of production within the upper

stage of barbarism.

The sketch which I have given here, following Morgan, of the

development of mankind through savagery and barbarism to the beginnings

of civilization, is already rich enough in new features; what is more,

they cannot be disputed, since they are drawn directly from the process

of production. Yet my sketch will seem flat and feeble compared with

the picture to be unrolled at the end of our travels; only then will

the transition from barbarism to civilization stand out in full light

and in all its striking contrasts. For the time being, Morgan’s

division may be summarized thus:

Savagery – the period in which man’s appropriation of products in their natural state predominates; the products of human art are

chiefly instruments which assist this appropriation.

Barbarism – the period during which man learns to breed domestic

animals and to practice agriculture, and acquires methods of

increasing the supply of natural products by human activity.

Civilization – the period in which man learns a more advanced

application of work to the products of nature, the period of

industry proper and of art.

Editorial Footnotes

The intent of these footnotes are both to help the modern reader critically assess this work in face of recent scientific evidence and to show how effective Engels' dialectical method was that many of his conclusions remain true to this day. The following chapters do not have editorial footnotes because they are not needed as much as they are in this chapter (and this editor is not as knowledgable on those other subjects!). It should be noted that Engels predominant focus on European cultures is due to his lack of data on other cultures. These notes were written by MIA volunteer Brian Baggins (July, 2000).

A

While written in the late nineteenth century, these characteristics are descriptive of the first hominin genus: australopithecus who came into existence ~4 million years ago on the continent of Africa, and became extinct ~2 million years ago. They primarily were dependent on fruits, roots, etc. but likely supplemented this as scavengers.

B

This stage is a reasonable facsimile of homo erectus. Collection of their own food was predominant, the use of fire is likely, they hunted animals to some extent, and most importantly these practices allowed for the migration of humanity: settling much of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

There are however two significant mistakes. Australian Aborigines and Polynesians were not in a "middle stage of savagery”. This was a false characterization used by Europeans to justify the colonization of those people. Similarly, cannibalism is an accusation often made to justify exploitation, and its existence is extremely rare.

C

This stage is descriptive of homo sapiens, i.e. modern human beings, who first emerged ~200,000 years ago, and who originated in Africa. At around the same time, homo erectus went extinct.

D

Current estimates are that domestication of animals occurred in 11,000 BCE, while agriculture began around 9,500 BCE.

E

The theory that brain size correlates to intelligence was discredited by the end of the 19th century. This theory was used to justify both gender and race inequities for over a century. Modern theories about intelligence relating to physical characteristics, including size, are highly nuanced.

F

This is inaccurate. The Mesopotamian (3500-1000 B.C.E.), Egyptian (3000-500 B.C.E.), Harrapan (2500-1000 B.C.E.), & Chinese (2000 B.C.E. – 1800 C.E.) civilizations long preceded the Europeans in this stage: the Greeks were the first in Europe at around 500 B.C.E. Further, societies throughout the western hemisphere (Mesoamerica) developed their own writing and metallurgy. Morgan and Engels failed to recognize that the majority of humans on earth reached this final stage before European colonization.

## II. The Family

MORGAN, who spent a great part of his

life among the Iroquois Indians – settled to this day in New York State

– and was adopted into one of their tribes (the Senecas), found in use

among them a system of consanguinity which was in contradiction to their actual

family relationships. There prevailed among them a form of monogamy easily

terminable on both sides, which Morgan calls the “pairing family.”

The issue of the married pair was therefore known and recognized by everybody:

there could be no doubt about whom to call father, mother, son, daughter,

brother, sister. But these names were actually used quite differently. The

Iroquois calls not only his own children his sons and daughters, but also the

children of his brothers; and they call him father. The children of his

sisters, however, he calls his nephews and nieces, and they call him their

uncle. The Iroquois woman, on the other hand, calls her sisters’

children, as well as her own, her sons and daughters, and they call her mother.

But her brothers’ children she calls her nephews and nieces, and she is

known as their aunt. Similarly, the children of brothers call one another

brother and sister, and so do the children of sisters. A woman's own children

and the children of her brother, on the other hand, call one another cousins.

And these are not mere empty names, but expressions of actual conceptions of

nearness and remoteness, of equality and difference in the degrees of

consanguinity: these conceptions serve as the foundation of a fully elaborated

system of consanguinity through which several hundred different relationships

of one individual can be expressed. What is more, this system is not only in

full force among all American Indians (no exception has been found up to the

present), but also retains its validity almost unchanged among the aborigines

of India, the Dravidian tribes in the Deccan and the Gaura tribes in Hindustan.

To this day the Tamils of southern India and the Iroquois Seneca Indians in New

York State still express more than two hundred degrees of consanguinity in the

same manner. And among these tribes of India, as among all the American

Indians, the actual relationships arising out of the existing form of the

family contradict the system of consanguinity.

How is this to be explained? In view of the decisive part played by

consanguinity in the social structure of all savage and barbarian peoples, the

importance of a system so widespread cannot be dismissed with phrases. When a

system is general throughout America and also exists in Asia among peoples of a

quite different race, when numerous instances of it are found with greater or

less variation in every part of Africa and Australia, then that system has to

be historically explained, not talked out of existence, as McLennan, for

example, tried to do. The names of father, child, brother, sister are no mere

complimentary forms of address; they involve quite definite and very serious

mutual obligations which together make up an essential part of the social

constitution of the peoples in question.

The explanation was found. In the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) there still

existed in the first half of the nineteenth century a form of family in which

the fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, uncles and

aunts, nephews and nieces were exactly what is required by the American and old

Indian system of consanguinity. But now comes a strange thing. Once again, the

system of consanguinity in force in Hawaii did not correspond to the actual

form of the Hawaiian family. For according to the Hawaiian system of

consanguinity all children of brothers and sisters are without exception

brothers and sisters of one another and are considered to be the common

children not only of their mother and her sisters or of their father and his

brothers, but of all the brothers and sisters of both their parents without

distinction. While, therefore, the American system of consanguinity presupposes

a more primitive form of the family which has disappeared in America, but still

actually exists in Hawaii, the Hawaiian system of consanguinity, on the other

hand, points to a still earlier form of the family which, though we can nowhere

prove it to be still in existence, nevertheless must have existed; for

otherwise the corresponding system of consanguinity could never have arisen.

The family [says Morgan] represents an active principle. It is

never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society

advances from a lower to a higher condition ... Systems of consanguinity, on

the contrary, are passive; recording the progress made by the family at long

intervals apart, and only changing radically when the family has radically

changed.

[Morgan, op. cit., p. 444. – Ed.]

“And,” adds Marx, “the same is true of the political,

juridical, religious, and philosophical systems in general.” While the

family undergoes living changes, the system of consanguinity ossifies; while

the system survives by force of custom, the family outgrows it. But just as

Cuvier could deduce from the marsupial bone of an animal skeleton found near

Paris that it belonged to a marsupial animal and that extinct marsupial animals

once lived there, so with the same certainty we can deduce from the historical

survival of a system of consanguinity that an extinct form of family once

existed which corresponded to it.

The systems of consanguinity and the forms of the family we have just

mentioned differ from those of today in the fact that every child has more than

one father and mother. In the American system of consanguinity, to which the

Hawaiian family corresponds, brother and sister cannot be the father and mother

of the same child; but the Hawaiian system of consanguinity, on the contrary,

presupposes a family in which this was the rule. Here we find ourselves among

forms of family which directly contradict those hitherto generally assumed to

be alone valid. The traditional view recognizes only monogamy, with, in

addition, polygamy on the part of individual men, and at the very most

polyandry on the part of individual women; being the view of moralizing

philistines, it conceals the fact that in practice these barriers raised by

official society are quietly and calmly ignored. The study of primitive

history, however, reveals conditions where the men live in polygamy and their

wives in polyandry at the same time, and their common children are therefore

considered common to them all – and these conditions in their turn

undergo a long series of changes before they finally end in monogamy. The trend

of these changes is to narrow more and more the circle of people comprised

within the common bond of marriage, which was originally very wide, until at

last it includes only the single pair, the dominant form of marriage today.

Reconstructing thus the past history of the family, Morgan, in agreement

with most of his colleagues, arrives at a primitive stage when unrestricted

sexual freedom prevailed within the tribe, every woman belonging equally to

every man and every man to every woman. Since the eighteenth century there had

been talk of such a primitive state, but only in general phrases. Bachofen

– and this is one of his great merits – was the first to take the

existence of such a state seriously and to search for its traces in historical

and religious survivals. Today we know that the traces he found do not lead

back to a social stage of promiscuous sexual intercourse, but to a much later

form – namely, group marriage. The primitive social stage of promiscuity,

if it ever existed, belongs to such a remote epoch that we can hardly expect to

prove its existence directly by discovering its social fossils among backward

savages. Bachofen's merit consists in having brought this question to the

forefront for examination. [1]

Lately it has become fashionable to deny the existence of this initial stage

in human sexual life. Humanity must be spared this “shame.” It is

pointed out that all direct proof of such a stage is lacking, and particular

appeal is made to the evidence from the rest of the animal world; for, even

among animals, according to the numerous facts collected by Letourneau

(L'évolution du mariage et de la famille, 1888), complete promiscuity in

sexual intercourse marks a low stage of development. But the only conclusion I

can draw from all these facts, so far as man and his primitive conditions of

life are concerned, is that they prove nothing whatever. That vertebrates mate

together for a considerable period is sufficiently explained by physiological

causes – in the case of birds, for example, by the female’s need of

help during the brooding period; examples of faithful monogamy among birds

prove nothing about man, for the simple reason that men are not descended from

birds. And if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must

go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs

in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life

copulating in all its sections with itself. Confining ourselves to mammals,

however, we find all forms of sexual life – promiscuity, indications of

group marriage, polygyny, monogamy. Polyandry alone is lacking – it took

human beings to achieve that. Even our nearest relations, the quadrumana,

exhibit every possible variation in the grouping of males and females; and if

we narrow it down still more and consider only the four anthropoid apes, all

that Letourneau has to say about them is that they are sometimes monogamous,

sometimes polygamous, while Saussure, quoted by Giraud-Teulon, maintains that

they are monogamous. The more recent assertions of the monogamous habits of the

anthropoid apes which are cited by Westermarck (The History of Human

Marriage, London 1891), are also very far from proving anything. In short,

our evidence is such that honest Letourneau admits: “Among mammals there

is no strict relation between the degree of intellectual development and the

form of sexual life.” And Espinas (Des sociétés animates, 1877),

says in so many words:

The herd is the highest social group which we can observe

among animals. It is composed, so it appears, of families, but from the start

the family and the herd are in conflict with one another and develop in inverse

proportion.

As the above shows, we know practically nothing definite about the family

and other social groupings of the anthropoid apes; the evidence is flatly

contradictory. Which is not to be wondered at. The evidence with regard to

savage human tribes is contradictory enough, requiring very critical

examination and sifting; and ape societies are far more difficult to observe

than human. For the present, therefore, we must reject any conclusion drawn

from such completely unreliable reports.

The sentence quoted from Espinas, however, provides a better starting point.

Among the higher animals the herd and the family are not complementary to one

another, but antagonistic. Espinas shows very well how the jealousy of the

males during the mating season loosens the ties of every social herd or

temporarily breaks it up.

When the family bond is close and exclusive, herds form only

in exceptional cases. When on the other hand free sexual intercourse or

polygamy prevails, the herd comes into being almost spontaneously ... Before a

herd can be formed, family ties must be loosened and the individual must have

become free again. This is the reason why organized flocks are so rarely found

among birds ... We find more or less organized societies among mammals,

however, precisely because here the individual is not merged in the family ...

In its first growth, therefore, the common feeling of the herd has no greater

enemy than the common feeling of the family. We state it without hesitation:

only by absorbing families which had undergone a radical change could a social

form higher than the family have developed; at the same time, these families

were thereby enabled later to constitute themselves afresh under infinitely

more favorable circumstances.

[Espinas, op. cit., quoted by Giraud-Teulon, Origines du

mariage et de la famille,

1884, pp. 518-20].

Here we see that animal societies are, after all, of some value for drawing

conclusions about human societies; but the value is only negative. So far as

our evidence goes, the higher vertebrates know only two forms of family –

polygyny or separate couples; each form allows only one adult male, only one

husband. The jealousy of the male, which both consolidates and isolates the

family, sets the animal family in opposition to the herd. The jealousy of the

males prevents the herd, the higher social form, from coming into existence, or

weakens its cohesion, or breaks it up during the mating period; at best, it

attests its development. This alone is sufficient proof that animal families

and primitive human society are incompatible, and that when primitive men were

working their way up from the animal creation, they either had no family at all

or a form that does not occur among animals. In small numbers, an animal so

defenseless as evolving man might struggle along even in conditions of

isolation, with no higher social grouping than the single male and female pair,

such as Westermarck, following the reports of hunters, attributes to the

gorillas and the chimpanzees. For man's development beyond the level of the

animals, for the achievement of the greatest advance nature can show, something

more was needed: the power of defense lacking to the individual had to be made

good by the united strength and co-operation of the herd. To explain the

transition to humanity from conditions such as those in which the anthropoid

apes live today would be quite impossible; it looks much more as if these apes

had strayed off the line of evolution and were gradually dying out or at least

degenerating. That alone is sufficient ground for rejecting all attempts based

on parallels drawn between forms of family and those of primitive man. Mutual

toleration among the adult males, freedom from jealousy, was the first

condition for the formation of those larger, permanent groups in which alone

animals could become men. And what, in fact, do we find to be the oldest and

most primitive form of family whose historical existence we can indisputably

prove and which in one or two parts of the world we can still study today?

Group marriage, the form of family in which whole groups of men and whole

groups of women mutually possess one another, and which leaves little room for

jealousy. And at a later stage of development we find the exceptional form of

polyandry, which positively revolts every jealous instinct and is therefore

unknown among animals. But as all known forms of group marriage are accompanied

by such peculiarly complicated regulations that they necessarily point to

earlier and simpler forms of sexual relations, and therefore in the last resort

to a period of promiscuous intercourse corresponding to the transition from the

animal to the human, the references to animal marriages only bring us back to

the very point from which we were to be led away for good and all.

What, then, does promiscuous sexual intercourse really mean? It means the

absence of prohibitions and restrictions which are or have been in force. We

have already seen the barrier of jealousy go down. If there is one thing

certain, it is that the feeling of jealousy develops relatively late. The same

is true of the conception of incest. Not only were brother and sister

originally man and wife; sexual intercourse between parents and children is

still permitted among many peoples today. Bancroft (The Native Races of the

Pacific States of North America, 1875, Vol. I), testifies to it among the

Kadiaks on the Behring Straits, the Kadiaks near Alaska, and the Tinneh in the

interior of British North America; Letourneau compiled reports of it among the

Chippewa Indians, the Cucus in Chile, the Caribs, the Karens in Burma; to say

nothing of the stories told by the old Greeks and Romans about the Parthians,

Persians, Scythians, Huns, and so on. Before incest was invented – for

incest is an invention, and a very valuable one, too – sexual intercourse

between parents and children did not arouse any more repulsion than sexual

intercourse between other persons of different generations, and that occurs

today even in the most philistine countries without exciting any great horror;

even “old maids” of over sixty, if they are rich enough, sometimes

marry young men in their thirties. But if we consider the most primitive known

forms of family apart from their conceptions of incest – conceptions

which are totally different from ours and frequently in direct contradiction to

them-then the form of sexual intercourse can only be described as promiscuous

– promiscuous in so far as the restrictions later established by custom

did not yet exist. But in everyday practice that by no means necessarily

implies general mixed mating. Temporary pairings of one man with one woman were

not in any way excluded, just as in the cases of group marriages today the

majority of relationships are of this character. And when Westermarck, the

latest writer to deny the existence of such a primitive state, applies the term

“marriage” to every relationship in which the two sexes remain

mated until the birth of the offspring, we must point out that this kind of

marriage can very well occur under the conditions of promiscuous intercourse

without contradicting the principle of promiscuity – the absence of any

restriction imposed by custom on sexual intercourse. Westermarck, however,

takes the standpoint that promiscuity “involves a suppression of

individual inclinations,” and that therefore “the most genuine form

of it is prostitution.” In my opinion, any understanding of primitive

society is impossible to people who only see it as a brothel. We will return to

this point when discussing group marriage.

According to Morgan, from this primitive state of promiscuous intercourse

there developed, probably very early:

### 1. The Consanguine Family, The First Stage of the Family

Here the marriage groups are separated according to generations: all the

grandfathers and grandmothers within the limits of the family are all husbands

and wives of one another; so are also their children, the fathers and mothers;

the latter’s children will form a third circle of common husbands and

wives; and their children, the great-grandchildren of the first group, will

form a fourth. In this form of marriage, therefore, only ancestors and progeny,

and parents and children, are excluded from the rights and duties (as we should

say) of marriage with one another. Brothers and sisters, male and female

cousins of the first, second, and more remote degrees, are all brothers and

sisters of one another, and precisely for that reason they are all husbands and

wives of one another. At this stage the relationship of brother and sister also

includes as a matter of course the practice of sexual intercourse with one

another. [2] In its typical form, such a family would

consist of the descendants of a single pair, the descendants of these

descendants in each generation being again brothers and sisters, and therefore

husbands and wives, of one another. [3]

The consanguine family is extinct. Even the most primitive peoples known to

history provide no demonstrable instance of it. But that it must have existed,

we are compelled to admit: for the Hawaiian system of consanguinity still

prevalent today throughout the whole of Polynesia expresses degrees of

consanguinity which could only arise in this form of family; and the whole

subsequent development of the family presupposes the existence of the

consanguine family as a necessary preparatory stage.

Footnotes

[1] Bachofen proves how

little he understood his own discovery, or rather his guess, by using the term

"hetaerism" to describe this primitive state. For the Greeks, when they

introduced the word, hetaerism meant intercourse of men, unmarried or living in

monogamy, with unmarried women, it always presupposes a definite form of

marriage outside which this intercourse takes place and includes at least the

possibility of prostitution. The word was never used in any other sense, and it

is in this sense that I use it with Morgan. Bachofen everywhere introduces into

his extremely important discoveries the most incredible mystifications through

his notion that in their historical development the relations between men and

women had their origin in men's contemporary religious conceptions, not in

their actual conditions of life.

[2] In a letter written in

the spring of 1882, Marx expresses himself in the strongest terms about the

complete misrepresentation of primitive times in Wager's text to the

Nibelangen: “ Have such things been heard, that brother embraced

sister as a bride?” To Wagner and his “ lecherous

gods” who, quite in the modern manner, spice their love affairs with

a little incest, Marx replies: “ In primitive times the sister was

the wife, and that was moral.”

[3] NOTE in Fourth edition:

A French friend of mine who is an admirer of Wagner is not in agreement with

this note. He observes that already in the Elder Edda, on which Wagner based

his story, in the Oegisdrekka, Loki makes the reproach to Freya: In the

sight of the gods thou didst embrace thine own brother." Marriage between

brother and sister, he argues, was therefore forbidden already at that time.

The Oegisdrekka is the expression of a time when belief in the old myths had

completely broken down; it is purely a satire on the gods, in the style of

Lucian. If Loki as Mephisto makes such a reproach to Freya, it tells rather

against Wagner. Loki also says some lines later to Niordhr: “ With

thy sister didst thou breed son.” (vidh systur thinni gaztu slikan

mög) Niordhr is not, indeed, an Asa, but a Vana, and says in the Ynglinga saga

that marriages between brothers and sisters are usual in Vanaland, which was

not the case among the Asas. This would seem to show that the Vanas were more

ancient gods the Asas. At any rate, Niordhr lives among the OEgisdrekka is

rather a proof that at the time when the Norse sagas of the gods arose,

marriages between brothers and sisters, at any rate among the gods, did not yet

excite any horror. If one wants to find excuses for Wagner, it would perhaps be

better to cite Goethe instead of the Edda, for in his ballad of the God and the

Bayadere Goethe commits a similar mistake in regard to the religious surrender

of women, which he makes far too similar to modern prostitution.

### The Punaluan Family

If the first advance in organization consisted in the exclusion

of parents and children from sexual intercourse with one another, the second

was the exclusion of sister and brother. On account of the greater nearness in

age, this second advance was infinitely more important, but also more

difficult, than the first. It was effected gradually, beginning probably with

the exclusion from sexual intercourse of own brothers and sisters (children of,

the same mother) first in isolated cases and then by degrees as a general rule

(even in this century exceptions were found in Hawaii), and ending with the

prohibition of marriage even between collateral brothers and sisters, or, as we

should say, between first, second, and third cousins. It affords, says Morgan,

“a good illustration of the operation of the principle of natural

selection.” There can be no question that the tribes among whom

inbreeding was restricted by this advance were bound to develop more quickly

and more fully than those among whom marriage between brothers and sisters

remained the rule and the law. How powerfully the influence of this advance

made itself felt is seen in the institution which arose directly out of it and

went far beyond it – the gens, which forms the basis of the social order of

most, if not all, barbarian peoples of the earth and from which in Greece and

Rome we step directly into civilization.

After a few generations at most, every original family was bound to split

up. The practice of living together in a primitive communistic household, which

prevailed without exception till late in the middle stage of barbarism, set a

limit, varying with the conditions but fairly definite in each locality, to the

maximum size of the family community. As soon as the conception arose that

sexual intercourse between children of the same mother was wrong, it was bound

to exert its influence when the old households split up and new ones were

founded (though these did not necessarily coincide with the family group). One

or more lines of sisters would form the nucleus of the one household and their

own brothers the nucleus of the other. It must have been in some such manner as

this that the form which Morgan calls the punaluan family originated out of the

consanguine family. According to the Hawaiian custom, a number of sisters, own

or collateral (first, second or more remote cousins) were the common wives of

their common husbands, from among whom, however, their own brothers were

excluded; these husbands now no longer called themselves brothers, for they

were no longer necessarily brothers, but punalua – that is, intimate

companion, or partner. Similarly, a line of own or collateral brothers had a

number of women, not their sisters, as common wives, and these wives called one

another punalua. This was the classic form of a type of family, in which later

a number of variations was possible, but whose essential feature was: mutually

common possession of husbands and wives within a definite family circle, from

which, however, the brothers of the wives, first own and later also collateral,

and conversely also the sisters of the husbands, were excluded.

This form of the family provides with the most complete exactness the

degrees of consanguinity expressed in the American system. The children of my

mother’s sisters are still her children, just as the children of my

father’s brothers are also his children; and they are all my brothers and

sisters. But the children of my mother’s brothers are now her nephews and

nieces, the children of my father's sisters are his nephews and nieces, and

they are all my male and female cousins. For while the husbands of my

mother’s sisters are still her husbands, and the wives of my

father&rquo;s brothers are still his wives (in right, if not always in

fact), the social ban on sexual intercourse between brothers and sisters has

now divided the children of brothers and sisters, who had hitherto been treated

as own brothers and sisters, into two classes: those in the one class remain

brothers and sisters as before (collateral, according to our system); those in

the other class, the children of my mother’s brother in the one case and

of my father’s sister in the other, cannot be brothers and sisters any

longer, they can no longer have common parents, neither father nor mother nor

both, and therefore now for the first time the class of nephews and nieces,

male and female cousins becomes necessary, which in the earlier composition of

the family would have been senseless. The American system of consanguinity,

which appears purely nonsensical in any form of family based on any variety of

monogamy, finds, down to the smallest details, its rational explanation and its

natural foundation in the punaluan family. The punaluan family or a form

similar to it must have been at the very least as widespread as this system of

consanguinity.

Evidence of this form of family, whose existence has actually been proved in

Hawaii, would probably have been received from all over Polynesia if the pious

missionaries, like the Spanish monks of former days in America, had been able

to see in such unchristian conditions anything more than a sheer

“abomination.” [1]

Caesar’s report of the Britons, who were at that time in the middle

stage of barbarism, “every ten or twelve have wives in common, especially

brothers with brothers and parents with children,” is best explained as

group marriage. Barbarian mothers do not have ten or twelve sons of their own

old enough to keep wives in common, but the American system of consanguinity,

which corresponds to the punaluan family, provides numerous brothers, because

all a man’s cousins, near and distant, are his brothers. Caesar’s

mention of “parents with children” may be due to misunderstanding

on his part; it is not, however, absolutely impossible under this system that

father and son or mother and daughter should be included in the same marriage

group, though not father and daughter or mother and son. This or a similar form

of group marriage also provides the simplest explanation of the accounts in

Herodotus and other ancient writers about community of wives among savages and

barbarian peoples. The same applies also to the reports of Watson and Kaye in

their book, The People of India, about the Teehurs in Oudh (north of

the Ganges): “Both sexes have but a nominal tie on each other, and they

change connection without compunction; living together, almost

indiscriminately, in many large families.”

In the very great majority of cases the institution of the gens seems to

have originated directly out of the punaluan family. It is true that the

Australian classificatory system also provides an origin for it: the

Australians have gentes, but not yet the punaluan family; instead, they have a

cruder form of group marriage. In all forms of group family it is uncertain who

is the father of a child; but it is certain who its mother is. Though she calls

all the children of the whole family her children and has a mother’s

duties towards them, she nevertheless knows her own children from the others.

It is therefore clear that in so far as group marriage prevails, descent can

only be proved on the mother’s side and that therefore only the female

line is recognized. And this is in fact the case among all peoples in the

period of savagery or in the lower stage of barbarism. It is the second great

merit of Bachofen that he was the first to make this discovery. To denote this

exclusive recognition of descent through the mother and the relations of

inheritance which in time resulted from it, he uses the term

“mother-right,” which for the sake of brevity I retain. The term

is, however, ill-chosen, since at this stage of society there cannot yet be any

talk of “right” in the legal sense.

If we now take one of the two standard groups of the punaluan family, namely

a line of own and collateral sisters (that is, own sisters’ children in

the first, second or third degree), together with their children and their own

collateral brothers on the mother’s side (who, according to our

assumption, are not their husbands), we have the exact circle of persons whom

we later find as members of a gens, in the original form of that institution.

They all have a common ancestral mother, by virtue of their descent from whom

the female offspring in each generation are sisters. The husbands of these

sisters, however, can no longer be their brothers and therefore cannot be

descended from the same ancestral mother; consequently, they do not belong to

the same consanguine group, the later gens. The children of these sisters,

however, do belong to this group, because descent on the mother’s side

alone counts, since it alone is certain. As soon as the ban had been

established on sexual intercourse between all brothers and sisters, including

the most remote collateral relatives on the mother’s side, this group

transformed itself into a gens – that is, it constituted itself a firm

circle of blood relations in the female line, between whom marriage was

prohibited; and henceforward by other common institutions of a social and

religious character it increasingly consolidated and differentiated itself from

the other gentes of the same tribe. More of this later. When we see, then, that

the development of the gens follows, not only necessarily, but also perfectly

naturally from the punaluan family, we may reasonably infer that at one time

this form of family almost certainly existed among all peoples among whom the

presence of gentile institutions can be proved – that is, practically all

barbarians and civilized peoples.

At the time Morgan wrote his book, our knowledge of group marriage was still

very limited. A little information was available about the group marriages of

the Australians, who were organized in classes, and Morgan had already, in

1871, published the reports he had received concerning the punaluan family in

Hawaii. The punaluan family provided, on the one hand, the complete explanation

of the system of consanguinity in force among the American Indians, which had

been the starting point of all Morgan’s researches; on the other hand,

the origin of the matriarchal gens could be derived directly from the punaluan

family; further, the punaluan family represented a much higher stage of

development than the Australian classificatory system. It is therefore

comprehensible that Morgan should have regarded it as the necessary stage of

development before pairing marriage and should believe it to have been general

in earlier times. Since then we have become acquainted with a number of other

forms of group marriage, and we now know that Morgan here went too far.

However, in his punaluan family he had had the good fortune to strike the

highest, the classic form of group marriage, from which the transition to a

higher stage can be explained most simply.

For the most important additions to our knowledge of group marriage we are

indebted to the English missionary, Lorimer Fison, who for years studied this

form of the family in its classic home, Australia. He found the lowest stage of

development among the Australian aborigines of Mount Gambier in South

Australia. Here the whole tribe is divided into two great exogamous classes or

moieties, Kroki and Kumite. Sexual intercourse within each of these moieties is

strictly forbidden; on the other hand, every man in the one moiety is the

husband by birth of every woman in the other moiety and she is by birth his

wife. Not the individuals, but the entire groups are married, moiety with

moiety. And observe that there is no exclusion on the ground of difference in

age or particular degrees of affinity, except such as is entailed by the

division of the tribe into two exogamous classes. A Kroki has every Kumite

woman lawfully to wife; but, as his own daughter according to mother-right is

also a Kumite, being the daughter of a Kumite woman, she is by birth the wife

of every Kroki, including, therefore, her father. At any rate, there is no bar

against this in the organization into moieties as we know it. Either, then,

this organization arose at a time when, in spite of the obscure impulse towards

the restriction of inbreeding, sexual intercourse between parents and children

was still not felt to be particularly horrible – in which case the moiety

system must have originated directly out of a state of sexual promiscuity; or

else intercourse between parents and children was already forbidden by custom

when the moieties arose, and in that case the present conditions point back to

the consanguine family and are the first step beyond it. The latter is more

probable. There are not, to my knowledge, any instances from Australia of

sexual cohabitation between parents and children, and as a rule the later form

of exogamy, the matriarchal gens, also tacitly presupposes the prohibition of

this relationship as already in force when the gens came into being.

The system of two moieties is found, not only at Mount Gambier in South

Australia, but also on the Darling River further to the east and in Queensland

in the northeast; it is therefore widely distributed. It excludes marriages

only between brothers and sisters, between the children of brothers and between

the children of sisters on the mother's side, because these belong to the same

moiety; the children of sisters and brothers, however, may marry. A further

step towards the prevention of inbreeding was taken by the Kamilaroi on the

Darling River in New South Wales; the two original moieties are split up into

four, and again each of these four sections is married en bloc to another. The

first two sections are husbands and wives of one another by birth; according to

whether the mother belonged to the first or second section, the children go

into the third or fourth; the children of these last two sections, which are

also married to one another, come again into the first and second sections.

Thus one generation always belongs to the first and second sections, the next

to the third and fourth, and the generation after that to the first and second

again. Under this system, first cousins (on the mother’s side) cannot be

man and wife, but second cousins can. This peculiarly complicated arrangement

is made still more intricate by having matriarchal gentes grafted onto it (at

any rate later), but we cannot go into the details of this now. What is

significant is how the urge towards the prevention of inbreeding asserts itself

again and again, feeling its way, however, quite instinctively, without clear

consciousness of its aim.

Group marriage which in these instances from Australia is still marriage of

sections, mass marriage of an entire section of men, often scattered over the

whole continent, with an equally widely distributed section of women –

this group marriage, seen close at hand, does not look quite so terrible as the

philistines, whose minds cannot get beyond brothels, imagine it to be. On the

contrary, for years its existence was not even suspected and has now quite

recently been questioned again. All that the superficial observer sees in group

marriage is a loose form of monogamous marriage, here and there polygyny, and

occasional infidelities. It takes years, as it took Fison and Howlett, to

discover beneath these marriage customs, which in their actual practice should

seem almost familiar to the average European, their controlling law: the law by

which the Australian aborigine, wandering hundreds of miles from his home among

people whose language he does not understand, nevertheless often finds in every

camp and every tribe women who give themselves to him without resistance and

without resentment; the law by which the man with several wives gives one up

for the night to his guest. Where the European sees immorality and lawlessness,

strict law rules in reality. The women belong to the marriage group of the

stranger, and therefore they are his wives by birth; that same law of custom

which gives the two to one another forbids under penalty of outlawry all

intercourse outside the marriage groups that belong together. Even when wives

are captured, as frequently occurs in many places, the law of the exogamous

classes is still carefully observed.

Marriage by capture, it may be remarked, already shows signs of the

transition to monogamous marriage, at least in the form of pairing marriage.

When the young man has captured or abducted a girl, with the help of his

friends, she is enjoyed by all of them in turn, but afterwards she is regarded

as the wife of the young man who instigated her capture. If, on the other hand,

the captured woman runs away from her husband and is caught by another man, she

becomes his wife and the first husband loses his rights. Thus while group

marriage continues to exist as the general form, side by side with group

marriage and within it exclusive relationships begin to form, pairings for a

longer or shorter period, also polygyny; thus group marriage is dying out here,

too, and the only question is which will disappear first under European

influence: group marriage or the Australian aborigines who practice it.

Marriage between entire sections, as it prevails in Australia, is in any case a

very low and primitive form of group marriage, whereas the punaluan family, so

far as we know, represents its highest stage of development. The former appears

to be the form corresponding to the social level of vagrant savages, while the

latter already presupposes relatively permanent settlements of communistic

communities and leads immediately to the successive higher phase of

development. But we shall certainly find more than one intermediate stage

between these two forms; here lies a newly discovered field of research which

is still almost completely unexplored.

Footnotes

[1] There can no longer be

any doubt that the traces which Bachofen thought he had found of unrestricted

sexual intercourse, or what he calls “spontaneous generation in the

slime,” go back to group marriage. “If Bachofen considers these

punaluan marriages ‘lawless,’ a man of that period would consider most of the

present-day marriages between near and remote cousins on the father’s or

mother's side to be incestuous, as being marriages between blood brothers and

sisters.” (Marx.)

### 3. The Pairing Family

A certain amount of pairing, for a longer or shorter period,

already occurred in group marriage or even earlier; the man had a chief wife

among his many wives (one can hardly yet speak of a favorite wife), and for her

he was the most important among her husbands. This fact has contributed

considerably to the confusion of the missionaries, who have regarded group

marriage sometimes as promiscuous community of wives, sometimes as unbridled

adultery. But these customary pairings were bound to grow more stable as the

gens developed and the classes of “brothers“ and

“sisters” between whom marriage was impossible became more

numerous. The impulse given by the gens to the prevention of marriage between

blood relatives extended still further. Thus among the Iroquois and most of the

other Indians at the lower stage of barbarism we find that marriage is

prohibited between all relatives enumerated in their system – which

includes several hundred degrees of kinship. The increasing complication of

these prohibitions made group marriages more and more impossible; they were

displaced by the pairing family. In this stage, one man lives with one woman,

but the relationship is such that polygamy and occasional infidelity remain the

right of the men, even though for economic reasons polygamy is rare, while from

the woman the strictest fidelity is generally demanded throughout the time she

lives with the man, and adultery on her part is cruelly punished. The marriage

tie can, however, be easily dissolved by either partner; after separation, the

children still belong, as before, to the mother alone.

In this ever extending exclusion of blood relatives from the bond of

marriage, natural selection continues its work. In Morgan’s words:

The influence of the new practice, which brought unrelated

persons into the marriage relation, tended to create a more vigorous stock

physically and mentally ... When two advancing tribes, with strong mental and

physical characters, are brought together and blended into one people by the

accidents of barbarous life, the new skull and brain would widen and lengthen

to the sum of the capabilities of both.

[Morgan, Op. cit., p. 468. – Ed.]

Tribes with gentile constitution were thus bound to gain supremacy over more

backward tribes, or else to carry them along by their example.

Thus the history of the family in primitive times consists in the

progressive narrowing of the circle, originally embracing the whole tribe,

within which the two sexes have a common conjugal relation. The continuous

exclusion, first of nearer, then of more and more remote relatives, and at last

even of relatives by marriage, ends by making any kind of group marriage

practically impossible. Finally, there remains only the single, still loosely

linked pair, the molecule with whose dissolution marriage itself ceases. This

in itself shows what a small part individual sex-love, in the modern sense of

the word, played in the rise of monogamy. Yet stronger proof is afforded by the

practice of all peoples at this stage of development. Whereas in the earlier

forms of the family men never lacked women, but, on the contrary, had too many

rather than too few, women had now become scarce and highly sought after. Hence

it is with the pairing marriage that there begins the capture and purchase of

women – widespread symptoms, but no more than symptoms, of the much

deeper change that had occurred. These symptoms, mere methods of procuring

wives, the pedantic Scot, McLennan, has transmogrified into special classes of

families under the names of “marriage by capture” and

“marriage by purchase.” In general, whether among the American

Indians or other peoples (at the same stage), the conclusion of a marriage is

the affair, not of the two parties concerned, who are often not consulted at

all, but of their mothers. Two persons entirely unknown to each other are often

thus affianced; they only learn that the bargain has been struck when the time

for marrying approaches. Before the wedding the bridegroom gives presents to

the bride's gentile relatives (to those on the mother's side, therefore, not to

the father and his relations), which are regarded as gift payments in return

for the girl. The marriage is still terminable at the desire of either partner,

but among many tribes, the Iroquois, for example, public opinion has gradually

developed against such separations; when differences arise between husband and

wife, the gens relatives of both partners act as mediators, and only if these

efforts prove fruitless does a separation take place, the wife then keeping the

children and each partner being free to marry again.

The pairing family, itself too weak and unstable to make an independent

household necessary or even desirable, in no wise destroys the communistic

household inherited from earlier times. Communistic housekeeping, however,

means the supremacy of women in the house; just as the exclusive recognition of

the female parent, owing to the impossibility of recognizing the male parent

with certainty, means that the women – the mothers – are held in

high respect. One of the most absurd notions taken over from eighteenth-century

enlightenment is that in the beginning of society woman was the slave of man.

Among all savages and all barbarians of the lower and middle stages, and to a

certain extent of the upper stage also, the position of women is not only free,

but honorable. As to what it still is in the pairing marriage, let us hear the

evidence of Ashur Wright, for many years missionary among the Iroquois Senecas:

As to their family system, when occupying the old long-houses

[communistic households comprising several families], it is probable that some

one clan [gens] predominated, the women taking in husbands, however, from the

other clans [gentes] ... Usually, the female portion ruled the house ... The

stores were in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too

shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children, or

whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to

pick up his blanket and budge; and after such orders it would not be healthful

for him to attempt to disobey. The house would be too hot for him; and ... he

must retreat to his own clan [gens]; or, as was often done, go and start a new

matrimonial alliance in some other. The women were the great power among the

clans [gentes], as everywhere else. They did not hesitate, when occasion

required, “to knock off the horns,” as it was technically called,

from the head of a chief, and send him back to the ranks of the warriors.

[Quoted by Morgan, Op. cit., P. 464. – Ed.]

The communistic household, in which most or all of the women belong to one

and the same gens, while the men come from various gentes, is the material

foundation of that supremacy of the women which was general in primitive times,

and which it is Bachofen’s third great merit to have discovered. The

reports of travelers and missionaries, I may add, to the effect that women

among savages and barbarians are overburdened with work in no way contradict

what has been said. The division of labor between the two sexes is determined

by quite other causes than by the position of woman in society. Among peoples

where the women have to work far harder than we think suitable, there is often

much more real respect for women than among our Europeans. The lady of

civilization, surrounded by false homage and estranged from all real work, has

an infinitely lower social position than the hard-working woman of barbarism,

who was regarded among her people as a real lady (lady, frowa, Frau –

mistress) and who was also a lady in character.

Whether pairing marriage has completely supplanted group marriage in America

today is a question to be decided by closer investigation among the peoples

still at the upper stage of savagery in the northwest, and particularly in

South America. Among the latter, so many instances of sexual license are

related that one can hardly assume the old group marriage to have been

completely overcome here. At any rate, all traces of it have not yet

disappeared. In at least forty North American tribes the man who marries an

eldest sister has the right to take all her other sisters as his wives as soon

as they are old enough – a relic of the time when a whole line of sisters

had husbands in common. And Bancroft reports of the Indians of the California

peninsula (upper stage of savagery) that they have certain festivals when

several “tribes” come together for the purpose of promiscuous

sexual intercourse. These “tribes” are clearly gentes, who preserve

in these feasts a dim memory of the time when the women of one gens had all the

men of the other as their common husbands, and conversely. The same custom

still prevails in Australia. We find among some peoples that the older men, the

chieftains and the magician-priests, exploit the community of wives and

monopolize most of the women for themselves; at certain festivals and great

assemblies of the people, however, they have to restore the old community of

women and allow their wives to enjoy themselves with the young men. Westermarck

(History of Human Marriage, 1891, pp. 28, 29) quotes a whole series of

instances of such periodic Saturnalian feasts, when for a short time the old

freedom of sexual intercourse is again restored: examples are given among the

Hos, the Santals, the Punjas and Kotars in India, among some African peoples,

and so forth. Curiously enough, Westermarck draws the conclusion that these are

survivals, not of the group marriage, which he totally rejects, but of the

mating season which primitive man had in common with the other animals.

Here we come to Bachofen’s fourth great discovery – the

widespread transitional form between group marriage and pairing. What Bachofen

represents as a penance for the transgression of the old divine laws –

the penance by which the woman purchases the right of chastity – is in

fact only a mystical expression of the penance by which the woman buys herself

out of the old community of husbands and acquires the right to give herself to

one man only. This penance consists in a limited surrender: the Babylonian

women had to give themselves once a year in the temple of Mylitta; other

peoples of Asia Minor sent their girls for years to the temple of Anaitis,

where they had to practice free love with favorites of their own choosing

before they were allowed to marry. Similar customs in religious disguise are

common to almost all Asiatic peoples between the Mediterranean and the Ganges.

The sacrifice of atonement by which the woman purchases her freedom becomes

increasingly lighter in course of time, as Bachofen already noted:

Instead of being repeated annually, the offering is made once

only; the hetaerism of the matrons is succeeded by the hetaerism of the

maidens; hetaerism during marriage by hetaerism before marriage; surrender to

all without choice by surrender to some.

(Mutterrecht, p. xix.)

Among other peoples the religious disguise is absent. In some cases –

among the Thracians, Celts, and others, in classical times, many of the

original inhabitants of India, and to this day among the Malayan peoples, the

South Sea Islanders and many American Indians – the girls enjoy the

greatest sexual freedom up to the time of their marriage. This is especially

the case almost everywhere in South America, as everyone who has gone any

distance into the interior can testify. Thus Agassiz (A Journey in

Brazil, Boston and New York, 1868, p. 266) tells this story of a rich

family of Indian extraction: when he was introduced to the daughter, he asked

after her father, presuming him to be her mother's husband, who was fighting as

an officer in the war against Paraguay; but the mother answered with a smile:

"Naõ tem pai, é filha da fortuna" (She has no father. She is a child of

chance):

It is the way the Indian or half-breed women here always speak

of their illegitimate children ... without an intonation of sadness or of

blame ... So far is this from being an unusual case, that ... the opposite seems

the exception. Children are frequently quite ignorant of their parentage. They

know about their mother, for all the care and responsibility falls upon her,

but they have no knowledge of their father; nor does it seem to occur to the

woman that she or her children have any claim upon him.

What seems strange here to civilized people is simply the rule according to

mother-right and in group marriage.

Among other peoples, again, the friends and relatives of the bridegroom, or

the wedding guests, claim their traditional right to the bride at the wedding

itself, and the bridegroom's turn only comes last; this was the custom in the

Balearic Islands and among the Augilers of Africa in ancient times; it is still

observed among the Bareas of Abyssinia. In other cases, an official personage,

the head of the tribe or the gens, cacique, shaman, priest, prince or whatever

he may be called, represents the community and exercises the right of the first

night with the bride. Despite all necromantic whitewashing, this jus prime

noctis [Right of first night. – Ed.] still

persists today as a relic of group marriage among most of the natives of the

Alaska region (Bancroft, Native Races, I, p. 8i), the Tahus of North Mexico

(Ibid., p. 584) and other peoples; and at any rate in the countries originally

Celtic, where it was handed down directly from group marriage, it existed

throughout the whole of the middle ages, for example, in Aragon. While in

Castile the peasants were never serfs, in Aragon there was serfdom of the most

shameful kind right up till the decree of Ferdinand the Catholic in 1486. This

document states:

We judge and declare that the aforementioned lords (senors,

barons) ... when the peasant takes himself a wife, shall neither sleep with her

on the first night; nor shall they during the wedding-night, when the wife has

laid herself in her bed, step over it and the aforementioned wife as a sign of

lordship; nor shall the aforementioned lords use the daughter or the son of the

peasant, with payment or without payment, against their will.

(Quoted in the original Catalan by Sugenheim,

Serfdom, Petersburg, 1861, p. 35)

Bachofen is also perfectly right when he consistently maintains that the

transition from what he calls “Hetaerism” or

“Sumpfzeugung” to monogamy was brought about primarily through the

women. The more the traditional sexual relations lost the native primitive

character of forest life, owing to the development of economic conditions with

consequent undermining of the old communism and growing density of population,

the more oppressive and humiliating must the women have felt them to be, and

the greater their longing for the right of chastity, of temporary or permanent

marriage with one man only, as a way of release. This advance could not in any

case have originated with the men, if only because it has never occurred to

them, even to this day, to renounce the pleasures of actual group marriage.

Only when the women had brought about the transition to pairing marriage were

the men able to introduce strict monogamy – though indeed only for women.

The first beginnings of the pairing family appear on the dividing line

between savagery and barbarism; they are generally to be found already at the

upper stage of savagery, but occasionally not until the lower stage of

barbarism. The pairing family is the form characteristic of barbarism, as group

marriage is characteristic of savagery and monogamy of civilization. To develop

it further, to strict monogamy, other causes were required than those we have

found active hitherto. In the single pair the group was already reduced to its

final unit, its two-atom molecule: one man and one woman. Natural selection,

with its progressive exclusions from the marriage community, had accomplished

its task; there was nothing more for it to do in this direction. Unless new,

social forces came into play, there was no reason why a new form of family

should arise from the single pair. But these new forces did come into play.

We now leave America, the classic soil of the pairing family. No sign allows

us to conclude that a higher form of family developed here, or that there was

ever permanent monogamy anywhere in America prior to its discovery and

conquest. But not so in the Old World.

Here the domestication of animals and the breeding of herds had developed a

hitherto unsuspected source of wealth and created entirely new social

relations. Up to the lower stage of barbarism, permanent wealth had consisted

almost solely of house, clothing, crude ornaments and the tools for obtaining

and preparing food – boat, weapons, and domestic utensils of the simplest

kind. Food had to be won afresh day by day. Now, with their herds of horses,

camels, asses, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, the advancing pastoral peoples

– the Semites on the Euphrates and the Tigris, and the Aryans in the

Indian country of the Five Streams (Punjab), in the Ganges region, and in the

steppes then much more abundantly watered of the Oxus and the Jaxartes –

had acquired property which only needed supervision and the rudest care to

reproduce itself in steadily increasing quantities and to supply the most

abundant food in the form of milk and meat. All former means of procuring food

now receded into the background; hunting, formerly a necessity, now became a

luxury.

But to whom did this new wealth belong? Originally to the gens, without a

doubt. Private property in herds must have already started at an early period,

however. It is difficult to say whether the author of the so-called first book

of Moses regarded the patriarch Abraham as the owner of his herds in his own

right as head of a family community or by right of his position as actual

hereditary head of a gens. What is certain is that we must not think of him as

a property owner in the modern sense of the word. And it is also certain that

at the threshold of authentic history we already find the herds everywhere

separately owned by heads of families, as are the artistic products of

barbarism – metal implements, luxury articles and, finally, the human

cattle – the slaves.

For now slavery had also been invented. To the barbarian of the lower stage,

a slave was valueless. Hence the treatment of defeated enemies by the American

Indians was quite different from that at a higher stage. The men were killed or

adopted as brothers into the tribe of the victors; the women were taken as

wives or otherwise adopted with their surviving children. At this stage human

labor-power still does not produce any considerable surplus over and above its

maintenance costs. That was no longer the case after the introduction of

cattle-breeding, metalworking, weaving and, lastly, agriculture. just as the

wives whom it had formerly been so easy to obtain had now acquired an exchange

value and were bought, so also with the forces of labor, particularly since the

herds had definitely become family possessions. The family did not multiply so

rapidly as the cattle. More people were needed to look after them; for this

purpose use could be made of the enemies captured in war, who could also be

bred just as easily as the cattle themselves.

Once it had passed into the private possession of families and there rapidly

begun to augment, this wealth dealt a severe blow to the society founded on

pairing marriage and the matriarchal gens. Pairing marriage had brought a new

element into the family. By the side of the natural mother of the child it

placed its natural and attested father, with a better warrant of paternity,

probably, than that of many a “father” today. According to the

division of labor within the family at that time, it was the man’s part

to obtain food and the instruments of labor necessary for the purpose. He

therefore also owned the instruments of labor, and in the event of husband and

wife separating, he took them with him, just as she retained her household

goods. Therefore, according to the social custom of the time, the man was also

the owner of the new source of subsistence, the cattle, and later of the new

instruments of labor, the slaves. But according to the custom of the same

society, his children could not inherit from him. For as regards inheritance,

the position was as follows:

At first, according to mother-right – so long, therefore, as descent

was reckoned only in the female line – and according to the original

custom of inheritance within the gens, the gentile relatives inherited from a

deceased fellow member of their gens. His property had to remain within the

gens. His effects being insignificant, they probably always passed in practice

to his nearest gentile relations – that is, to his blood relations on the

mother's side. The children of the dead man, however, did not belong to his

gens, but to that of their mother; it was from her that they inherited, at

first conjointly with her other blood relations, later perhaps with rights of

priority; they could not inherit from their father, because they did not belong

to his gens, within which his property had to remain. When the owner of the

herds died, therefore, his herds would go first to his brothers and sisters and

to his sister’s children, or to the issue of his mother’s sisters.

But his own children were disinherited.

Thus, on the one hand, in proportion as wealth increased, it made the

man’s position in the family more important than the woman’s, and

on the other hand created an impulse to exploit this strengthened position in

order to overthrow, in favor of his children, the traditional order of

inheritance. This, however, was impossible so long as descent was reckoned

according to mother-right. Mother-right, therefore, had to be overthrown, and

overthrown it was. This was by no means so difficult as it looks to us today.

For this revolution – one of the most decisive ever experienced by

humanity – could take place without disturbing a single one of the living

members of a gens. All could remain as they were. A simple decree sufficed that

in the future the offspring of the male members should remain within the gens,

but that of the female should be excluded by being transferred to the gens of

their father. The reckoning of descent in the female line and the matriarchal

law of inheritance were thereby overthrown, and the male line of descent and

the paternal law of inheritance were substituted for them. As to how and when

this revolution took place among civilized peoples, we have no knowledge. It

falls entirely within prehistoric times. But that it did take place is more

than sufficiently proved by the abundant traces of mother-right which have been

collected, particularly by Bachofen. How easily it is accomplished can be seen

in a whole series of American Indian tribes, where it has only recently taken

place and is still taking place under the influence, partly of increasing

wealth and a changed mode of life (transference from forest to prairie), and

partly of the moral pressure of civilization and missionaries. Of eight

Missouri tribes, six observe the male line of descent and inheritance, two

still observe the female. Among the Shawnees, Miamis and Delawares the custom

has grown up of giving the children a gentile name of their father's gens in

order to transfer them into it, thus enabling them to inherit from him.

Man“s innate casuistry! To change things by changing

their names! And to find loopholes for violating tradition while maintaining

tradition, when direct interest supplied sufficient impulse. (Marx.)

The result was hopeless confusion, which could only be remedied and to a

certain extent was remedied by the transition to father-right. “In

general, this seems to be the most natural transition.” (Marx.) For the

theories proffered by comparative jurisprudence regarding the manner in which

this change was effected among the civilized peoples of the Old World –

though they are almost pure hypotheses see M. Kovalevsky, Tableau des

origines et de l'évolution de la famille et de la propriété. Stockholm,

1890.

The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female

sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced

to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the

production of children. This degraded position of the woman, especially

conspicuous among the Greeks of the heroic and still more of the classical age,

has gradually been palliated and glozed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder

form; in no sense has it been abolished.

The establishment of the exclusive supremacy of the man shows

its effects first in the patriarchal family, which now emerges as an

intermediate form. Its essential characteristic is not polygyny, of which more

later, but “the organization of a number of persons, bond and free, into

a family, under paternal power, for the purpose of holding lands, and for the

care of flocks and herds ... (In the Semitic form) the chiefs, at least, lived

in polygamy ... Those held to servitude, and those employed as servants, lived

in the marriage relation.”

[Morgan, op. cit., p. 474]

Its essential features are the incorporation of unfree persons, and paternal

power; hence the perfect type of this form of family is the Roman. The original

meaning of the word “family” (familia) is not that compound of

sentimentality and domestic strife which forms the ideal of the present-day

philistine; among the Romans it did not at first even refer to the married pair

and their children, but only to the slaves. Famulus means domestic slave, and

familia is the total number of slaves belonging to one man. As late as the time

of Gaius, the familia, id est patrimonium (family, that is, the patrimony, the

inheritance) was bequeathed by will. The term was invented by the Romans to

denote a new social organism, whose head ruled over wife and children and a

number of slaves, and was invested under Roman paternal power with rights of

life and death over them all.

This term, therefore, is no older than the iron-clad family

system of the Latin tribes, which came in after field agriculture and after

legalized servitude, as well as after the separation of Greeks and Latins.

[Morgan, Op. cit., p. 478]

Marx adds:

The modern family contains in germ not only slavery

(servitus), but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to

agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the contradictions which

later extend throughout society and its state.

Such a form of family shows the transition of the pairing family to

monogamy. In order to make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore

of the paternity of the children, she is delivered over unconditionally into

the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights.

With the patriarchal family, we enter the field of written history a field

where comparative jurisprudence can give valuable help. And it has in fact

brought an important advance in our knowledge. We owe to Maxim Kovalevsky

(Tableau etc. de la mine et de propriété, Stockholm, 1890, pp.

60-100), the proof that the patriarchal household community, as we still find

it today among the Serbs and the Bulgars under the name of zádruga (which may

be roughly translated "bond of friendship") or bratstvo (brotherhood), and in a

modified form among the Oriental peoples, formed the transitional stage between

the matriarchal family deriving from group marriage and the single family of

the modern world. For the civilized peoples of the Old World, for the Aryans

and Semites at any rate, this seems to be established.

The Southern Slav zádruga provides the best instance of such a family

community still in actual existence. It comprises several generations of the

descendants of one father, together with their wives, who all live together in

one homestead, cultivate their fields in common, feed and clothe themselves

from a common stock, and possess in common the surplus from their labor. The

community is under the supreme direction of the head of the house (domácin),

who acts as its representative outside, has the right to sell minor objects,

and controls the funds, for which, as for the regular organization of business,

he is responsible. He is elected, and it is not at all necessary that he should

be the oldest in the community. The women and their work are under the control

of the mistress of the house (domácica), who is generally the wife of the

domácin. She also has an important and often a decisive voice in the choice of

husbands for the girls. Supreme power rests, however, with the family council,

the assembly of all the adult members of the household, women as well as men.

To this assembly the master of the house renders account; it takes all

important decisions, exercises jurisdiction over the members, decides on sales

and purchases of any importance, especially of land and so on.

It is only within the last ten years or so that such great family

communities have been proved to be still in existence in Russia; it is now

generally recognized that they are as firmly rooted in the customs of the

Russian people as the obshchina or village community. They appear in the oldest

Russian code of laws, the Pravda of Yaroslav, under the same name as in the

Dalmatian laws (vervj), and references to them can also be traced in Polish and

Czech historical sources.

Among the Germans also, according to Heusler (Institutionen des

deutschen Rechts), the economic unit was originally not the single family

in the modern sense, but the “house community,” which consisted of

several generations or several single families, and often enough included

unfree persons as well. The Roman family is now also considered to have

originated from this type, and consequently the absolute power of the father of

the house, and the complete absence of rights among the other members of the

family in relation to him, have recently been strongly questioned. It is

supposed that similar family communities also existed among the Celts in

Ireland; in France, under the name of parconneries, they survived in Nivernais

until the French Revolution, and in the Franche Comte they have not completely

died out even today [1884]. In the district of Louhans (Saône et Loire) large

peasant houses can be seen in which live several generations of the same

family; the house has a lofty common hall reaching to the roof, and surrounding

it the sleeping-rooms, to which stairs of six or eight steps give access.

In India, the household community with common cultivation of the land is

already mentioned by Nearchus in the time of Alexander the Great, and it still

exists today in the same region, in the Punjab and the whole of northwest

India. Kovalevsky was himself able to prove its existence in the Caucasus. In

Algeria it survives among the Kabyles. It is supposed to have occurred even in

America, and the calpullis which Zurita describes in old Mexico have been

identified with it; on the other hand, Cunow has proved fairly clearly (in the

journal Ausland, 1890, Nos. 42-44) that in Peru at the time of the

conquest there was a form of constitution based on marks (called, curiously

enough, marca), with periodical allotment of arable land and consequently with

individual tillage. In any case, the patriarchal household community with

common ownership and common cultivation of the land now assumes an entirely

different significance than hitherto. We can no longer doubt the important part

it played, as a transitional form between the matriarchal family and the single

family, among civilized and other peoples of the Old World. Later we will

return to the further conclusion drawn by Kovalevsky that it was also the

transitional form out of which developed the village, or mark, community with

individual tillage and the allotment, first periodical and then permanent, of

arable and pasture land.

With regard to the family life within these communities, it must be observed

that at any rate in Russia the master of the house has a reputation for

violently abusing his position towards the younger women of the community,

especially his daughters-in-law, whom he often converts into his harem; the

Russian folk-songs have more than a little to say about this.

Before we go on to monogamy, which developed rapidly with the overthrow of

mother-right, a few words about polygyny and polyandry. Both forms can only be

exceptions, historical luxury products, as it were, unless they occur side by

side in the same country, which is, of course, not the case. As the men

excluded from polygyny cannot console themselves with the women left over from

polyandry, and as hitherto, regardless of social institutions, the number of

men and women has been fairly equal, it is obviously impossible for either of

these forms of marriage to be elevated to the general form. Polygyny on the

part of one individual man was, in fact, obviously a product of slavery and

confined to a few people in exceptional positions. In the Semitic patriarchal

family it was only the patriarch himself, and a few of his sons at most, who

lived in polygyny; the rest had to content themselves with one wife. This still

holds throughout the whole of the Orient; polygyny is the privilege of the

wealthy and of the nobility, the women being recruited chiefly through purchase

as slaves; the mass of the people live in monogamy.

A similar exception is the polyandry of India and Tibet, the origin of which

in group marriage requires closer examination and would certainly prove

interesting. It seems to be much more easy-going in practice than the jealous

harems of the Mohammedans. At any rate, among the Nairs in India, where three

or four men have a wife in common, each of them can have a second wife in

common with another three or more men, and similarly a third and a fourth and

so on. It is a wonder that McLennan did not discover in these marriage clubs,

to several of which one could belong and which he himself describes, a new

class of club marriage! This marriage-club system, however, is not real

polyandry at all; on the contrary, as Giraud-Teulon has already pointed out, it

is a specialized form of group marriage; the men live in polygyny, the women in

polyandry.

### 4. The Monogamous Family

It develops out of the pairing family, as previously shown, in the

transitional period between the upper and middle stages of barbarism;

its decisive victory is one of the signs that civilization is

beginning. It is based on the supremacy of the man, the express

purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such

paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into

their father’s property as his natural heirs. It is distinguished from

pairing marriage by the much greater strength of the marriage tie,

which can no longer be dissolved at either partner’s wish. As a rule,

it is now only the man who can dissolve it, and put away his wife. The

right of conjugal infidelity also remains secured to him, at any rate

by custom (the Code Napoléon explicitly accords it to the husband as

long as he does not bring his concubine into the house), and as social

life develops he exercises his right more and more; should the wife

recall the old form of sexual life and attempt to revive it, she is

punished more severely than ever.

We meet this new form of the family in all its severity among the

Greeks. While the position of the goddesses in their mythology, as

Marx points out, brings before us an earlier period when the position

of women was freer and more respected, in the heroic age we find the

woman already being humiliated by the domination of the man and by

competition from girl slaves. Note how Telemachus in the Odyssey

silences his mother. [The reference is to a passage where Telemachus,

son of Odysseus and Penelope, tells his mother to get on with her

weaving and leave the men to mind their own business – Ed.] In Homer

young women are booty and are handed over to the pleasure of the

conquerors, the handsomest being picked by the commanders in order of

rank; the entire Iliad, it will be remembered, turns on the quarrel of

Achilles and Agamemnon over one of these slaves. If a hero is of any

importance, Homer also mentions the captive girl with whom he shares

his tent and his bed. These girls were also taken back to Greece and

brought under the same roof as the wife, as Cassandra was brought by

Agamemnon in AEschylus; the sons begotten of them received a small

share of the paternal inheritance and had the full status of freemen.

Teucer, for instance, is a natural son of Telamon by one of these

slaves and has the right to use his father’s name. The legitimate wife

was expected to put up with all this, but herself to remain strictly

chaste and faithful. In the heroic age a Greek woman is, indeed, more

respected than in the period of civilization, but to her husband she is

after all nothing but the mother of his legitimate children and heirs,

his chief housekeeper and the supervisor of his female slaves, whom he

can and does take as concubines if he so fancies. It is the existence

of slavery side by side with monogamy, the presence of young, beautiful

slaves belonging unreservedly to the man, that stamps monogamy from the

very beginning with its specific character of monogamy for the woman

only, but not for the man. And that is the character it still has

today.

Coming to the later Greeks, we must distinguish between Dorians and

Ionians. Among the former – Sparta is the classic example – marriage

relations are in some ways still more archaic than even in Homer. The

recognized form of marriage in Sparta was a pairing marriage, modified

according to the Spartan conceptions of the state, in which there still

survived vestiges of group marriage. Childless marriages were

dissolved; King Anaxandridas (about 650 B.C.), whose first wife was

childless, took a second and kept two households; about the same time,

King Ariston, who had two unfruitful wives, took a third, but dismissed

one of the other two. On the other hand, several brothers could have a

wife in common; a friend who preferred his friend’s wife could share

her with him; and it was considered quite proper to place one’s wife at

the disposal of a sturdy “stallion,” as Bismarck would say, even if he

was not a citizen. A passage in Plutarch, where a Spartan woman refers

an importunate wooer to her husband, seems to indicate, according to

Schamann, even greater freedom. Real adultery, secret infidelity by

the woman without the husband’s knowledge, was therefore unheard of.

On the other hand, domestic slavery was unknown in Sparta, at least

during its best period; the unfree helots were segregated on the

estates and the Spartans were therefore less tempted to take the

helots’ wives. Inevitably in these conditions women held a much more

honored position in Sparta than anywhere else in Greece. The Spartan

women and the elite of the Athenian hetairai are the only Greek women

of whom the ancients speak with respect and whose words they thought it

worth while to record.

The position is quite different among the Ionians; here Athens is

typical. Girls only learned spinning, weaving, and sewing, and at most

a little reading and writing. They lived more or less behind locked

doors and had no company except other women. The women’s apartments

formed a separate part of the house, on the upper floor or at the back,

where men, especially strangers, could not easily enter, and to which

the women retired when men visited the house. They never went out

without being accompanied by a female slave; indoors they were kept

under regular guard. Aristophanes speaks of Molossian dogs kept to

frighten away adulterers, and, at any rate in the Asiatic towns,

eunuchs were employed to keep watch over the women-making and exporting

eunuchs was an industry in Chios as early as Herodotus’ time, and,

according to Wachsmuth, it was not only the barbarians who bought the

supply. In Euripides a woman is called an oikourema, a thing (the word

is neuter) for looking after the house, and, apart from her business of

bearing children, that was all she was for the Athenian – his chief

female domestic servant. The man had his athletics and his public

business, from which women were barred; in addition, he often had

female slaves at his disposal and during the most flourishing days of

Athens an extensive system of prostitution which the state at least

favored. It was precisely through this system of prostitution that the

only Greek women of personality were able to develop, and to acquire

that intellectual and artistic culture by which they stand out as high

above the general level of classical womanhood as the Spartan women by

their qualities of character. But that a woman had to be a hetaira

before she could be a woman is the worst condemnation of the Athenian

family.

This Athenian family became in time the accepted model for domestic

relations, not only among the Ionians, but to an increasing extent

among all the Greeks of the mainland and colonies also. But, in spite

of locks and guards, Greek women found plenty of opportunity for

deceiving their husbands. The men, who would have been ashamed to show

any love for their wives, amused themselves by all sorts of love

affairs with hetairai; but this degradation of the women was avenged on

the men and degraded them also, till they fell into the abominable

practice of pederasty [Knabenliebe][1] and degraded alike their gods and themselves with

the myth of Ganymede.

This is the origin of monogamy as far as we can trace it back among the

most civilized and highly developed people of antiquity. It was not in

any way the fruit of individual sex-love, with which it had nothing

whatever to do; marriages remained as before marriages of convenience.

It was the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on

economic conditions – on the victory of private property over

primitive, natural communal property. The Greeks themselves put the

matter quite frankly: the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage

were to make the man supreme in the family, and to propagate, as the

future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own. Otherwise,

marriage was a burden, a duty which had to be performed, whether one

liked it or not, to gods, state, and one’s ancestors. In Athens the

law exacted from the man not only marriage but also the performance of

a minimum of so-called conjugal duties.

Thus when monogamous marriage first makes its appearance in history, it

is not as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the

highest form of such a reconciliation. Quite the contrary. Monogamous

marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the

other; it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the

whole previous prehistoric period. In an old unpublished manuscript,

written by Marx and myself in 1846, [The reference here is to the

German Ideology, published after Engels’ death – Ed.] I find the

words: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for

the propagation of children.” And today I can add: The first class

opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of

the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the

first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the

male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward;

nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the

period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also

relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for

some is won through the misery and frustration of others. It is the

cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the

oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be

already studied.

The old comparative freedom of sexual intercourse by no means

disappeared with the victory of pairing marriage or even of monogamous

marriage:

The old conjugal system, now reduced to narrower limits by the

gradual disappearance of the punaluan groups, still environed the

advancing family, which it was to follow to the verge of

civilization ... It finally disappeared in the new form of

hetaerism, which still follows mankind in civilization as a dark

shadow upon the family.

[Morgan, op. cit., p. 511 – Ed.]

By “hetaerism” Morgan understands the practice, co-existent with

monogamous marriage, of sexual intercourse between men and unmarried

women outside marriage, which, as we know, flourishes in the most

varied forms throughout the whole period of civilization and develops

more and more into open prostitution. This hetaerism derives quite

directly from group marriage, from the ceremonial surrender by which

women purchased the right of chastity. Surrender for money was at

first a religious act; it took place in the temple of the goddess of

love, and the money originally went into the temple treasury. The

temple slaves of Anaitis in Armenia and of Aphrodite in Corinth, like

the sacred dancing-girls attached to the temples of India, the

so-called bayaderes (the word is a corruption of the Portuguese word

bailadeira, meaning female dancer), were the first prostitutes.

Originally the duty of every woman, this surrender was later performed

by these priestesses alone as representatives of all other women.

Among other peoples, hetaerism derives from the sexual freedom allowed

to girls before marriage – again, therefore, a relic of group

marriage, but handed down in a different way. With the rise of the

inequality of property – already at the upper stage of barbarism,

therefore – wage-labor appears sporadically side by side with slave

labor, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the

professional prostitution of free women side by side with the forced

surrender of the slave. Thus the heritage which group marriage has

bequeathed to civilization is double-edged, just as everything

civilization brings forth is double-edged, double-tongued, divided

against itself, contradictory: here monogamy, there hetaerism, with its

most extreme form, prostitution. For hetaerism is as much a social

institution as any other; it continues the old sexual freedom – to the

advantage of the men. Actually not merely tolerated, but gaily

practiced, by the ruling classes particularly, it is condemned in

words. But in reality this condemnation never falls on the men

concerned, but only on the women; they are despised and outcast, in

order that the unconditional supremacy of men over the female sex may

be once more proclaimed as a fundamental law of society.

But a second contradiction thus develops within monogamous marriage

itself. At the side of the husband who embellishes his existence with

hetaerism stands the neglected wife. And one cannot have one side of

this contradiction without the other, any more than a man has a whole

apple in his hand after eating half. But that seems to have been the

husbands’ notion, until their wives taught them better. With

monogamous marriage, two constant social types, unknown hitherto, make

their appearance on the scene – the wife’s attendant lover and the

cuckold husband. The husbands had won the victory over the wives, but

the vanquished magnanimously provided the crown. Together with

monogamous marriage and hetaerism, adultery became an unavoidable

social institution – denounced, severely penalized, but impossible to

suppress. At best, the certain paternity of the children rested on

moral conviction as before, and to solve the insoluble contradiction

the Code Napoléon, Art- 312, decreed: “L’enfant conçu pendant le

marriage a pour père le mari,” the father of a child conceived during

marriage is-the husband. Such is the final result of three thousand

years of monogamous marriage.

Thus, wherever the monogamous family remains true to its historical

origin and clearly reveals the antagonism between the man and the woman

expressed in the man’s exclusive supremacy, it exhibits in miniature

the same oppositions and contradictions as those in which society has

been moving, without power to resolve or overcome them, ever since it

split into classes at the beginning of civilization. I am speaking

here, of course, only of those cases of monogamous marriage where

matrimonial life actually proceeds according to the original character

of the whole institution, but where the wife rebels against the

husband’s supremacy. Not all marriages turn out thus, as nobody knows

better than the German philistine, who can no more assert his rule in

the home than he can in the state, and whose wife, with every right,

wears the trousers he is unworthy of. But, to make up for it, he

considers himself far above his French companion in misfortune, to

whom, oftener than to him, something much worse happens.

However, monogamous marriage did not by any means appear always and

everywhere in the classically harsh form it took among the Greeks.

Among the Romans, who, as future world-conquerors, had a larger, if a

less fine, vision than the Greeks, women were freer and more respected.

A Roman considered that his power of life and death over his wife

sufficiently guaranteed her conjugal fidelity. Here, moreover, the

wife equally with the husband could dissolve the marriage at will. But

the greatest progress in the development of individual marriage

certainly came with the entry of the Germans into history, and for the

reason that the German – on account of their poverty, very probably –

were still at a stage where monogamy seems not yet to have become

perfectly distinct from pairing marriage. We infer this from three

facts mentioned by Tacitus. First, though marriage was held in great

reverence – “they content themselves with one wife, the women live

hedged round with chastity’” – polygamy was the rule for the

distinguished members and the leaders of the tribe, a condition of

things similar to that among the Americans, where pairing marriage was

the rule. Secondly, the transition from mother-right to father-right

could only have been made a short time previously, for the brother on

the mother’s side -the nearest gentile male relation according to

mother-right –was still considered almost closer of kin than the

father, corresponding again to the standpoint of the American Indians,

among whom Marx, as he often said, found the key to the understanding

of our own primitive age. And, thirdly, women were greatly respected

among the Germans, and also influential in public affairs, which is in

direct contradiction to the supremacy of men in monogamy. In almost

all these points the Germans agree with the Spartans, among whom also,

as we saw, pairing marriage had not yet been completely overcome.

Thus, here again an entirely new influence came to power in the world

with the Germans. The new monogamy, which now developed from the

mingling of peoples amid the ruins of the Roman world, clothed the

supremacy of the men in milder forms and gave women a position which,

outwardly at any rate, was much more free and respected than it had

ever been in classical antiquity. Only now were the conditions

realized in which through monogamy-within it, parallel to it, or in

opposition to it, as the case might be-the greatest moral advance we

owe to it could be achieved: modern individual sex-love, which had

hitherto been unknown to the entire world.

This advance, however, undoubtedly sprang from the fact that the

Germans still lived in pairing families and grafted the corresponding

position of women onto the monogamous system, so far as that was

possible. It most decidedly did not spring from the legendary virtue

and wonderful moral purity of the German character, which was nothing

more than the freedom of the pairing family from the crying moral

contradictions of monogamy. On the contrary, in the course of their

migrations the Germans had morally much deteriorated, particularly

during their southeasterly wanderings among the nomads of the Black Sea

steppes, from whom they acquired, not only equestrian skill, but also

gross, unnatural vices, as Ammianus expressly states of the Taifalians

and Procopius of the Herulians.

But if monogamy was the only one of all the known forms of the family

through which modern sex-love could develop, that does not mean that

within monogamy modern sexual love developed exclusively or even

chiefly as the love of husband and wife for each other. That was

precluded by the very nature of strictly monogamous marriage under the

rule of the man. Among all historically active classes – that is, among

all ruling classes – matrimony remained what it had been since the

pairing marriage, a matter of convenience which was arranged by the

parents. The first historical form of sexual love as passion, a

passion recognized as natural to all human beings (at least if they

belonged to the ruling classes), and as the highest form of the sexual

impulse – and that is what constitutes its specific character – this first

form of individual sexual love, the chivalrous love of the middle ages,

was by no means conjugal. Quite the contrary. In its classic form

among the Provençals, it heads straight for adultery, and the poets of

love celebrated adultery. The flower of Provençal love poetry are the

Albas (aubades, songs of dawn). They describe in glowing colors how

the knight lies in bed beside his love-the wife of another man-while

outside stands the watchman who calls to him as soon as the first gray

of dawn (alba) appears, so that he can get away unobserved; the parting

scene then forms the climax of the poem. The northern French and also

the worthy Germans adopted this kind of poetry together with the

corresponding fashion of chivalrous love; old Wolfram of Eschenbach has

left us three wonderfully beautiful songs of dawn on this same improper

subject, which I like better than his three long heroic poems.

Nowadays there are two ways of concluding a bourgeois marriage. In

Catholic countries the parents, as before, procure a suitable wife for

their young bourgeois son, and the consequence is, of course, the

fullest development of the contradiction inherent in monogamy: the

husband abandons himself to hetaerism and the wife to adultery.

Probably the only reason why the Catholic Church abolished divorce was

because it had convinced itself that there is no more a cure for

adultery than there is for death. In Protestant countries, on the

other hand, the rule is that the son of a bourgeois family is allowed

to choose a wife from his own class with more or less freedom; hence

there may be a certain element of love in the marriage, as, indeed, in

accordance with Protestant hypocrisy, is always assumed, for decency’s

sake. Here the husband’s hetaerism is a more sleepy kind of business,

and adultery by the wife is less the rule. But since, in every kind of

marriage, people remain what they were before, and since the bourgeois

of Protestant countries are mostly philistines, all that this

Protestant monogamy achieves, taking the average of the best cases, is

a conjugal partnership of leaden boredom, known as “domestic bliss."

The best mirror of these two methods of marrying is the novel-the

French novel for the Catholic manner, the German for the Protestant.

In both, the hero “gets” them: in the German, the young man gets the

girl; in the French, the husband gets the horns. Which of them is

worse off is sometimes questionable. This is why the French bourgeois

is as much horrified by the dullness of the German novel as the German

philistine is by the “immorality” of the French. However, now that

“Berlin is a world capital,” the German novel is beginning with a

little less timidity to use as part of its regular stock-in-trade the

hetaerism and adultery long familiar to that town.

In both cases, however, the marriage is conditioned by the class

position of the parties and is to that extent always a marriage of

convenience. In both cases this marriage of convenience turns often

enough into crassest prostitution-sometimes of both partners, but far

more commonly of the woman, who only differs from the ordinary

courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece-work as a

wage-worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery. And of all

marriages of convenience Fourier’s words hold true: “As in grammar two

negatives make an affirmative, so in matrimonial morality two

prostitutions pass for a virtue.” [Charles Fourier, Theorie de l’Uniti

Universelle. Paris, 1841-45, Vol. III, p. 120. – Ed.] Sex-love in the

relationship with a woman becomes, and can only become, the real rule

among the oppressed classes, which means today among the

proletariat-whether this relation is officially sanctioned or not. But

here all the foundations of typical monogamy are cleared away. Here

there is no property, for the preservation and inheritance of which

monogamy and male supremacy were established; hence there is no

incentive to make this male supremacy effective. What is more, there

are no means of making it so. Bourgeois law, which protects this

supremacy, exists only for the possessing class and their dealings with

the proletarians. The law costs money and, on account of the worker’s

poverty, it has no validity for his relation to his wife. Here quite

other personal and social conditions decide. And now that large-scale

industry has taken the wife out of the home onto the labor market and

into the factory, and made her often the bread-winner of the family, no

basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian

household – except, perhaps, for something of the brutality towards

women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy. The

proletarian family is therefore no longer monogamous in the strict

sense, even where there is passionate love and firmest loyalty on both

sides, and maybe all the blessings of religious and civil authority.

Here, therefore, the eternal attendants of monogamy, hetaerism and

adultery, play only an almost vanishing part. The wife has in fact

regained the right to dissolve the marriage, and if two people cannot

get on with one another, they prefer to separate. In short,

proletarian marriage is monogamous in the etymological sense of the

word, but not at all in its historical sense.

Our jurists, of course, find that progress in legislation is leaving

women with no further ground of complaint. Modern civilized systems of

law increasingly acknowledge, first, that for a marriage to be legal,

it must be a contract freely entered into by both partners, and,

secondly, that also in the married state both partners must stand on a

common footing of equal rights and duties. If both these demands are

consistently carried out, say the jurists, women have all they can ask.

This typically legalist method of argument is exactly the same as that

which the radical republican bourgeois uses to put the proletarian in

his place. The labor contract is to be freely entered into by both

partners. But it is considered to have been freely entered into as

soon as the law makes both parties equal on paper. The power conferred

on the one party by the difference of class position, the pressure

thereby brought to bear on the other party – the real economic

position of both – that is not the law’s business. Again, for the

duration of the labor contract both parties are to have equal rights,

in so far as one or the other does not expressly surrender them. That

economic relations compel the worker to surrender even the last

semblance of equal rights – here again, that is no concern of the law.

In regard to marriage, the law, even the most advanced, is fully

satisfied as soon as the partners have formally recorded that they are

entering into the marriage of their own free consent. What goes on in

real life behind the juridical scenes, how this free consent comes

about – that is not the business of the law and the jurist. And yet

the most elementary comparative jurisprudence should show the jurist

what this free consent really amounts to. In the countries where an

obligatory share of the paternal inheritance is secured to the children

by law and they cannot therefore be disinherited – in Germany, in the

countries with French law and elsewhere – the children are obliged to

obtain their parents’ consent to their marriage. In the countries with

English law, where parental consent to a marriage is not legally

required, the parents on their side have full freedom in the

testamentary disposal of their property and can disinherit their

children at their pleasure. It is obvious that, in spite and precisely

because of this fact, freedom of marriage among the classes with

something to inherit is in reality not a whit greater in England and

America than it is in France and Germany.

As regards the legal equality of husband and wife in marriage, the

position is no better. The legal inequality of the two partners,

bequeathed to us from earlier social conditions, is not the cause but

the effect of the economic oppression of the woman. In the old

communistic household, which comprised many couples and their children,

the task entrusted to the women of managing the household was as much a

public and socially necessary industry as the procuring of food by the

men. With the patriarchal family, and still more with the single

monogamous family, a change came. Household management lost its public

character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private

service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all

participation in social production. Not until the coming of modern

large-scale industry was the road to social production opened to her

again – and then only to the proletarian wife. But it was opened in

such a manner that, if she carries out her duties in the private

service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and

unable to earn; and if she wants to take part in public production and

earn independently, she cannot carry out family duties. And the wife’s

position in the factory is the position of women in all branches of

business, right up to medicine and the law. The modern individual

family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the

wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual

families as its molecules.

In the great majority of cases today, at least in the possessing

classes, the husband is obliged to earn a living and support his

family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy, without

any need for special legal titles and privileges. Within the family he

is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat. In the

industrial world, the specific character of the economic oppression

burdening the proletariat is visible in all its sharpness only when all

special legal privileges of the capitalist class have been abolished

and complete legal equality of both classes established. The

democratic republic does not do away with the opposition of the two

classes; on the contrary, it provides the clear field on which the

fight can be fought out. And in the same way, the peculiar character

of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the

necessity of creating real social equality between them, and the way to

do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess

legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the

first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole

female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the

abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.

We thus have three principal forms of marriage which correspond broadly

to the three principal stages of human development. For the period of

savagery, group marriage; for barbarism, pairing marriage; for

civilization, monogamy, supplemented by adultery and prostitution.

Between pairing marriage and monogamy intervenes a period in the upper

stage of barbarism when men have female slaves at their command and

polygamy is practiced.

As our whole presentation has shown, the progress which manifests

itself in these successive forms is connected with the peculiarity that

women, but not men, are increasingly deprived of the sexual freedom of

group marriage. In fact, for men group marriage actually still exists

even to this day. What for the woman is a crime, entailing grave legal

and social consequences, is considered honorable in a man or, at the

worse, a slight moral blemish which he cheerfully bears. But the more

the hetaerism of the past is changed in our time by capitalist

commodity production and brought into conformity with it, the more,

that is to say, it is transformed into undisguised prostitution, the

more demoralizing are its effects. And it demoralizes men far more

than women. Among women, prostitution degrades only the unfortunate

ones who become its victims, and even these by no means to the extent

commonly believed. But it degrades the character of the whole male

world. A long engagement, particularly, is in nine cases out of ten a

regular preparatory school for conjugal infidelity.

We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic

foundations of monogamy as they have existed hitherto will disappear

just as surely as those of its complement-prostitution. Monogamy arose

from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single

individual – a man – and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the

children of that man and of no other. For this purpose, the monogamy

of the woman was required, not that of the man, so this monogamy of the

woman did not in any way interfere with open or concealed polygamy on

the part of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion,

at any rate, of permanent, heritable wealth – the means of production

– into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a

minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting. Having

arisen from economic causes, will monogamy then disappear when these

causes disappear?

One might answer, not without reason: far from disappearing, it will,

on the contrary, be realized completely. For with the transformation

of the means of production into social property there will disappear

also wage-labor, the proletariat, and therefore the necessity for a

certain – statistically calculable – number of women to surrender

themselves for money. Prostitution disappears; monogamy, instead of

collapsing, at last becomes a reality – also for men.

In any case, therefore, the position of men will be very much altered.

But the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant

change. With the transfer of the means of production into common

ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society.

Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care

and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks

after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This

removes all the anxiety about the “consequences,” which today is the

most essential social – moral as well as economic – factor that

prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves.

Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of

unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public

opinion in regard to a maiden’s honor and a woman’s shame? And,

finally, have we not seen that in the modern world monogamy and

prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions,

poles of the same state of society? Can prostitution disappear without

dragging monogamy with it into the abyss?

Here a new element comes into play, an element which, at the time when

monogamy was developing, existed at most in germ: individual sex-love.

Before the Middle Ages we cannot speak of individual sex-love. That

personal beauty, close intimacy, similarity of tastes and so forth

awakened in people of opposite sex the desire for sexual intercourse,

that men and women were not totally indifferent regarding the partner

with whom they entered into this most intimate relationship – that

goes without saying. But it is still a very long way to our sexual

love. Throughout the whole of antiquity, marriages were arranged by

the parents, and the partners calmly accepted their choice. What

little love there was between husband and wife in antiquity is not so

much subjective inclination as objective duty, not the cause of the

marriage, but its corollary. Love relationships in the modern sense

only occur in antiquity outside official society. The shepherds of

whose joys and sorrows in love Theocratus and Moschus sing, the Daphnis

and Chloe of Longus are all slaves who have no part in the state, the

free citizen’s sphere of life. Except among slaves, we find love

affairs only as products of the disintegration of the old world and

carried on with women who also stand outside official society, with

hetairai – that is, with foreigners or freed slaves: in Athens from

the eve of its decline, in Rome under the Caesars. If there were any

real love affairs between free men and free women, these occurred only

in the course of adultery. And to the classical love poet of

antiquity, old Anacreon, sexual love in our sense mattered so little

that it did not even matter to him which sex his beloved was.

Our sexual love differs essentially from the simple sexual desire, the

Eros, of the ancients. In the first place, it assumes that the person

loved returns the love; to this extent the woman is on an equal footing

with the man, whereas in the Eros of antiquity she was often not even

asked. Secondly, our sexual love has a degree of intensity and

duration which makes both lovers feel that non-possession and

separation are a great, if not the greatest, calamity; to possess one

another, they risk high stakes, even life itself. In the ancient world

this happened only, if at all, in adultery. And, finally, there arises

a new moral standard in the judgment of a sexual relationship. We do

not only ask, was it within or outside marriage? But also, did it

spring from love and reciprocated love or not? Of course, this new

standard has fared no better in feudal or bourgeois practice than all

the other standards of morality – it is ignored. But neither does it

fare any worse. It is recognized just as much as they are – in

theory, on paper. And for the present it cannot ask anything more.

At the point where antiquity broke off its advance to sexual love, the

Middle Ages took it up again: in adultery. We have already described

the knightly love which gave rise to the songs of dawn. From the love

which strives to break up marriage to the love which is to be its

foundation there is still a long road, which chivalry never fully

traversed. Even when we pass from the frivolous Latins to the virtuous

Germans, we find in the Nibelungenlied that, although in her heart

Kriemhild is as much in love with Siegfried as he is with her, yet when

Gunther announces that he has promised her to a knight he does not

name, she simply replies: “You have no need to ask me; as you bid me,

so will I ever be; whom you, lord, give me as husband, him will I

gladly take in troth.” It never enters her head that her love can be

even considered. Gunther asks for Brunhild in marriage, and Etzel for

Kriemhild, though they have never seen them. Similarly, in Gutrun,

Sigebant of Ireland asks for the Norwegian Ute, whom he has never seen,

Hetel of Hegelingen for Hilde of Ireland, and, finally, Siegfried of

Moorland, Hartmut of Ormany and Herwig of Seeland for Gutrun, and here

Gutrun’s acceptance of Herwig is for the first time voluntary. As a

rule, the young prince’s bride is selected by his parents, if they are

still living, or, if not, by the prince himself, with the advice of the

great feudal lords, who have a weighty word to say in all these cases.

Nor can it be otherwise. For the knight or baron, as for the prince of

the land himself, marriage is a political act, an opportunity to

increase power by new alliances; the interest of the house must be

decisive, not the wishes of an individual. What chance then is there

for love to have the final word in the making of a marriage?

The same thing holds for the guild member in the medieval towns. The

very privileges protecting him, the guild charters with all their

clauses and rubrics, the intricate distinctions legally separating him

from other guilds, from the members of his own guild or from his

journeymen and apprentices, already made the circle narrow enough

within which he could look for a suitable wife. And who in the circle

was the most suitable was decided under this complicated system most

certainly not by his individual preference but by the family interests.

In the vast majority of cases, therefore, marriage remained, up to the

close of the middle ages, what it had been from the start – a matter

which was not decided by the partners. In the beginning, people were

already born married –married to an entire group of the opposite sex.

In the later forms of group marriage similar relations probably

existed, but with the group continually contracting. In the pairing

marriage it was customary for the mothers to settle the marriages of

their children; here, too, the decisive considerations are the new ties

of kinship, which are to give the young pair a stronger position in the

gens and tribe. And when, with the preponderance of private over

communal property and the interest in its bequeathal, father-right and

monogamy gained supremacy, the dependence of marriages on economic

considerations became complete. The form of marriage by purchase

disappears, the actual practice is steadily extended until not only the

woman but also the man acquires a price – not according to his

personal qualities, but according to his property. That the mutual

affection of the people concerned should be the one paramount reason

for marriage, outweighing everything else, was and always had been

absolutely unheard of in the practice of the ruling classes; that sort

of thing only happened in romance – or among the oppressed classes,

who did not count.

Such was the state of things encountered by capitalist production when

it began to prepare itself, after the epoch of geographical

discoveries, to win world power by world trade and manufacture. One

would suppose that this manner of marriage exactly suited it, and so it

did. And yet – there are no limits to the irony of history –

capitalist production itself was to make the decisive breach in it. By

changing all things into commodities, it dissolved all inherited and

traditional relationships, and, in place of time-honored custom and

historic right, it set up purchase and sale, “free” contract. And the

English jurist, H. S. Maine, thought he had made a tremendous discovery

when he said that our whole progress in comparison with former epochs

consisted in the fact that we had passed “from status to contract,"

from inherited to freely contracted conditions – which, in so far as

it is correct, was already in The Communist Manifesto [Chapter II].

But a contract requires people who can dispose freely of their persons,

actions, and possessions, and meet each other on the footing of equal

rights. To create these “free” and “equal” people was one of the main

tasks of capitalist production. Even though at the start it was

carried out only half-consciously, and under a religious disguise at

that, from the time of the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation the

principle was established that man is only fully responsible for his

actions when he acts with complete freedom of will, and that it is a

moral duty to resist all coercion to an immoral act. But how did this

fit in with the hitherto existing practice in the arrangement of

marriages? Marriage, according to the bourgeois conception, was a

contract, a legal transaction, and the most important one of all,

because it disposed of two human beings, body and mind, for life.

Formally, it is true, the contract at that time was entered into

voluntarily: without the assent of the persons concerned, nothing could

be done. But everyone knew only too well how this assent was obtained

and who were the real contracting parties in the marriage. But if real

freedom of decision was required for all other contracts, then why not

for this? Had not the two young people to be coupled also the right to

dispose freely of themselves, of their bodies and organs? Had not

chivalry brought sex-love into fashion, and was not its proper

bourgeois form, in contrast to chivalry’s adulterous love, the love of

husband and wife? And if it was the duty of married people to love

each other, was it not equally the duty of lovers to marry each other

and nobody else? Did not this right of the lovers stand higher than

the right of parents, relations, and other traditional marriage-brokers

and matchmakers? If the right of free, personal discrimination broke

boldly into the Church and religion, how should it halt before the

intolerable claim of the older generation to dispose of the body, soul,

property, happiness, and unhappiness of the younger generation?

These questions inevitably arose at a time which was loosening all the

old ties of society and undermining all traditional conceptions. The

world had suddenly grown almost ten times bigger; instead of one

quadrant of a hemisphere, the whole globe lay before the gaze of the

West Europeans, who hastened to take the other seven quadrants into

their possession. And with the old narrow barriers of their homeland f

ell also the thousand-year-old barriers of the prescribed medieval way

of thought. To the outward and the inward eye of man opened an

infinitely wider horizon. What did a young man care about the approval

of respectability, or honorable guild privileges handed down for

generations, when the wealth of India beckoned to him, the gold and the

silver mines of Mexico and Potosi? For the bourgeoisie, it was the

time of knight-errantry; they, too, had their romance and their

raptures of love, but on a bourgeois footing and, in the last analysis,

with bourgeois aims.

So it came about that the rising bourgeoisie, especially in Protestant

countries, where existing conditions had been most severely shaken,

increasingly recognized freedom of contract also in marriage, and

carried it into effect in the manner described. Marriage remained

class marriage, but within the class the partners were conceded a

certain degree of freedom of choice. And on paper, in ethical theory

and in poetic description, nothing was more immutably established than

that every marriage is immoral which does not rest on mutual sexual

love and really free agreement of husband and wife. In short, the love

marriage was proclaimed as a human right, and indeed not only as a

droit de l’homme, one of the rights of man, but also, for once in a

way, as droit de la femme, one of the rights of woman.

This human right, however, differed in one respect from all other

so-called human rights. While the latter, in practice, remain

restricted to the ruling class (the bourgeoisie), and are directly or

indirectly curtailed for the oppressed class (the proletariat), in the

case of the former the irony of history plays another of its tricks.

The ruling class remains dominated by the familiar economic influences

and therefore only in exceptional cases does it provide instances of

really freely contracted marriages, while among the oppressed class, as

we have seen, these marriages are the rule.

Full freedom of marriage can therefore only be generally established

when the abolition of capitalist production and of the property

relations created by it has removed all the accompanying economic

considerations which still exert such a powerful influence on the

choice of a marriage partner. For then there is no other motive left

except mutual inclination.

And as sexual love is by its nature exclusive – although at present

this exclusiveness is fully realized only in the woman – the marriage

based on sexual love is by its nature individual marriage. We have

seen how right Bachofen was in regarding the advance from group

marriage to individual marriage as primarily due to the women. Only

the step from pairing marriage to monogamy can be put down to the

credit of the men, and historically the essence of this was to make the

position of the women worse and the infidelities of the men easier. If

now the economic considerations also disappear which made women put up

with the habitual infidelity of their husbands – concern for their own

means of existence and still more for their children’s future – then,

according to all previous experience, the equality of woman thereby

achieved will tend infinitely more to make men really monogamous than

to make women polyandrous.

But what will quite certainly disappear from monogamy are all the

features stamped upon it through its origin in property relations;

these are, in the first place, supremacy of the man, and, secondly,

indissolubility. The supremacy of the man in marriage is the simple

consequence of his economic supremacy, and with the abolition of the

latter will disappear of itself. The indissolubility of marriage is

partly a consequence of the economic situation in which monogamy arose,

partly tradition from the period when the connection between this

economic situation and monogamy was not yet fully understood and was

carried to extremes under a religious form. Today it is already broken

through at a thousand points. If only the marriage based on love is

moral, then also only the marriage in which love continues. But the

intense emotion of individual sex-love varies very much in duration

from one individual to another, especially among men, and if affection

definitely comes to an end or is supplanted by a new passionate love,

separation is a benefit for both partners as well as for society –

only people will then be spared having to wade through the useless mire

of a divorce case.

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will

be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is

mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will

disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a

new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their

lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or

any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have

never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other

considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their

lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in

the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks

they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their

corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual –

and that will be the end of it.

Let us, however, return to Morgan, from whom we have moved a

considerable distance. The historical investigation of the social

institutions developed during the period of civilization goes beyond

the limits of his book. How monogamy fares during this epoch,

therefore, only occupies him very briefly. He, too, sees in the

further development of the monogamous family a step forward, an

approach to complete equality of the sexes, though he does not regard

this goal as attained. But, he says:

When the fact is accepted that the family has passed through four

successive forms, and is now in a fifth, the question at once

arises whether this form can be permanent in the future. The only

answer that can be given is that it must advance as society

advances, and change as society changes, even as it has done in

the past. It is the creature of the social system, and will

reflect its culture. As the monogamian family has improved

greatly since the commencement of civilization, and very sensibly

in modern times, it is at least supposable that it is capable of

still further improvement until the equality of the sexes is

attained. Should the monogamian family in the distant future fail

to answer the requirements of society ... it is impossible to

predict the nature of its successor.

1. Original translation corrected.

See Engels and Homosexuality, ISR.

## III. The Iroquois Gens

We now come to another discovery made by Morgan, which is at

least as important as the reconstruction of the family in its primitive form

from the systems of consanguinity. The proof that the kinship organizations

designated by animal names in a tribe of American Indians are essentially

identical with the genea of the Greeks and the gentes of the Romans; that the

American is the original form and the Greek and Roman forms are later and

derivative; that the whole social organization of the primitive Greeks and

Romans into gens, phratry, and tribe finds its faithful parallel in that of the

American Indians; that the gens is an institution common to all barbarians

until their entry into civilization and even afterwards (so far as our sources

go up to the present) – this proof has cleared up at one stroke the most

difficult questions in the most ancient periods of Greek and Roman history,

providing us at the same time with an unsuspected wealth of information about

the fundamental features of social constitution in primitive times –

before the introduction of the state. Simple as the matter seems once it is

understood, Morgan only made his discovery quite recently. In his previous

work, published in 1871, [1] he had

not yet penetrated this secret, at whose subsequent revelation the English

anthropologists, usually so self-confident, became for a time as quiet as mice.

The Latin word gens, which Morgan uses as a general term for such kinship

organizations, comes, like its Greek equivalent, genos, from the common Aryan

root gan (in German, where, following the law [2] Aryan g is regularly replaced by k, kan), which means

to beget. Gens, Genos, Sanscrit jánas, Gothic kuni (following the same law as

above), Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon kyn, English kin, Middle High German künne,

all signify lineage, descent. Gens in Latin and genos in Greek are, however,

used specifically to denote the form of kinship organization which prides

itself on its common descent (in this case from a common ancestral father) and

is bound together by social and religious institutions into a distinct

community, though to all our historians its origin and character have hitherto

remained obscure.

We have already seen, in connection with the punaluan family, what is the composition of a

gens in its original form. It consists of all the persons who in punaluan

marriage, according to the conceptions necessarily prevailing under it, form

the recognized descendants of one particular ancestral mother, the founder of

the gens. In this form of family, as paternity is uncertain, only the female

line counts. Since brothers may not marry their sisters but only women of

different descent, the children begotten by them with these alien women cannot,

according to mother-right, belong to the father's gens. Therefore only the

offspring of the daughters in each generation remain within the kinship

organization; the offspring of the sons go into the gentes of their mothers.

What becomes of this consanguine group when it has constituted itself a

separate group, distinct from similar groups within the tribe?

As the classic form of this original gens, Morgan takes the gens among the

Iroquois, and especially in the Seneca tribe. In this tribe there are eight

gentes, named after animals: (1) Wolf, (2) Bear, (3) Turtle, (4) Beaver, (5)

Deer, (6) Snipe, (7) Heron, (8) Hawk. In every gens the following customs are

observed:

1. The gens elects its sachem

(head of the gens in peace) and its chief (leader in war). The sachem had to be

chosen from among the members of the gens, and his office was hereditary within

the gens, in the sense that it had to be filled immediately as often as a

vacancy occurred; the military leader could be chosen from outside the gens,

and for a time the office might even be vacant. A son was never chosen to

succeed his father as sachem, since mother-right prevailed among the Iroquois

and the son consequently belonged to a different gens; but the office might and

often did pass to a brother of the previous sachem or to his sister's son. All

voted in the elections, both men and women. The election, however, still

required the confirmation of the seven remaining gentes, and only then was the

new sachem ceremonially invested with his office by the common council of the

whole Iroquois confederacy. The significance of this will appear later. The

authority of the sachem within the gens was paternal, and purely moral in

character; he had no means of coercion. By virtue of his office he was also a

member of the tribal council of the Senecas and also of the federal council of

all the Iroquois. The war-chief could only give orders on military expeditions.

2. The gens deposes the sachem

and war-chief at will. This also is done by men and women jointly. After a

sachem or chief had been deposed, they became simple braves, private persons,

like the other members. The tribal council also had the power to depose

sachems, even against the will of the gens.

3. No member is permitted to

marry within the gens. This is the fundamental law of the gens, the bond which

holds it together. It is the negative expression of the very positive blood

relationship, by virtue of which the individuals it comprises become a gens. By

his discovery of this simple fact Morgan has revealed for the first time the

nature of the gens. How little the gens was understood before is obvious from

the earlier reports about savages and barbarians, in which the various bodies

out of which the gentile organization is composed are ignorantly and

indiscriminately referred to as tribe, clan, thum, and so forth, and then

sometimes designated as bodies within which marriage is prohibited. Thus was

created the hopeless confusion which gave Mr. McLennan his chance to appear as

Napoleon, establishing order by his decree: All tribes are divided into those

within which marriage is prohibited (exogamous) and those within which it is

permitted (endogamous). Having now made the muddle complete, he could give

himself up to the profoundest inquiries as to which of his two absurd classes

was the older exogamy or endogamy. All this nonsense promptly stopped of itself

with the discovery of the gens and of its basis in consanguinity, involving the

exclusion of its members from intermarriage with one another. It goes without

saying that at the stage at which we find the Iroquois the prohibition of

marriage within the gens was stringently observed.

4. The property of deceased

persons passed to the other members of the gens; it had to remain in the gens.

As an Iroquois had only things of little value to leave, the inheritance was

shared by his nearest gentile relations; in the case of a man, by his own

brothers and sisters and maternal uncle; in the case of a woman, by her

children and own sisters, but not by her brothers. For this reason man and wife

could not inherit from one another, nor children from their father.

5. The members of the gens owed

each other help, protection, and especially assistance in avenging injury by

strangers. The individual looked for his security to the protection of the

gens, and could rely upon receiving it; to wrong him was to wrong his whole

gens. From the bonds of blood uniting the gens sprang the obligation of blood

revenge, which the Iroquois unconditionally recognized. If any person from

outside the gens killed a gentile member, the obligation of blood revenge

rested on the entire gens of the slain man. First, mediation was tried; the

gens of the slayer sat in council, and made proposals of settlement to the

council of the gens of the slain, usually offering expressions of regret and

presents of considerable value. If these were accepted, the matter was disposed

of. In the contrary case, the wronged gens appointed one or more avengers,

whose duty it was to pursue and kill the slayer. If this was accomplished, the

gens of the slayer had no ground of complaint; accounts were even and closed.

6. The gens has special names or

classes of names, which may not be used by any other gens in the whole tribe,

so that the name of the individual indicates the gens to which he belongs. A

gentile name confers of itself gentile rights.

7. The gens can adopt strangers

and thereby admit them into the whole tribe. Thus among the Senecas the

prisoners of war who were not killed became through adoption into a gens

members of the tribe, receiving full gentile and tribal rights. The adoption

took place on the proposal of individual members of the gens; if a man adopted,

he accepted the stranger as brother or sister; if a woman, as son or daughter.

The adoption had to be confirmed by ceremonial acceptance into the tribe.

Frequently a gens which was exceptionally reduced in numbers was replenished by

mass adoption from another gens, with its consent. Among the Iroquois the

ceremony of adoption into the gens was performed at a public council of the

tribe, and therefore was actually a religious rite.

8. Special religious ceremonies

can hardly be found among the Indian gentes; the religious rites of the Indians

are, however, more or less connected with the gens. At the six yearly religious

festivals of the Iroquois the sachems and war-chiefs of the different gentes

were included ex officio among the “Keepers of the Faith” and had

priestly functions.

9. The gens has a common burial

place. Among the Iroquois of New York State, who are hedged in on all sides by

white people, this has disappeared, but it existed formerly. It exists still

among other Indians – for example, among the Tuscaroras, who are closely

related to the Iroquois; although they are Christians, each gens has a separate

row in the cemetery; the mother is therefore buried in the same row as her

children, but not the father. And among the Iroquois also the whole gens of the

deceased attends the burial, prepares the grave, the funeral addresses, etc.

10. The gens has a council: the

democratic assembly of all male and female adult gentiles, all with equal

votes. This council elected sachems, war-chiefs and also the other "Keepers of

the Faith," and deposed them; it took decisions regarding blood revenge or

payment of atonement for murdered gentiles; it adopted strangers into the gens.

In short, it was the sovereign power in the gens. Such were the rights and

privileges of a typical Indian gens.

All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and

they were bound to defend each other's freedom; they were equal in privileges

and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority; and they

were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and

fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens.

These facts are material, because the gens was the unit of a social and

governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organized ...

It serves to explain that sense of independence and personal dignity

universally an attribute of Indian character. [3]

The Indians of the whole of North America at the time of its discovery were

organized in gentes under mother-right. The gentes had disappeared only in some

tribes, as among the Dakotas; in others, as among the Ojibwas and the Omahas,

they were organized according to father-right.

Among very many Indian tribes with more than five or six gentes, we find

every three, four, or more gentes united in a special group, which Morgan,

rendering the Indian name faithfully by its Greek equivalent, calls a "phratry"

(brotherhood). Thus the Senecas have two phratries: the first comprises gentes

1 to 4, the second gentes 5 to 8. Closer investigation shows that these

phratries generally represent the original gentes into which the tribe first

split up; for since marriage was prohibited within the gens, there had to be at

least two gentes in any tribe to enable it to exist independently.

In the measure in which the tribe increased, each gens divided again into

two or more gentes, each of which now appears as a separate gens, while the

original gens, which includes all the daughter gentes, continues as the

phratry. Among the Senecas and most other Indians, the gentes within one

phratry are brother gentes to one another, while those in the other phratry are

their cousin gentes-terms which in the American system of consanguinity have,

as we have seen, a very real and expressive meaning. Originally no Seneca was

allowed to marry within his phratry, but this restriction has long since become

obsolete and is now confined to the gens. According to Senecan tradition, the

Bear and the Deer were the two original gentes, from which the others branched

off. After this new institution had once taken firm root, it was modified as

required; if the gentes in one phratry died out, entire gentes were sometimes

transferred into it from other phratries to make the numbers even. Hence we

find gentes of the same name grouped in different phratries in different

tribes.

Among the Iroquois, the functions of the phratry are partly social, partly

religious.

(1) In the ball game one phratry

plays against another. Each phratry puts forward its best players, while the

other members, grouped according to phratries, look on and bet against one

another on the victory of their players.

(2) In the tribal council the

sachems and the war-chiefs of each phratry sit together, the two groups facing

one another; each speaker addresses the representatives of each phratry as a

separate body.

(3) If a murder had been

committed in the tribe, and the slayer and the slain belonged to different

phratries, the injured gens often appealed to its brother gentes; these held a

council of the phratry and appealed in a body to the other phratry that it also

should assemble its council to effect a settlement. Here the phratry reappears

as the original gens, and with greater prospect of success than the weaker

single gens, its offspring.

(4) At the death of prominent

persons the opposite phratry saw to the interment and the burial ceremonies,

while the phratry of the dead person attended as mourners. If a sachem died,

the opposite phratry reported to the federal council of the Iroquois that the

office was vacant.

(5) The council of the phratry

also played a part in the election of a sachem. That the election would be

confirmed by the brother gentes was more or less taken for granted, but the

gentes of the opposite phratry might raise an objection. In this case the

council of the opposite phratry was assembled; if it maintained the objection,

the election was void.

(6) The Iroquois formerly had

special religious mysteries, called medicine lodges by the white men. Among the

Senecas, these mysteries were celebrated by two religious brotherhoods, into

which new members were admitted by formal initiation; there was one such

brotherhood in each of the two phratries.

(7) If, as is almost certain, the

four lineages occupying the four quarters of Tlascala at the time of the

conquest were four phratries, we here have proof that the phratries were also

military units, like the phratries among the Greeks and similar kinship

organizations among the Germans; these four lineages went into battle as

separate groups, each with its own uniform and flag, and under its own leader.

As several gentes make up a phratry, so in the classic form

several phratries make up a tribe; in some cases, when tribes have been much

weakened, the intermediate form, the phratry, is absent. What distinguishes an

Indian tribe in America?

1. Its own territory and name. In

addition to its actual place of settlement, every tribe further possessed

considerable territory for hunting and lashing. Beyond that lay a broad strip

of neutral land reaching to the territory of the neighboring tribe; it was

smaller between tribes related in language, larger between tribes not so

related. It is the same as the boundary forest of the Germans, the waste made

by Caesar's Suevi around their territory, the isarnholt (in Danish, jarnved,

limes Danicus) between Danes and Germans, the Sachsenwald (Saxon wood) and

branibor (Slav, "protecting wood") between Germans and Slavs, from which

Brandenburg takes its name. The territory delimited by these uncertain

boundaries was the common land of the tribe, recognized as such by neighboring

tribes and defended by the tribe itself against attacks. In most cases the

uncertainty of the boundaries only became a practical disadvantage when there

had been a great increase in population. The names of the tribes seem generally

to have arisen by chance rather than to have been deliberately chosen; in the

course of time it often happened that a tribe was called by another name among

the neighboring tribes than that which it used itself, just as the Germans were

first called Germans by the Celts.

2. A distinct dialect peculiar to the tribe

alone. Tribe and dialect are substantially coextensive; the formation

through segmentation of new tribes and dialects was still proceeding in America

until quite recently, and most probably has not entirely stopped even today.

When two weakened tribes have merged into one, the exceptional case occurs of

two closely related dialects being spoken in the same tribe. The average

strength of American tribes is under 2,000 members; the Cherokees, however,

number about 26,000, the greatest number of Indians in the United States

speaking the same dialect.

3. The right to install into office the

Sachems and war-chiefs elected by the Gentes and the right to depose

them, even against the will of their gens. As these sachems and

war-chiefs are members of the council of the tribe, these rights of the tribe

in regard to them explain themselves. Where a confederacy of tribes had been

formed, with all the tribes represented in a federal council, these rights were

transferred to the latter.

4. The possession of common religious

conceptions (mythology) and ceremonies. “After the fashion of

barbarians the American Indians were a religious people.” [4] Their mythology has not yet been

studied at all critically. They already embodied their religious ideas-spirits

of every kind-in human form; but the lower stage of barbarism, which they had

reached, still knows no plastic representations, so-called idols. Their

religion is a cult of nature and of elemental forces, in process of development

to polytheism. The various tribes had their regular festivals, with definite

rites, especially dances and games. Dancing particularly was an essential part

of all religious ceremonies; each tribe held its own celebration separately.

5. A tribal council for the common affairs of

the tribe. It was composed of all the sachems and war-chiefs of the

different gentes, who were genuinely representative because they could be

deposed at any time. It held its deliberations in public, surrounded by the

other members of the tribe, who had the right to join freely in the discussion

and to make their views heard. The decision rested with the council. As a rule,

everyone was given a hearing who asked for it; the women could also have their

views expressed by a speaker of their own choice. Among the Iroquois the final

decision had to be unanimous, as was also the case in regard to many decisions

of the German mark communities. The tribal council was responsible especially

for the handling of relations with other tribes; it received and sent

embassies, declared war and made peace. If war broke out, it was generally

carried on by volunteers. In principle, every tribe was considered to be in a

state of war with every other tribe with which it had not expressly concluded a

treaty of peace. Military expeditions against such enemies were generally

organized by prominent individual warriors; they held a war-dance, and whoever

joined in the dance announced thereby his participation in the expedition. The

column was at once formed, and started off. The defense of the tribal territory

when attacked was also generally carried out by volunteers. The departure and

return of such columns were always an occasion of public festivities. The

consent of the tribal council was not required for such expeditions, and was

neither asked nor given. They find their exact counterpart in the private war

expeditions of the German retinues described by Tacitus, only with the

difference that among the Germans the retinues have already acquired a more

permanent character, forming a firm core already organized in peacetime to

which the other volunteers are attached in event of war. These war parties are

seldom large; the most important expeditions of the Indians, even to great

distances, were undertaken with insignificant forces. If several such parties

united for operations on a large scale, each was under the orders only of its

own leader. Unity in the plan of campaign was secured well or ill by a council

of these leaders. It is the same manner of warfare as we find described by

Ammianus Marcellinus among the Alemanni on the Upper Rhine in the fourth

century.

6. Among some tribes we find a head chief,

whose powers, however, are very slight. He is one of the sachems, and in

situations demanding swift action he has to take provisional measures, until

the council can assemble and make a definite decision. His function represents

the first feeble attempt at the creation of an official with executive power,

though generally nothing more came of it; as we shall see, the executive

official developed in most cases, if not in all, out of the chief military

commander.

The great majority of the American Indians did not advance to any higher

form of association than the tribe. Living in small tribes, separated from one

another by wide tracts between their frontiers, weakened by incessant wars,

they occupied an immense territory with few people. Here and there alliances

between related tribes came into being in the emergency of the moment and broke

up when the emergency had passed. But in certain districts tribes which were

originally related and had then been dispersed, joined together again in

permanent federations, thus taking the first step towards the formation of

nations. In the United States we find the most developed form of such a

federation among the Iroquois. Emigrating from their homes west of the

Mississippi, where they probably formed a branch of the great Dakota family,

they settled after long wanderings in what is now the State of New York. They

were divided into five tribes: Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas and

Mohawks. They subsisted on fish, game, and the products of a crude

horticulture, and lived in villages, which were generally protected by a

stockade. Never more than twenty thousand strong, they had a number of gentes

common to all the five tribes, spoke closely related dialects of the same

language, and occupied a continuous stretch of territory which was divided up

among the five tribes. As they had newly conquered this territory, these tribes

were naturally accustomed to stand together against the Inhabitants they had

driven out. From this developed, at the beginning of the fifteenth century at

latest, a regular “everlasting league,” a sworn confederacy, which

in the consciousness of its new strength immediately assumed an aggressive

character, and at the height of its power, about 1675, conquered wide stretches

of the surrounding country, either expelling the inhabitants or making them pay

tribute. The Iroquois confederacy represents the most advanced social

organization achieved by any Indians still at the lower stage of barbarism

(excluding, therefore, the Mexicans, New Mexicans and Peruvians).

The main provisions of the confederacy were as follows:

1. Perpetual federation of the

five consanguineous tribes on the basis of complete equality and independence

in all internal matters of the tribe. This bond of kin represented the real

basis of the confederacy. Of the five tribes, three were known as father tribes

and were brother tribes to one another; the other two were known as son tribes,

and were likewise brother tribes to one another. Three gentes, the oldest,

still had their living representatives in all five tribes, and another three in

three tribes; the members of each of these gentes were all brothers of one

another throughout all the five tribes. Their common language, in which there

were only variations of dialect, was the expression and the proof of their

common descent.

2. The organ of the confederacy

was federal council of fifty sachems, all equal in rank and authority; the

decisions of this council were final in all matters relating to the

confederacy.

3. The fifty sachems were

distributed among the tribes and gentes at the foundation of the confederacy to

hold the new offices specially created for federal purposes. They were elected

by the respective gentes whenever a vacancy occurred and could be deposed by

the gentes at any time; but the right of investing them with their office

belonged to the federal council.

4. These federal sachems were

also sachems in their respective tribes, and had a seat and a vote in the

tribal council.

5. All decisions of the federal

council had to be unanimous.

6. Voting was by tribes, so that

for a decision to be valid every tribe and all members of the council in every

tribe had to signify their agreement.

7. Each of the five tribal

councils could convene the federal council, but it could not convene itself.

8. The meetings of the council

were held in the presence of the assembled people; every Iroquois could speak;

the council alone decided.

9. The confederacy had no

official head or chief executive officer.

10. On the other hand, the

council had two principal war-chiefs, with equal powers and equal authority

(the two "kings" of the Spartans, the two consuls in Rome).

That was the whole public constitution under which the Iroquois

lived for over four hundred years and are still living today. I have described

it fully, following Morgan, because here we have the opportunity of studying

the organization of a society which still has no state. The state presupposes a

special public power separated from the body of the people, and Maurer, who

with a true instinct recognizes that the constitution of the German mark is a

purely social institution, differing essentially from the state, though later

providing a great part of its basis, consequently investigates in all his

writings the gradual growth of the public power out of, and side by side with,

the primitive constitutions of marks, villages, homesteads, and towns. Among

the North American Indians we see how an originally homogeneous tribe gradually

spreads over a huge continent; how through division tribes become nations,

entire groups of tribes; how the languages change until they not only become

unintelligible to other tribes, but also lose almost every trace of their

original identity; how at the same time within the tribes each gens splits up

into several gentes, how the old mother gentes are preserved as phratries,

while the names of these oldest gentes nevertheless remain the same in widely

distant tribes that have long been separated-the Wolf and the Bear are still

gentile names among a majority of all Indian tribes. And the constitution

described above applies in the main to them all, except that many of them never

advanced as far as the confederacy of related tribes.

But once the gens is given as the social unit, we also see how the whole

constitution of gentes, phratries, and tribes is almost necessarily bound to

develop from this unit, because the development is natural. Gens, phratry, and

tribe are all groups of different degrees of consanguinity, each self-contained

and ordering its own affairs, but each supplementing the other. And the affairs

which fall within their sphere comprise all the public affairs of barbarians of

the lower stage. When we find a people with the gens as their social unit, we

may therefore also look for an organization of the tribe similar to that here

described; and when there are adequate sources, as in the case of the Greeks

and the Romans, we shall not only find it, but we shall also be able to

convince ourselves that where the sources fail us, comparison with the American

social constitution helps us over the most difficult doubts and riddles.

And a wonderful constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all its

childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings,

regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits – and everything takes

its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the

community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among

themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge

threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a

civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although

there were many more matters to be settled in common than today – the household

is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land

belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the

households – yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated

administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by

those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the

custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy – the communal household

and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those

disabled in war. All are equal and free – the women included. There is no place

yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes. When,

about the year 1651, the Iroquois had conquered the Eries and the

“Neutral Nation,” they offered to accept them into the confederacy

on equal terms; it was only after the defeated tribes had refused that they

were driven from their territory. And what men and women such a society breeds

is proved by the admiration inspired in all white people who have come into

contact with unspoiled Indians, by the personal dignity, uprightness, strength

of character, and courage of these barbarians.

We have seen examples of this courage quite recently in Africa. The Zulus a

few years ago and the Nubians a few months ago – both of them tribes in

which gentile institutions have not yet died out – did what no European

army can do. Armed only with lances and spears, without firearms, under a hail

of bullets from the breech-loaders of the English infantry – acknowledged the

best in the world at fighting in close order – they advanced right up to

the bayonets and more than once threw the lines into disorder and even broke

them, in spite of the enormous inequality of weapons and in spite of the fact

that they have no military service and know nothing of drill. Their powers of

endurance and performance are shown by the complaint of the English that a

Kaffir travels farther and faster in twenty-four hours than a horse. His

smallest muscle stands out hard and firm like whipcord, says an English

painter.

That is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when

we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized

men today, an enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and small

peasant from the free member of the old gentile society.

That is the one side. But we must not forget that this organization was

doomed. It did not go beyond the tribe. The confederacy of tribes already marks

the beginning of its collapse, as will soon be apparent, and was already

apparent in the attempts at subjugation by the Iroquois. Outside the tribe was

outside the law. Wherever there was not an explicit treaty of peace, tribe was

at war with tribe, and wars were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man

from other animals, and which was only mitigated later by self-interest. The

gentile constitution in its best days, as we saw it in America, presupposed an

extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore an extremely sparse

population over a wide area. Man’s attitude to nature was therefore one

of almost complete subjection to a strange incomprehensible power, as is

reflected in his childish religious conceptions. Man was bounded by his tribe,

both in relation to strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe,

the gens, and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power

established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself

unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive the people

of this epoch appear to us, they are completely undifferentiated from one

another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the

primitive community. [5] The power

of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it was

broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall

from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest

interests – base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery

of the common wealth – inaugurate the new, civilized, class society. It

is by the vilest means – theft, violence, fraud, treason – that the

old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society

itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has

never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the

expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than

ever before.

Footnotes

[1] Systems of Consanguinity

and Affinity of the Human Family, Smithsonian Publications, 1871.-Ed.

[2] Engels refers here to

Grimm's law of the shifting of consonants in the Indo-European languages.-Ed.

[3] Morgan, Ancient

Society, pp. 85-86.-Ed.

[4] Ibid., p. 117 -Ed.

[5] “Those ancient

social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society,

extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature

development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord

that unified him with his fellow men in a primitive tribal community, or upon

direct relations of domination and subjection.” – (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 51, New York.) Ed.

## IV. The Greek Gens

From prehistoric times Greeks and Pelasgians alike, and other
peoples of kindred stock, had been organized in the same organic series as the
Americans: gens, phratry, tribe, confederacy of tribes. The phratry might be
absent, as among the Dorians, and the confederacy of tribes was not necessarily
fully developed everywhere as yet; but in every case the gens was the unit. At
the time of their entry into history, the Greeks are on the threshold of
civilization; between them and the American tribes, of whom we spoke above, lie
almost two entire great periods of development, by which the Greeks of the
heroic age are ahead of the Iroquois. The gens of the Greeks is therefore no
longer the archaic gens of the Iroquois; the impress of group marriage is
beginning to be a good deal blurred. Mother-right has given way to
father-right; increasing private wealth has thus made its first breach in the
gentile constitution. A second breach followed naturally from the first. After
the introduction of father-right the property of a rich heiress would have
passed to her husband and thus into another gens on her marriage, but the
foundation of all gentile law was now violated and in such a case the girl was
not only permitted but ordered to marry within the gens, in order that her
property should be retained for the gens.

According to Grote's History of Greece, the Athenian gens, in particular,
was held together by the following institutions and customs:

1. Common religious rites, and
the exclusive privilege of priesthood in honor of a particular god, the
supposed ancestral father of the gens, who in this attribute was designated by
a special surname.

2. A common burial place (cf.
Demosthenes' Eubulides).

3. Mutual right of inheritance.

4. Mutual obligations of help,
protection, and assistance in case of violence.

5. Mutual right and obligation to
marry within the gens in certain cases, especially for orphan girls and
heiresses.

6. Possession, at least in some
cases, of common property, with a special archon (head man or president) and
treasurer.

Next, several gentes were united in the phratry, but less
closely; though here also we find mutual rights and obligations of a similar
kind, particularly the common celebration of certain religious ceremonies and
the right to avenge the death of a phrator. Similarly, all the phratries of a
tribe held regularly recurring religious festivals in common, at which a leader
of the tribe (phylobasileus), elected from the nobility (Eupatridai),
officiated.

Thus far Grote. And Marx adds:

“In the Greek gens, the savage (e.g. Iroquois) shows
through unmistakably.” He becomes still more unmistakable when we
investigate further.

For the Greek gens has also the following characteristics:

7. Descent in the male line.

8. Prohibition of marriage within
the gens except in the case of heiresses. This exception, and its formulation
as an ordinance, prove the old rule to be valid. This is further substantiated
by the universally accepted principle that at her marriage the woman renounced
the religious rites of her gens and went over to those of her husband, being
also inscribed in his phratry. This custom and a famous passage in Diccarchus
both show that marriage outside the gens was the rule, and Becker in Charicles
directly assumes that nobody might marry within his own gens.

9. The right of adoption into the
gens. This was exercised through adoption into the family, but required public
formalities and was exceptional.

10. The right to elect chieftains
and to depose them. We know that every gens had its archon; but it is nowhere
stated that the office was hereditary in certain families. Until the end of
barbarism the probability is always against strict heredity, which is quite
incompatible with conditions in which rich and poor had completely equal rights
within the gens.

Not only Grote, but also Niebuhr, Mommsen and all the other historians of
classical antiquity, have come to grief over the gens. Though they correctly
noted many of its characteristics, they always took it to be a group of
families, thus making it impossible for themselves to understand the nature and
origin of the gens. Under the gentile constitution, the family was never an
organizational unit, and could not be so, for man and wife necessarily belonged
to two different gentes. The whole gens was incorporated within the phratry,
and the whole phratry within the tribe; but the family belonged half to the
gens of the man and half to the gens of the woman. In public law the state also
does not recognize the family; up to this day, the family only exists for
private law. And yet all our histories have hitherto started from the absurd
assumption, which, since the eighteenth century in particular, has become
inviolable, that the monogamous single family, which is hardly older than
civilization, is the core around which society and state have gradually
crystallized.

Mr. Grote will also please note [Marx throws in] that though
the Greeks derive their gentes from mythology, the gentes are older than the
mythology which they themselves created with all its gods and
demigods.

Morgan prefers to quote Grote because he is not only an impressive but also
a trustworthy witness. Grote goes on to say that every Athenian gens had a name
derived from its supposed ancestor; that it was the general custom before
Solon, and even after Solon, in the absence of a will, for the property of a
deceased person to pass to the members of his gens (gennetai), and that in the
case of a murder it was the light and the duty, first of the relatives of the
murdered man, then of the members of his gens, and lastly of his phratry, to
prosecute the criminal before the tribunals: “All that we hear of the
most ancient Athenian laws is based upon the gentile and phratric
divisions.” (Grote.)

The descent of the gentes from common ancestors has caused the
“pedantic philistines,” as Marx calls them, a lot of brain-racking.
As they of course declare the common ancestors to be pure myths, they are at an
utter loss to explain how the gens originated out of a number of separate and
originally quite unrelated families; yet they have to perform this feat in
order to explain how the gentes exist at all. So they argue in circles, with
floods of words, never getting any further than the statement: the ancestral
tree is a fairy tale, but the gens is a reality. And finally Grote declares
(interpolations by Marx):

We hear of this genealogy but rarely, because it is only
brought before the public in certain cases pre-eminent and venerable. But the
humbler gentes had their common rites [this is strange, Mr. Grote!], and common
superhuman ancestor and genealogy, as well as the more celebrated [this is most
strange, Mr. Grote, among humbler gentes!]: the scheme and ideal basis
[my good sir, not ideal, but carnal, germanice fleishlich!]
was the same in all. [Quoted by Morgan, op. cit., p. 239. – Ed.]

Marx summarizes Morgan's reply to this as follows:

“The system of consanguinity corresponding to the
original form of the gens – and the Greeks, like other mortals, once possessed
such a gens – preserved the knowledge of the mutual relations between all
members of a gens to each other. They learned this, for them decisively
important, fact by practice from early childhood. This fell into desuetude with
the rise of the monogamian family. The gentile name created a pedigree beside
which that of the individual family was insignificant. This name was now to
preserve the fact of the common descent of those who bore it; but the lineage
of the gens went so far that its members could no longer prove the actual
relationship existing between them, except in a limited number of cases through
recent common ancestors. The name itself was the evidence of a common descent,
and conclusive proof, except in cases of adoption. The actual denial of all
kinship between gentiles à la Grote and Neibuhr, which transforms the gens into
a purely fictitious, fanciful creation of the brain, is, on the other hand,
worthy of ‘ideal’ scientists, that is, of cloistered bookworms.
Because concatention of the generations, especially with the incipience of
monogamy, is removed into the distance, and the reality of the past seems
reflected in mythological fantasy, the good old Philistines concluded, and
still conclude, that the fancied genealogy created real gentes!”

As among the Americans, the phratry was a mother gens, split up
into several daughter gentes, and uniting them, often tracing them all to a
common ancestor. Thus, according to Grote,

“all the contemporary members of the phratry of
Hekataeus had a common god for their ancestor at the sixteenth
degree.”

Hence, all the gentes of this phratry were literally brother gentes. The
phratry still occurs in Homer as a military unit in that famous passage where
Nestos advises Agamemnon: Draw up people by tribes and by phratries so that
phratry may support phratry, and tribe tribe. The phratry has further the right
and the duty of prosecuting for blood-guilt incurred against a phrator; hence
in earlier times it also had the obligation of blood revenge. Further, it had
common shrines and festivals; in fact the elaboration of the whole Greek
mythology out of the traditional old Aryan nature-cult was essentially
conditioned by the phratries and gentes, and took place within them. The
phratry also had a chief (the phratriarchos) and, according to de Coulanges,
assemblies. It could pass binding resolutions, and act as a judicial and
administrative body. Even the later state, while it ignored the gens, left
certain public offices in the hands of the phratry.

Several related phratries form a tribe. In Attica there were four tribes,
each consisting of three phratries, each phratry numbering thirty gentes. Such
a rounded symmetry of groups presupposes conscious, purposeful interference
with the naturally developed order. As to how, when, and why this occurred,.
Greek history is silent; the historical memory of the Greeks only went back to
the heroic age.

As the Greeks were crowded together in a relatively small territory,
differences of dialect were less developed than in the wide American forests;
yet in Greece also it was only tribes of the same main dialect that united in a
larger organization, and even Attica, small as it was, had a dialect of its
own, which later, through its general use as the language of prose, became the
dominant dialect.

In the Homeric poems we find most of the Greek tribes already united into
small nations, within which, however, gentes, phratries, and tribes retained
their full independence. They already lived in towns fortified with walls; the
population increased with the increase of the herds, the extension of
agriculture and the beginnings of handicraft. The differences in wealth thus
became more pronounced, and with them the aristocratic element within the old
primitive democracy. The various small nations waged incessant wars for the
possession of the best land and doubtless also for booty; the use of prisoners
of war as slaves was already a recognized institution.

The constitution of these tribes and small nations was as follows:

(1) The permanent authority was the council (boulè), probably
composed originally of all the chiefs of the gentes; later, when their number
became too large, of a selection, whose choice provided an opportunity of
extending and strengthening the aristocratic element. Dionysius actually speaks
of the council in the heroic age as composed of nobles (kratistoi). The
ultimate decision in important matters rested with the council. Thus in
Æschylus the council of Thebes makes what is in the circumstances the vital
decision to give Eteocles an honorable burial, but to throw out the corpse of
Polynices to be devoured by dogs. When the state was established, this council
was merged into the senate.

(2) The assembly of the people (agora). We saw among the
Iroquois how the people, men and women, stood round the council when it was
holding its meetings, intervening in an orderly manner in its deliberations and
thus influencing its decisions. Among the Homeric Greeks, this Umstand
(standing round), to use an old German legal expression, had already developed
into a regular assembly of the people, as was also the case among the Germans
in primitive times. It was convened by the council to decide important
questions; every man bad the right to speak. The decision was given by a show
of hands (AEschylus, The Suppliants) or by acclamation. The decision of the
assembly was supreme and final, for, says Schömann, in Griechische
Alterthümer,

“if the matter was one requiring the co-operation of
the people for its execution, Homer does not indicate any means by which the
people could be forced to co-operate against their will.”

For at this time, when every adult male member of the tribe was
a warrior, there was as yet no public power separate from the people which
could have been used against the people. Primitive democracy was still in its
full strength, and it is in relation to that fact that the power and the
position both of the council and of the basileus must first be judged.

(3) The leader of the army (basileus). Marx makes the following
comment:

European scholars, born lackeys most of them, make the
basileus into a monarch in the modern sense. Morgan, the Yankee
republican, protests. Very ironically, but truly, he says of the oily-tongued
Gladstone and his Juventus Mundi:

“Mr. Gladstone, who presents to his readers the Grecian
chiefs of the heroic age as kings and princes, with the superadded qualities of
gentlemen, is forced to admit that ‘on the whole we seem to have the
custom or law of primogeniture sufficiently, but not oversharply
defined.’”

[Morgan, op. cit., p. 255 – Ed.]

Mr. Gladstone will probably agree that such an ambiguous law
of primogeniture may be “sufficiently, but not oversharply defined”
as being just as good as none at all.

In what sense the offices of sachem and chieftain were
hereditary among the Iroquois and other Indians, we have already seen. All
offices were elective, generally within a gens, and to that extent hereditary
to the gens. In the course of time, preference when filling vacancies was given
to the nearest gentile relation-brother or sister's son – unless there were
reasons for passing him over. The fact that among the Greeks, under
father-right, the office of basileus generally passed to the son, or one of the
sons, only proves that the probabilities were in favor of the sons succeeding
to the office by popular election; it is no proof at all of legal hereditary
succession without popular election. All that we have here is the first
beginnings among the Iroquois and Greeks of distinct noble families within the
gentes and, in the case of the Greeks, the first beginnings also of a future
hereditary leadership or monarchy. The probability is, therefore, that among
the Greeks the basileus had either to be elected by the people or at least
confirmed in his office by the recognized organs of the people, the council or
agora, as was the case with the Roman “king” (rex).

In the Iliad, Agamemnon, the ruler of men, does not appear
as the supreme king of the Greeks, but as supreme commander of a federal army
before a besieged town. It is to this supremacy of command that Odysseus, after
disputes had broken out among the Greeks, refers in a famous passage:
“Evil is the rule of many; let one be commander,” etc. (The
favorite line about the scepter is a later addition.)

Odysseus is here not giving a lecture on a form of
government, but demanding obedience to the supreme commander in war. Since they
are appearing before Troy only as an army, the proceedings in the agora secure
to the Greeks all necessary democracy. When Achilles speaks of presents –
that is, the division of the booty – he always leaves the division, not
to Agamemnon or any other basileus, but to the “sons of the
Achacans,” that is, the people. Such epithets as “descended from
Zeus,” “nourished by Zeus,” prove nothing, for every gens is
descended from a god, that of the leader of the tribe being already descended
from a “superior” god, in this case Zeus. Even those without
personal freedom, such as the swineherd Eumaecus and others, are
“divine” (dioi and theioi), and that too in the Odyssey, which is
much later than the Iliad; and again in the Odyssey the name Heros is given to
the herald Mulius as well as to the blind bard Demodocus. Since, in short,
council and assembly of the people function together with the basileus, the
word basileia, which Greek writers employ to denote the so-called Homeric
kingship (chief command in the army being the principal characteristic of the
office), only means – military democracy. (Marx.)

In addition to his military functions, the basileus also held those of
priest and judge, the latter not clearly defined, the former exercised in his
capacity as supreme representative of the tribe or confederacy of tribes. There
is never any mention of civil administrative powers; he seems, however, to be a
member of the council ex officio. It is therefore quite correct etymologically
to translate basileus as König (king), since König (kuning) is derived from kuni, künne,
and means head of a gens. But the old Greek basileus does not correspond in any
way to the present meaning of the word König. Thucydides expressly
refers to the old basileia as patrikê, i.e. derived from gentes, and says it
had strictly defined, and therefore limited, functions. And Aristotle says that
the basileia of the heroic age was a leadership over free men and that the
basileus was military leader, judge and high priest; he thus had no
governmental power in the later sense. [1]

Thus in the Greek constitution of the heroic age we see the old gentile
order as still a living force. But we also see the beginnings of its
disintegration: father-right, with transmission of the property to the
children, by which accumulation of wealth within the family was favored and the
family itself became a power as against the gens; reaction of the inequality of
wealth on the constitution by the formation of the first rudiments of
hereditary nobility and monarchy; slavery, at first only of prisoners of war,
but already preparing the way for the enslavement of fellow-members of the
tribe and even of the gens; the old wars between tribe and tribe already
degenerating into systematic pillage by land and sea for the acquisition of
cattle, slaves and treasure, and becoming a regular source of wealth; in short,
riches praised and respected as the highest good and the old gentile order
misused to justify the violent seizure of riches. Only one thing was wanting:
an institution which not only secured the newly acquired riches of individuals
against the communistic traditions of the gentile order, which not only
sanctified the private property formerly so little valued, and declared this
sanctification to be the highest purpose of all human society; but an
institution which set the seal of general social recognition on each new method
of acquiring property and thus amassing wealth at continually increasing speed;
an institution which perpetuated, not only this growing cleavage of society
into classes, but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the
non-possessing, and the rule of the former over the latter.

And this institution came. The state was invented.

Footnotes

[1] Like the Greek basileus,
so also the Aztec military chief has been made out to be a modern prince. The
reports of the Spaniards, which were at first misinterpretations and
exaggerations, and later actual lies, were submitted for the first time to
historical criticism by Morgan. He proves that the Mexicans were at the middle
stage of barbarism, though more advanced than the New Mexican Pueblo Indians,
and that their constitution, so far as it can be recognized in the distorted
reports, corresponded to this stage: a confederacy of three tribes, which had
subjugated a number of other tribes and exacted tribute from them, and which
was governed by a federal council and a federal military leader, out of whom
the Spaniards made an “emperor.”

## V. The Rise of the Athenian State

How the state developed, how the organs of the gentile
constitution were partly transformed in this development, partly pushed aside
by the introduction of new organs, and at last superseded entirely by real
state authorities, while the true “people in arms,” organized for
its self-defense in its gentes, phratries, and tribes, was replaced by an armed
“public force” in the service of these state authorities and
therefore at their command for use also against the people – this
process, at least in its first stages, can be followed nowhere better than in
ancient Athens. The changes in form have been outlined by Morgan, but their
economic content and cause must largely be added by myself.

In the Heroic age the four tribes of the Athenians were still settled in
Attica in separate territories; even the twelve phratries composing them seem
still to have had distinct seats in the twelve towns of Cecrops. The
constitution was that of the heroic age: assembly of the people, council of the
people, basileus. As far as written history takes us back, we find the land
already divided up and privately owned, which is in accordance with the
relatively advanced commodity production and the corresponding trade in
commodities developed towards the end of the upper stage of barbarism. In
addition to grain, wine and oil were produced; to a continually increasing
extent, the sea trade in the Aegean was captured from the Phoenicians, and most
of it passed into Athenian hands. Through the sale and purchase of land, and
the progressive division of labor between agriculture and handicraft, trade,
and shipping, it was inevitable that the members of the different gentes,
phratries, and tribes very soon became intermixed, and that into the districts
of the phratry and tribe moved inhabitants, who, although fellow countrymen,
did not belong to these bodies and were therefore strangers in their own place
of domicile. For when times were quiet, each tribe and each phratry
administered its own affairs without sending to Athens to consult the council
of the people or the basileus. But anyone not a member of the phratry or tribe
was, of course, excluded from taking any part in this administration, even
though living in the district.

The smooth functioning of the organs of the gentile constitution was thus
thrown so much out of gear that even in the heroic age remedies had to be
found. The constitution ascribed to Theseus was introduced. The principal
change which it made was to set up a central authority in Athens – that
is, part of the affairs hitherto administered by the tribes independently were
declared common affairs and entrusted to the common council sitting in Athens.
In taking this step, the Athenians went further than any native people of
America had ever done: instead of neighboring tribes forming a simple
confederacy, they fused together into one single nation. Hence arose a common
Athenian civil law, which stood above the legal customs of the tribes and
gentes.

The Athenian citizen, as such, acquired definite rights and new protection
in law even on territory which was not that of his tribe. The first step had
been taken towards undermining the gentile constitution; for this was the first
step to the later admission of citizens who did not belong to any tribe in all
Attica, but were, and remained, completely outside the Athenian gentile
constitution. By a second measure ascribed to Theseus, the entire people,
regardless of gens, phratry or tribe, was divided into three classes:
eupatridai, or nobles, geomoroi, or farmers, and demiourgoi, or artisans, and
the right to hold office was vested exclusively in the nobility. Apart from the
tenure of offices by the nobility, this division remained inoperative, as it
did not create any other legal distinctions between the classes. It is,
however, important because it reveals the new social elements which had been
developing unobserved. It shows that the customary appointment of members of
certain families to the offices of the gens had already grown into an almost
uncontested right of these families to office; it shows that these families,
already powerful through their wealth, were beginning to form groupings outside
their gentes as a separate, privileged class, and that the state now taking
form sanctioned this presumption. It shows further that the division of labor
between peasants and artisans was now firmly enough established in its social
importance to challenge the old grouping of gentes and tribes. And, finally, it
proclaims the irreconcilable opposition between gentile society and the state;
the first attempt at forming a state consists in breaking up the gentes by
dividing their members into those with privileges and those with none, and by
further separating the latter into two productive classes and thus setting them
one against the other.

The further political history of Athens up to the time of Solon is only
imperfectly known. The office of basileus fell into disuse; the positions at
the head of the state were occupied by archons elected from the nobility. The
power of the nobility continuously increased, until about the year 600 B.C. it
became insupportable. And the principal means for suppressing the common
liberty were – money and usury. The nobility had their chief seat in and
around Athens, whose maritime trade, with occasional piracy still thrown in,
enriched them and concentrated in their hands the wealth existing in the form
of money. From here the growing money economy penetrated like corrosive acid
into the old traditional life of the rural communities founded on natural
economy. The gentile constitution is absolutely irreconcilable with money
economy; the ruin of the Attic small farmers coincided with the loosening of
the old gentile bonds which embraced and protected them. The debtorA’s
bond and the lien on property (for already the Athenians had invented the
mortgage also) respected neither gens nor phratry, while the old gentile
constitution, for its part, knew neither money nor advances of money nor debts
in money. Hence the money rule of the aristocracy now in full flood of
expansion also created a new customary law to secure the creditor against the
debtor and to sanction the exploitation of the small peasant by the possessor
of money. All the fields of Attica were thick with mortgage columns bearing
inscriptions stating that the land on which they stood was mortgaged to such
and such for so and so much. The fields not so marked had for the most part
already been sold on account of unpaid mortgages or interest, and had passed
into the ownership of the noble usurer; the peasant could count himself lucky
if he was allowed to remain on the land as a tenant and live on one-sixth of
the produce of his labor, while he paid five-sixths to his new master as rent.
And that was not all. If the sale of the land did not cover the debt, or if the
debt had been contracted without any security, the debtor, in order to meet his
creditor's claims, had to sell his children into slavery abroad. Children sold
by their father – such was the first fruit of father-right and monogamy!
And if the blood-sucker was still not satisfied, he could sell the debtor
himself as a slave. Thus the pleasant dawn of civilization began for the
Athenian people.

Formerly, when the conditions of the people still corresponded to the
gentile constitution, such an upheaval was impossible; now it had happened
– nobody knew how. Let us go back for a moment to our Iroquois, amongst
whom the situation now confronting the Athenians, without their own doing, so
to speak, and certainly against their will, was inconceivable. Their mode of
producing the necessities of life, unvarying from year to year, could never
generate such conflicts as were apparently forced on the Athenians from
without; it could never create an opposition of rich and poor, of exploiters
and exploited. The Iroquois were still very far from controlling nature, but
within the limits imposed on them by natural forces they did control their own
production. Apart from bad harvests in their small gardens, the exhaustion of
the stocks of fish in their lakes and rivers or of the game in their woods,
they knew what results they could expect, making their living as they did. The
certain result was a livelihood, plentiful or scanty; but one result there
could never be – social upheavals that no one had ever intended,
sundering of the gentile bonds, division of gens and tribe into two opposing
and warring classes. Production was limited in the extreme, but – the
producers controlled their product. That was the immense advantage of barbarian
production, which was lost with the coming of civilization; to reconquer it,
but on the basis of the gigantic control of nature now achieved by man and of
the free association now made possible, will be the task of the next
generations.

Not so among the Greeks. The rise of private property in herds and articles
of luxury led to exchange between individuals, to the transformation of
products into commodities. And here lie the seeds of the whole subsequent
upheaval. When the producers no longer directly consumed their product
themselves, but let it pass out of their hands in the act of exchange, they
lost control of it. They no longer knew what became of it; the possibility was
there that one day it would be used against the producer to exploit and oppress
him. For this reason no society can permanently retain the mastery of its own
production and the control over the social effects of its process of production
unless it abolishes exchange between individuals.

But the Athenians were soon to learn how rapidly the product asserts its
mastery over the producer when once exchange between individuals has begun and
products have been transformed into commodities. With the coming of commodity
production, individuals began to cultivate the soil on their own account, which
soon led to individual ownership of land. Money followed, the general commodity
with which all others 101 were exchangeable. But when men invented money, they
did not think that they were again creating a new social power, the one general
power before which the whole of society must bow. And it was this new power,
suddenly sprung to life without knowledge or will of its creators, which now,
in all the brutality of its youth, gave the Athenians the first taste of its
might.

What was to be done? The old gentile constitution had not only shown itself
powerless before the triumphal march of money; it was absolutely incapable of
finding any place within its framework for such things as money, creditors,
debtors, and forcible collection of debts. But the new social power was there;
pious wishes, and yearning for the return of the good old days would not drive
money and usury out of the world. Further, a number of minor breaches had also
been made in the gentile constitution. All over Attica, and especially in
Athens itself, the members of the different gentes and phratries became still
more indiscriminately mixed with every generation, although even now an
Athenian was only allowed to sell land outside his gens, not the house in which
he lived. The division of labor between the different branches of production
– agriculture, handicrafts (in which there were again innumerable
subdivisions), trade, shipping, and so forth – had been carried further
with every advance of industry and commerce; the population was now divided
according to occupation into fairly permanent groups, each with its new common
interests; and since the gens and the phratry made no provision for dealing
with them, new offices had to be created. The number of slaves had increased
considerably, and even at that time must have far exceeded the number of free
Athenians; the gentile constitution originally knew nothing of slavery and
therefore had no means of keeping these masses of bondsmen in order. Finally,
trade had brought to Athens a number of foreigners who settled there on account
of the greater facilities of making money; they also could claim no rights or
protection under the old constitution; and, though they were received with
traditional tolerance, they remained a disturbing and alien body among the
people.

In short, the end of the gentile constitution was approaching. Society was
outgrowing it more every day; even the worst evils that had grown up under its
eyes were beyond its power to check or remove. But in the meantime the state
had quietly been developing. The new groups formed by the division of labor,
first between town and country, then between the different branches of town
labor, had created new organs to look after their interests; official posts of
all kinds had been set up. And above everything else the young state needed a
power of its own, which in the case of the seafaring Athenians could at first
only be a naval power, for the purpose of carrying on small wars and protecting
its merchant ships. At some unknown date before Solon, the naukrariai were set
up, small territorial districts, twelve to each tribe; each naukraria had to
provide, equip and man a warship and also contribute two horsemen. This
institution was a twofold attack on the gentile constitution. In the first
place, it created a public force which was now no longer simply identical with
the whole body of the armed people; secondly, for the first time it divided the
people for public purposes, not by groups of kinship, but by common place of
residence. We shall see the significance of this.

The gentile constitution being incapable of bringing help to the exploited
people, there remained only the growing state. And the state brought them its
help in the form of the constitution of Solon, thereby strengthening itself
again at the expense of the old constitution. Solon – the manner in which
his reform, which belongs to the year 594 B.C., was carried through does not
concern us here – opened the series of so-called political revolutions;
and he did so with an attack on property. All revolutions hitherto have been
revolutions to protect one kind of property against another kind of property.
They cannot protect the one without violating the other. In the great French
Revolution feudal property was sacrificed to save bourgeois property; in that
of Solon, the property of the creditors had to suffer for the benefit of the
property of the debtors. The debts were simply declared void. We do not know
the exact details, but in his poems Solon boasts of having removed the mortgage
columns from the fields and brought back all the people who had fled or been
sold abroad on account of debt. This was only possible by open violation of
property. And, in fact, from the first to the last, all so-called political
revolutions have been made to protect property – of one kind; and they
have been carried out by confiscating, also called stealing, property –
of another kind. The plain truth is that for two and a half thousand years it
has been possible to preserve private property only by violating property.

But now the need was to protect the free Athenians against the return of
such slavery. The first step was the introduction of general measures –
for example, the prohibition of debt contracts pledging the person of the
debtor. Further, in order to place at least some check on the nobles’
ravening hunger for the land of the peasants, a maximum limit was fixed for the
amount of land that could be owned by one individual. Then changes were made in
the constitution, of which the most important for us are the following:

The council was raised to four hundred members, one hundred for each tribe;
here, therefore, the tribe was still taken as basis. But that was the one and
only feature of the new state incorporating anything from the old constitution.
For all other purposes Solon divided the citizens into four classes according
to their property in land and the amount of its yield: five hundred, three
hundred and one hundred fifty medimni of grain (one medimnus equals about 1.16
bushels) were the minimum yields for the first three classes; those who owned
less land or none at all were placed in the fourth class. All offices could be
filled only from the three upper classes, and the highest offices only from the
first. The fourth class only had the right to speak and vote in the assembly of
the people; but it was in this assembly that all officers were elected, here
they had to render their account, here all laws were made; and here the fourth
class formed the majority. The privileges of the aristocracy were partially
renewed in the form of privileges of wealth, but the people retained the
decisive power. Further, the four classes formed the basis of a new military
organization. The first two classes provided the cavalry; the third had to
serve as heavy infantry; the fourth served either as light infantry without
armor or in the fleet, for which they probably received wages.

A completely new element is thus introduced into the constitution: private
ownership. According to the size of their property in land, the rights and
duties of the citizens of the state are now assessed, and in the same degree to
which the classes based on property gain influence, the old groups of blood
relationship lose it; the gentile constitution had suffered a new defeat.

However, the assessment of political rights on a property basis was not an
institution indispensable to the existence of the state. In spite of the great
part it has played in the constitutional history of states, very many states,
and precisely those most highly developed, have not required it. In Athens also
its role was only temporary; from the time of Aristides all offices were open
to every citizen.

During the next eighty years Athenian society gradually shaped the course
along which it developed in the following centuries. Usury on the security of
mortgaged land, which had been rampant in the period before Solon, had been
curbed, as had also the inordinate concentration of property in land. Commerce
and handicrafts, including artistic handicrafts, which were being increasingly
developed on a large scale by the use of slave labor, became the main
occupations. Athenians were growing more enlightened. Instead of exploiting
their fellow citizens in the old brutal way, they exploited chiefly the slaves
and the non-Athenian customers. Movable property, wealth in the form of money,
of slaves and ships, continually increased, but it was no longer a mere means
to the acquisition of landed property, as in the old slow days: it had become
an end in itself. On the one hand the old power of the aristocracy now had to
contend with successful competition from the new class of rich industrialists
and merchants; but, on the other hand, the ground was also cut away from
beneath the last remains of the old gentile constitution. The gentes,
phratries, and tribes, whose members were now scattered over all Attica and
thoroughly intermixed, had thus become useless as political bodies; numbers of
Athenian citizens did not belong to any gens at all; they were immigrants, who
had indeed acquired rights of citizenship, but had not been adopted into any of
the old kinship organizations; in addition, there was the steadily increasing
number of foreign immigrants who only had rights of protection.

Meanwhile, the fights went on between parties; the nobility tried to win
back their former privileges and for a moment regained the upper hand, until
the revolution of Cleisthenes (509 B.C.) overthrew them finally, but with them
also the last remnants of the gentile constitution.

In his new constitution, Cleisthenes ignored the four old tribes founded on
gentes and phratries. In their place appeared a completely new organization on
the basis of division of the citizens merely according to their place of
residence, such as had been already attempted in the naukrariai. Only domicile
was now decisive, not membership of a kinship group. Not the people, but the
territory was now divided: the inhabitants became a mere political appendage of
the territory.

The whole of Attica was divided into one hundred communal districts, called
“demes,” each of which was self-governing. The citizens resident in
each deme (demotes) elected their president (demarch) and treasurer, as well as
thirty judges with jurisdiction in minor disputes. They were also given their
own temple and patron divinity or hero, whose priests they elected. Supreme
power in the deme was vested in the assembly of the demotes. As Morgan rightly
observes, here is the prototype of the self-governing American township. The
modern state, in its highest development, ends in the same unit with which the
rising state in Athens began.

Ten of these units (demes) formed a tribe, which, however, is now known as a
local tribe to distinguish it from the old tribe of kinship. The local tribe
was not only a self-governing political body, but also a military body; it
elected its phylarch, or tribal chief, who commanded the cavalry, the taxiarch
commanding the infantry, and the strategos, who was in command over all the
forces raised in the tribal area. It further provided five warships with their
crews and commanders, and received as patron deity an Attic hero, after whom it
was named. Lastly, it elected fifty councilors to the Athenian council.

At the summit was the Athenian state, governed by the council composed of
the five hundred councilors elected by the ten tribes, and in the last instance
by the assembly of the people, at which every Athenian citizen had the right to
attend and to vote; archons and other officials managed the various departments
of administration and justice. In Athens there was no supreme official with
executive power.

Through this new constitution and the admission to civil rights of a very
large number of protected persons, partly immigrants, partly freed slaves, the
organs of the gentile constitution were forced out of public affairs; they sank
to the level of private associations and religious bodies. But the moral
influence of the old gentile period and its traditional ways of thought were
still handed down for a long time to come, and only died out gradually. We find
evidence of this in another state institution.

We saw that an essential characteristic of the state is the existence of a
public force differentiated from the mass of the people. At this time, Athens
still had only a people’s army and a fleet provided directly by the
people; army and fleet gave protection against external enemies and kept in
check the slaves, who already formed the great majority of the population. In
relation to the citizens, the public power at first existed only in the form of
the police force, which is as old as the state itself; for which reason the
naive French of the eighteenth century did not speak of civilized peoples, but
of policed peoples (nations policées). The Athenians then instituted a police
force simultaneously with their state, a veritable gendarmerie of bowmen, foot
and mounted Landjäger [the country's hunters] as
they call them in South Germany and Switzerland. But this gendarmerie consisted
of slaves. The free Athenian considered police duty so degrading that he would
rather be arrested by an armed slave than himself have any hand in such
despicable work. That was still the old gentile spirit. The state could not
exist without police, but the state was still young and could not yet inspire
enough moral respect to make honorable an occupation which, to the older
members of the gens, necessarily appeared infamous.

Now complete in its main features, the state was perfectly adapted to the
new social conditions of the Athenians, as is shown by the rapid growth of
wealth, commerce, and industry. The class opposition on which the social and
political institutions rested was no longer that of nobility and common people,
but of slaves and free men, of protected persons and citizens. At the time of
their greatest prosperity, the entire free-citizen population of Athens, women
and children included, numbered about ninety thousand; besides them there were
three hundred and sixty-five thousand slaves of both sexes and forty-five
thousand protected persons – aliens and freedmen. There were therefore at least
eighteen slaves and more than two protected persons to every adult male
citizen. The reason for the large number of slaves was that many of them worked
together in manufactories, in large rooms, under overseers. But with the
development of commerce and industry wealth was accumulated and concentrated in
a few hands, and the mass of the free citizens were impoverished. Their only
alternatives were to compete against slave labor with their own labor as
handicraftsman, which was considered base and vulgar and also offered very
little prospect of success, or to become social scrap. Necessarily, in the
circumstances, they did the latter, and, as they formed the majority, they
thereby brought about the downfall of the whole Athenian state. The downfall of
Athens was not caused by democracy, as the European lickspittle historians
assert to flatter their princes, but by slavery, which banned the labor of free
citizens.

The rise of the state among the Athenians is a particularly typical example
of the formation of a state; first, the process takes place in a pure form,
without any interference through use of violent force, either from without or
from within (the usurpation by Pisistratus left no trace of its short
duration); second, it shows a very highly developed form of state, the
democratic republic, arising directly out of gentile society; and lastly we are
sufficiently acquainted with all the essential details.

## VI. The Gens and the State in Rome

According to the legendary account of the foundation of Rome,
the first settlement was established by a number of Latin gentes [1] (one hundred, says the legend), who
were united in a tribe; these were soon joined by a Sabellian tribe, also said
to have numbered a hundred gentes, and lastly by a third tribe of mixed
elements, again said to have been composed of a hundred gentes. The whole
account reveals at the first glance that very little was still primitive here
except the gens, and that even it was in some cases only an offshoot from a
mother gens still existing in its original home. The tribes clearly bear the
mark of their artificial composition, even though they are generally composed
out of related elements and after the pattern of the old tribe, which was not
made but grew; it is, however, not an impossibility that the core of each of
the three tribes was a genuine old tribe. The intermediate group, the phratry,
consisted of ten gentes and was called a curia; there were therefore thirty
curiae.

The Roman gens is recognized to be the same institution as the Greek gens;
and since the Greek gens is a further development of the social unit whose
original form is found among the American Indians, this, of course, holds true
of the Roman gens also. Here therefore we can be more brief.

The Roman gens, at least in the earliest times of Rome, had the following
constitution:

1. Mutual right of inheritance
among gentile members; the property remained within the gens. Since
father-right already prevailed in the Roman gens as in the Greek, descendants
in the female line were excluded. According to the Law of the Twelve Tables,
the oldest written Roman law known to us, the children, as natural heirs, had
the first title to the estate; in default of children, then the agnates
(descendants in the male line); in default of agnates, the gentiles. In all
cases the property remained within the gens. Here we see gentile custom
gradually being penetrated by the new legal provisions springing from increased
wealth and monogamy: the original equal right of inheritance of all members of
the gens is first restricted in practice to the agnates – probably very early, as
already mentioned – finally, to the children and their issue in the male line;
in the Twelve Tables this appears, of course, in the reverse order.

2. Possession of a common burial
place. On their immigration to Rome from Regilli, the patrician gens of the
Claudii received a piece of land for their own use and also a common burial
place in the town. Even in the time of Augustus, the head of Varus, who had
fallen in the battle of the Teutoburg Forest, was brought to Rome and interred
in the gentilitius tumulus (mound of the gens); the gens (Quinctilia) therefore still had its own
burial mound.

3. Common religious rites. These,
the sacra gentilitia, are well known.

4. Obligation not to marry within
the gens. This seems never to have become written law in Rome, but the custom
persisted. Of all the countless Roman married couples whose names have been
preserved, there is not one where husband and wife have the same gentile name.
The law of inheritance also proves the observance of this rule. The woman loses
her agnatic rights on marriage and leaves her gens; neither she nor her
children can inherit from her father or his brothers, because otherwise the
inheritance would be lost to the father’s gens. There is no sense in this
rule unless a woman may not marry a member of her own gens.

5. Common land. In primitive
times the gens had always owned common land, ever since the tribal land began
to be divided up. Among the Latin tribes, we find the land partly in the
possession of the tribe, partly of the gens, and partly of the households,
which at that time can hardly have been single families. Romulus is said to
have made the first allotments of land to individuals, about two and one-half
acres (two jugera) to a person. But later we still find land owned by the
gentes, to say nothing of the state land, round which the whole internal
history of the republic centers.

6. Obligation of mutual
protection and help among members of the gens. Only vestiges remain in written
history; from the very start the Roman state made its superior power so
manifest that the right of protection against injury passed into its hands.
When Appius Claudius was arrested, the whole of his gens, even those who were
his personal enemies, put on mourning. At the time of the second Punic war the
gentes joined together to ransom their members who had been taken prisoner; the
senate prohibited them from doing so.

7. Right to bear the gentile
name. Persisted till the time of the emperors; freedmen were allowed to use the
gentile name of their former master, but without gentile rights.

8. Right to adopt strangers into
the gens. This was done through adoption into a family (as among the Indians),
which carried with it acceptance into the gens.

9. The right to elect the chief
and to depose him is nowhere mentioned. But since in the earliest days of Rome
all offices were filled by election or nomination, from the elected king
downwards, and since the priests of the curiae were also elected by the curiae
themselves, we may assume the same procedure for the presidents (principes) of
the gentes – however firmly established the election from one and the same family
within the gens may have already become.

Such were the rights of a Roman gens. Apart from the already completed
transition to father-right, they are the perfect counterpart of the rights and
duties in an Iroquois gens; here again “the Iroquois shows through
unmistakably” (p. 90).

The confusion that still exists today, even among our leading historians, on
the subject of the Roman gens, may be illustrated by one example. In his paper
on Roman family names in the period of the Republic and of Augustus
(Romische Forschungen, Berlin, 1864, Vol. I, pp. 8-11) Mommsen writes:

The gentile name belongs to all the male members of the gens,
excluding, of course, the slaves, but including adopted and protected persons;
it belongs also to the women ... The tribe [as Mommsen here translates gens]
is... a communal entity, derived from common lineage (real, supposed or even
pretended) and united by communal festivities, burial rites and laws of
inheritance; to it all personally free individuals, and therefore all women
also, may and must belong. But it is difficult to determine what gentile name
was borne by married women. So long as the woman may only marry a member of her
own gens, this problem does not arise; and there is evidence that for a long
period it was more difficult for women to marry outside than inside the gens;
for instance, so late as the sixth century [B.C.] the right of gentis enuptio
(marriage outside the gens) was a personal privilege, conceded as a reward ...
But when such marriages outside the tribe took place, the wife, in earliest
times, must thereby have gone over to her husband's tribe. Nothing is more
certain than that the woman, in the old religious marriage, enters completely
into the legal and sacramental bonds of her husband's community and leaves her
own. Everyone knows that the married woman forfeits the right of inheritance
and bequest in relation to members of her own gens but shares rights of
inheritance with her husband and children and the members of their gens. And if
she is adopted by her husband and taken into his family, how can she remain
apart from his gens?

Mommsen therefore maintains that the Roman women who belonged to a gens had
originally been permitted to marry only within the gens, that the gens had
therefore been endogamous, not exogamous. This view, which is in contradiction
to all the evidence from other peoples, rests chiefly, if not exclusively, on
one much disputed passage from Livy (Book XXXIX, Ch. 19), according to which
the senate in the year 568 after the foundation of the city, or 186 B.C.,
decreed: “Uti Feceniae Hispallae datio, deminutio, gentis enuptio, tutoris optio item esset quasi ei vir testamento dedisset; utique ei ingenuo nubere liceret, neu quid ei qui eam duxisset ob id fraudi ignominiaeve esset”
– that Fecenia Hispala shall have the right to dispose of her property,
to decrease it, to marry outside the gens, and to choose for herself a
guardian, exactly as if her (deceased) husband had conferred this right on her
by testament; that she may marry a freeman, and that the man who takes her to
wife shall not be considered to have committed a wrongful or shameful act
thereby.

Without a doubt, Fecenia, a freedwoman, is here granted the right to marry
outside the gens. And equally without a doubt the husband possessed the right,
according to this passage, to bequeath to his wife by will the right to marry
outside the gens after his death. But outside which gens?

If the woman had to marry within her gens, as Mommsen assumes, she remained
within this gens also after her marriage. But in the first place the endogamous
character of the gens which is here asserted is precisely what has to be
proved. And, secondly, if the wife had to marry within the gens, then, of
course, so had the man, for otherwise he could not get a wife. So we reach the
position that the man could bequeath to his wife by will a right which he
himself, and for himself, did not possess; we arrive at a legal absurdity.
Mommsen also feels this, and hence makes the assumption: “For a lawful
marriage outside the gens, it was probably necessary to have the consent, not
only of the chief, but of all members of the gens.” That is a very bold
assumption in the first place, and, secondly, it contradicts the clear wording
of the passage. The senate grants her this right in the place of her husband;
it grants her expressly neither more nor less than her husband could have
granted her, but what it grants her is an absolute right, conditional upon no
other restriction. Thus it is provided that if she makes use of this right, her
new husband also shall not suffer any disability. The senate even directs the
present and future consuls and praetors to see to it that no injurious
consequences to her follow. Mommsen’s assumption therefore seems to be
completely inadmissible.

Or assume that the woman married a man from another gens, but herself
remained in the gens into which she had been born. Then, according to the above
passage, the man would have had the right to allow his wife to marry outside
her own gens. That is, he would have had the right to make dispositions in the
affairs of a gens to which he did not even belong. The thing is so patently
absurd that we need waste no more words on it.

Hence there only remains the assumption that in her first marriage the woman
married a man from another gens, and thereby immediately entered the gens of
her husband, which Mommsen himself actually admits to have been the practice
when the woman married outside her gens. Then everything at once becomes clear.
Severed from her old gens by her marriage and accepted into the gentile group
of her husband, the woman occupies a peculiar position in her new gens. She is,
indeed, a member of the gens, but not related by blood. By the mere manner of
her acceptance as a gentile member, she is entirely excluded from the
prohibition against marrying within the gens, for she has just married into it;
further, she is accepted as one of the married members of the gens, and on her
husband’s death inherits from his property, the property of a gentile
member. What is more natural than that this property should remain within the
gens and that she should therefore be obliged to marry a member of her
husband’s gens and nobody else? And if an exception is to be made, who is
so competent to give her the necessary authorization as the man who has
bequeathed her this property, her first husband? At the moment when he
bequeaths to her a part of his property and at the same time allows her to
transfer it into another gens through marriage or in consequence of marriage,
this property still belongs to him and he is therefore literally disposing of
his own property. As regards the woman herself and her relation to her
husband's gens, it was he who brought her into the gens by a free act of will -
the marriage; hence it also seems natural that he should be the proper person
to authorize her to leave this gens by a second marriage. In a word, the matter
appears simple and natural as soon as we abandon the extraordinary conception
of the endogamous Roman gens and regard it, with Morgan, as originally
exogamous.

There still remains one last assumption which has also found adherents, and
probably the most numerous. On this view, the passage only means that
“freed servants (libertae) could not without special permission e gente
enubere (marry out of the gens) or perform any of the acts, which, involving
loss of rights (capitis deminutio minima), would have resulted in the liberta
leaving the gens.” (Lange, Römische Altertumer, Berlin 1856, I,
195, where Huschke is cited in connection with our passage from Livy.) If this
supposition is correct, the passage then proves nothing at all about the
position of free Roman women, and there can be even less question of any
obligation resting on them to marry within the gens.

The expression enuptio gentis only occurs in this one passage and
nowhere else in the whole of Latin literature; the word enubere, to marry
outside, only occurs three times, also in Livy, and then not in reference to
the gens. The fantastic notion that Roman women were only allowed to marry
within their gens owes its existence solely to this one passage. But it cannot
possibly be maintained. For either the passage refers to special restrictions
for freedwomen, in which case it proves nothing about free women (ingenuae), or
it applies also to free women; and then it proves, on the contrary, that the
woman married as a rule outside her gens, but on her marriage entered into the
gens of her husband; which contradicts Mommsen and supports Morgan.

Almost three centuries after the foundation of Rome, the gentile groups were
still so strong that a patrician gens, that of the Fabii, was able to undertake
an independent campaign, with the permission of the senate, against the
neighboring town of Veii; three hundred and six Fabii are said to have set out
and to have been killed to a man, in an ambush; according to the story, only
one boy who had remained behind survived to propagate the gens.

As we have said, ten gentes formed a phratry, which among the Romans was
called a curia and had more important public functions than the Greek phratry.
Every curia had its own religious rites, shrines and priests; the latter, as a
body, formed one of the Roman priestly colleges. Ten curiae formed a tribe,
which probably, like the rest of the Latin tribes, originally had an elected
president-military leader and high priest. The three tribes together formed the
Roman people, the Populus Romanus.

Thus no one could belong to the Roman people unless he was a member of a
gens and through it of a curia and a tribe. The first constitution of the Roman
people was as follows: Public affairs were managed in the first instance by the
senate, which, as Niebuhr first rightly saw, was composed of the presidents of
the three hundred gentes; it was because they were the elders of the gens that
they were called fathers, patres, and their body, the senate (council of the
elders, from senex, old). Here again the custom of electing always from the
same family in the gens brought into being the first hereditary nobility; these
families called themselves “patricians,” and claimed for themselves
exclusive right of entry into the senate and tenure of all other offices. The
acquiescence of the people in this claim, in course of time, and its
transformation into an actual right, appear in legend as the story that Romulus
conferred the patriciate and its privileges on the first senators and their
descendants. The senate, like the Athenian boulè, made final decisions in many
matters and held preparatory discussions on those of greater importance,
particularly new laws. With regard to these, the decision rested with the
assembly of the people, called the comitia curiata (assembly of the curiae).
The people assembled together, grouped in curiae, each curia probably grouped
in gentes; each of the thirty curiae had one vote in the final decision. The
assembly of the curiae accepted or rejected all laws, elected all higher
officials, including the rex (so-called king), declared war (the senate,
however, concluded peace), and, as supreme court, decided, on the appeal of the
parties concerned, all cases involving death sentence on a Roman citizen.
Lastly, besides the senate and the assembly of the people, there was the rex,
who corresponded exactly to the Greek basileus and was not at all the almost
absolute king which Mommsen made him out to be. [2] He also was military leader,
high priest, and president of certain courts. He had no civil authority
whatever, nor any power over the life, liberty, or property of citizens, except
such as derived from his disciplinary powers as military leader or his
executive powers as president of a court. The office of rex was not hereditary;
on the contrary, he was first elected by the assembly of the curiae, probably
on the nomination of his predecessor, and then at a second meeting solemnly
installed in office. That he could also be deposed is shown by the fate of
Tarquinius Superbus.

Like the Greeks of the heroic age, the Romans in the age of the so-called
kings lived in a military democracy founded on gentes, phratries, and tribes
and developed out of them. Even if the curiae and tribes were to a certain
extent artificial groups, they were formed after the genuine, primitive models
of the society out of which they had arisen and by which they were still
surrounded on all sides. Even if the primitive patrician nobility had already
gained ground, even if the reges were endeavoring gradually to extend their
power, it does not change the original, fundamental character of the
constitution, and that alone matters.

Meanwhile, Rome and the Roman territory, which had been enlarged by
conquest, increased in population, partly through immigration, partly through
the addition of inhabitants of the subjugated, chiefly Latin, districts. All
these new citizens of the state (we leave aside the question of the clients)
stood outside the old gentes, curiae, and tribes, and therefore formed no part
of the populus Romanus, the real Roman people. They were personally free, could
own property in land, and had to pay taxes and do military service. But they
could not hold any office, nor take part in the assembly of the curiae, nor
share in the allotment of conquered state lands. They formed the class that was
excluded from all public rights, the plebs. Owing to their continually
increasing numbers, their military training and their possession of arms, they
became a powerful threat to the old populus, which now rigidly barred any
addition to its own ranks from outside. Further, landed property seems to have
been fairly equally divided between populus and plebs, while the commercial and
industrial wealth, though not as yet much developed, was probably for the most
part in the hands of the plebs.

The great obscurity which envelops the completely legendary primitive
history of Rome – an obscurity considerably deepened by the rationalistically
pragmatical interpretations and accounts given of the subject by later authors
with legalistic minds – makes it impossible to say anything definite about the
time, course, or occasion of the revolution which made an end of the old
gentile constitution. All that is certain is that its cause lay in the
struggles between plebs and populus.

The new constitution, which was attributed to the rex Servius Tullius and
followed the Greek model, particularly that of Solon, created a new assembly of
the people, in which populus and plebeians without distinction were included or
excluded according to whether they performed military service or not. The whole
male population liable to bear arms was divided on a property basis into six
classes. The lower limit in each of the five classes was: (1) 100,000 asses;
(2) 75,000 asses; (3) 50,000 asses; (4) 25,000 asses; (5) 11,000 asses;
according to Dureau de la Malle, the equivalent to about 14,000; 10,500; 7,000;
3,600; and 1,570 marks respectively. The sixth class, the proletarians,
consisted of those with less property than the lower class and those exempt
from military service and taxes. In the new popular assembly of the centuries
(comitia centuriata) the citizens appeared in military formation, arranged by
companies in their centuries of a hundred men, each century having one vote.
Now the first class put eighty centuries in the field, the second twenty-two,
the third twenty, the fourth twenty-two, the fifth thirty, and the sixth also
on century for the sake of appearances. In addition, there was the cavalry,
drawn from the wealthiest men, with eighteen centuries; total, 193;
ninety-seven votes were thus required for a clear majority. But the cavalry and
the first class alone had together ninety-eight votes, an therefore the
majority; if they were agreed, they did not ask the others; they made their
decision, and it stood.

This new assembly of the centuries now took over all political rights of the
former assembly of the curiae, with the exception of a few nominal privileges.
The curiae and the gentes of which they were composed were thus degraded, as in
Athens, to mere private and religious associations and continued to vegetate as
such for a long period while the assembly of the curiae soon became completely
dormant. In order that the three old tribes of kinship should also be excluded
from the state, four local tribes were instituted, each of which inhabited one
quarter of the city and possessed a number of political rights.

Thus in Rome also, even before the abolition of the so-called monarchy, the
old order of society based on personal ties of blood was destroyed and in its
place was set up a new and complete state constitution based on territorial
division and difference of wealth. Here the public power consisted of the body
of citizens liable to military service, in opposition not only to the slaves,
but also to those excluded from service in the army and from possession of
arms, the so-called proletarians.

The banishment of the last rex, Tarquinius Superbus, who usurped real
monarchic power, and the replacement of the office of rex by two military
leaders (consuls) with equal powers (as among the Iroquois) was simply a
further development of this new constitution. Within this new constitution, the
whole history of the Roman Republic runs its course, with all the struggles
between patricians and plebeians for admission to office and share in the state
lands, and the final merging of the patrician nobility in the new class of the
great land and money owners, who, gradually swallowing up all the land of the
peasants ruined by military service, employed slave labor to cultivate the
enormous estates thus formed, depopulated Italy and so threw open the door, not
only to the emperors, but also to their successors, the German barbarians.

Footnotes

[1] As gentes is here the
Latin word used by the Romans, it is printed in italics to distinguish it from
the general term "gens" used throughout the book – Ed.

[2] The Latin rex is the
same as the Celtic-Irish righ (tribal chief) and the Gothic reiks; that reiks
signified head of the gens or tribe, as did also originally the German word
Fürst (meaning "first" – cf. English first and Danish förste), is shown
by the fact that already in the fourth century the Goths had a special word for
the later "king," the military leader of the whole people: thiudans. In
Ulfilas’ translation of the Bible, Artaxerxes and Herod are never called
reiks, but thiudans, and the empire of the Emperor Tiberius is not called
reiki, but thiudinassus. In the name of the Gothic thiodans or, as we
inaccurately translate, "king," Thiudareik (Theodorich, i.e. Dietrich), both
titles coalesce.

## VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans

Space does not allow us to consider the gentile institutions
still existing in greater or lesser degree of purity among the most various
savage and barbarian peoples, nor the traces of these institutions in the
ancient history of the civilized peoples of Asia. The institutions or their
traces are found everywhere. A few examples will be enough. Before the gens had
been recognized, the man who took the greatest pains to misunderstand it,
McLennan himself, proved its existence, and in the main accurately described
it, among the Kalmucks, Circassians, Samoyeds and three Indian peoples: the
Warali, Magars and Munniporees. Recently it has been discovered and described
by M. Kovalevsky among the Pshavs, Shevsurs, Svanets and other Caucasian
tribes. Here we will only give some short notes on the occurrence of the gens
among Celts and Germans.

The oldest Celtic laws which have been preserved show the gens still fully
alive: in Ireland, after being forcibly broken up by the English, it still
lives today in the consciousness of the people, as an instinct at any rate; in
Scotland it was still in full strength in the middle of the eighteenth century,
and here again it succumbed only to the weapons, laws, and courts of the
English.

The old Welsh laws, which were recorded in writing several centuries before
the English conquest, at the latest in the eleventh century, still show common
tillage of the soil by whole villages, even if only as an exceptional relic of
a once general custom; each family had five acres for its own cultivation; a
piece of land was cultivated collectively as well and the yield shared. In view
of the analogy of Ireland and Scotland, it cannot be doubted that these village
communities represent gentes or subdivisions of gentes, even though further
examination of the Welsh laws, which I cannot undertake for lack of time (my
notes date from 1869), should not provide direct proof. But what is directly
proved by the Welsh sources and by the Irish is that among the Celts in the
eleventh century pairing marriage had not by any means been displaced by
monogamy.

In Wales a marriage only became indissoluble, or rather it only ceased to be
terminable by notification, after seven years had elapsed. If the time was
short of seven years by only three nights, husband and wife could separate.
They then shared out their property between them; the woman divided and the man
chose. The furniture was divided according to fixed and very humorous rules. If
it was the man who dissolved the marriage, he had to give the woman back her
dowry and some other things; if it was the woman, she received less. Of the
children the man took two and the woman one, the middle child. If after the
separation the woman took another husband and the first husband came to fetch
her back again, she had to follow him even if she had already one foot in her
new marriage bed. If, on the other hand, the man and woman had been together
for seven years, they were husband and wife, even without any previous formal
marriage. Chastity of girls before marriage was not at all strictly observed,
nor was it demanded; the provisions in this respect are of an extremely
frivolous character and not at all in keeping with bourgeois morality. If a
woman committed adultery, the husband had the right to beat her (this was one
of the three occasions when he was allowed to do so; otherwise he was
punished), but not then to demand any other satisfaction, since “for the
one offense there shall be either atonement or vengeance, but not both.”
The grounds on which the wife could demand divorce without losing any of her
claims in the subsequent settlement were very comprehensive; if the husband had
bad breath, it was enough. The money which had to be paid to the chief of the
tribe or king to buy off his right of the first night (gobr merch, whence the
medieval name, marcheta; French marquette), plays a large part in the code of
laws. The women had the right to vote in the assemblies of the people. When we
add that the evidence shows similar conditions in Ireland; that there, also,
temporary marriages were quite usual and that at the separation very favorable
and exactly defined conditions were assured to the woman, including even
compensation for her domestic services; that in Ireland there was a
“first wife” as well as other wives, and that in the division of an
inheritance no distinction was made between children born in wedlock or outside
it – we then have a picture of pairing marriage in comparison with which the
form of marriage observed in North America appears strict. This is not
surprising in the eleventh century among a people who even so late as
Caesar’s time were still living in group marriage.

The existence of the Irish gens (sept; the tribe was called clainne, clan) is
confirmed and described not only by the old legal codes, but also by the
English jurists of the seventeenth century who were sent over to transform the
clan lands into domains of the English crown. Until then, the land had been the
common property of the clan or gens, in so far as the chieftains had not
already converted it into their private domains. When a member of the gens died
and a household consequently came to an end, the gentile chief (the English
jurists called him caput cognationis) made a new division of the whole
territory among the remaining households. This must have been done, broadly
speaking, according to the rules in force in Germany. Forty or fifty years ago
village fields were very numerous, and even today a few of these rundales, as
they are called, may still be found. The peasants of a rundale, now individual
tenants on the soil that had been the common property of the gens till it was
seized by the English conquerors, pay rent for their respective piece of land,
but put all their shares in arable and meadowland together, which they then
divide according to position and quality into Gewanne, as they are called on
the Moselle, each receiving a share in each Gewann; moorland and pasture-land
are used in common. Only fifty years ago new divisions were still made from
time to time, sometimes annually. The field-map of such a village looks exactly
like that of a German Gehöferschaft [peasant community] on the Moselle or in
the Mittelwald. The gens also lives on in the “factions.” The Irish
peasants often divide themselves into parties based apparently on perfectly
absurd or meaningless distinctions; to the English they are quite
incomprehensible and seem to have no other purpose than the favorite ceremony
of two factions hammering one another. They are artificial revivals, modern
substitutes for the dispersed gentes, manifesting in their own peculiar manner
the persistence of the inherited gentile instinct. In some districts the
members of the gens still live pretty much together on the old territory; in
the ’thirties the great majority of the inhabitants of County Monaghan
still had only four family names, that is, they were descended from four gentes
or clans. [1]

In Scotland the decay of the gentile organization dates from the suppression
of the rising of 1745. The precise function of the Scottish clan in this
organization still awaits investigation; but that the clan is a gentile body is
beyond doubt. In Walter Scott's novels the Highland clan lives before our eyes.
It is, says Morgan:

... an excellent type of the gens in organization and in
spirit, and an extraordinary illustration of the power of the gentile life over
its members ... We find in their feuds and blood revenge, in their localization
by gentes, in their use of lands in common, in the fidelity of the clansman to
his chief and of the members of the clan to each other, the usual and
persistent features of gentile society ... Descent was in the male line, the
children of the males remaining members of the clan, while the children of its
female members belonged to the clans of their respective fathers."

[Morgan, op. cit., pp. 368-369. – Ed.]

But that formerly mother-right prevailed in Scotland is proved by the fact
that, according to Bede, in the royal family of the Picts succession was in the
female line. Among the Scots, as among the Welsh, a relic even of the punaluan
family persisted into the Middle Ages in the form of the right of the first
night, which the head of the clan or the king, as last representative of the
former community of husbands, had the right to exercise with every bride,
unless it was compounded for money.

That the Germans were organized in gentes until the time of the migrations
is beyond all doubt. They can have occupied the territory between the Danube,
Rhine, Vistula, and the northern seas only a few centuries before our era; the
Cimbri and Teutons were then still in full migration, and the Suevi did not
find any permanent habitation until Caesar's time. Caesar expressly states of
them that they had settled in gentes and kindreds (gentibus cognationtbusque),
and in the mouth of a Roman of the Julian gens the word gentibus has a
definite meaning which cannot be argued away. The same was true of all the
Germans; they seem still to have settled by gentes even in the provinces they
conquered from the Romans. The code of laws of the Alemanni confirms that the
people settled by kindreds (genealogiae) in the conquered territory
south of the Danube; genealogia is used in exactly the same sense as
Markgenossenschaft or Dorfgenossenschaft [Mark or village
community – Ed.] later. Kovalevsky has recently put forward the
view that these genealogia are the large household communities among which the
land was divided, and from which the village community only developed later.
This would then probably also apply to the fara, with which expression the
Burgundians and the Lombards – that is, a Gothic and a Herminonian or
High German tribe – designated nearly, if not exactly, the same thing as
the genealogiae in the Alemannian code of laws. Whether it is really a gens or
a household community must be settled by further research.

The records of language leave us in doubt whether all the Germans had a
common expression for gens, and what that expression was. Etymologically, the
Gothic kuni, Middle High German künne, corresponds to the Greek genos and the
Latin gens, and is used in the same sense. The fact that the term for woman
comes from the same root – Greek gyne, Slav zena, Gothic qvino, Old Norse
kona, kuna – points back to the time of mother-right. Among the Lombards
and Burgundians we find, as already mentioned, the term fara, which Grimm
derives from an imaginary root fisan, to beget. I should prefer to go back to
the more obvious derivation from faran (fahren), to travel or wander; fara
would then denote a section of the migrating people which remained permanently
together and almost as a matter of course would be composed of relatives. In
the several centuries of migration, first to the east and then to the west, the
expression came to be transferred to the kinship group itself. There are,
further, the Gothic sibia, Anglo-Saxon sib, Old High German sippia, sima,
kindred. Old Norse only has the plural sifiar, relatives; the singular only
occurs as the name of a goddess, Sif. Lastly, still another expression occurs
in the Hildebrandslied, where Hildebrand asks Hadubrand: “Who is thy
father among the men of the people ... or of what kin art thou?“ (eddo huêlîhes cnuosles du sîs). In as far as there was a common German name for the
gens, it was probably the Gothic kuni that was used; this is rendered probable,
not only by its identity with the corresponding expression in the related
languages, but also by the fact that from it is derived the word kuning, König
(king), which originally denotes the head of a gens or of a tribe. Sibia,
kindred, does not seem to call for consideration; at any rate, sifiar in Old
Norse denotes not only blood relations, but also relations by marriage; thus it
includes the members of at least two gentes, and hence sif itself cannot have
been the term for the gens.

As among the Mexicans and Greeks, so also among the Germans, the order of
battle, both the cavalry squadrons and the wedge formations of the infantry,
was drawn up by gentes. Tacitus’ use of the vague expression “by
families and kindreds” is to be explained through the fact that in his
time the gens in Rome had long ceased to be a living body.

A further passage in Tacitus is decisive. It states that the maternal uncle
looks upon his nephew as his own son, and that some even regard the bond of
blood between the maternal uncle and the nephew as more sacred and close than
that between father and son, so that when hostages are demanded the sister's
son is considered a better security than the natural son of the man whom it is
desired to bind. Here we have living evidence, described as particularly
characteristic of the Germans, of the matriarchal, and therefore primitive,
gens. [2]
If a member of such a gens gave his own son as a pledge of his oath and the son
then paid the penalty of death for his father's breach of faith, the father had
to answer for that to himself. But if it was a sister's son who was sacrificed,
then the most sacred law of the gens was violated. The member of the gens who
was nearest of kin to the boy or youth, and more than all others was bound to
protect him, was guilty of his death; either he should not have pledged him or
he should have kept the agreement. Even if we had no other trace of gentile
organization among the Germans, this one passage would suffice.

Still more decisive, because it comes about eight hundred years later, is a
passage from the Old Norse poem of the twilight of the gods and the end of the
world, the Völuspà. In this "vision of the seeress," into which Christian
elements are also interwoven, as Bang and Bugge have now proved, the
description of the period of universal degeneration and corruption leading up
to the great catastrophe contains the following passage:

Broedhr munu berjask ok at bonum verdask,

munu systrungar sifjum spilla.

“Brothers will make war upon one another and become one
another’s murderers, the children of sisters will break kinship.”
Systrungar means the son of the mother’s sister, and that these
sisters’ sons should betray the blood-bond between them is regarded by
the poet as an even greater crime than that of fratricide. The force of the
climax is in the word systrungar, which emphasizes the kinship on the
mother“s side; if the word had been syskina-börn, brothers' or sisters'
children, or syskinasynir, brothers' or sisters' sons, the second line would
not have been a climax to the first, but would merely have weakened the effect.
Hence even in the time of the Vikings, when the Völuspà was composed, the
memory of mother-right had not yet been obliterated in Scandinavia.

In the time of Tacitus, however, mother-right had already given way to
father-right, at least among the Germans with whose customs he was more
familiar. The children inherited from the father; if there were no children,
the brothers, and the uncles on the father's and the mother's side. The fact
that the mother’s brother was allowed to inherit is connected with the
survivals of mother-right already mentioned, and again proves how new
father-right still was among the Germans at that time. Traces of mother-right
are also found until late in the Middle Ages. Apparently even at that time
people still did not have any great trust in fatherhood, especially in the case
of serfs. When, therefore, a feudal lord demanded from a town the return of a
fugitive serf, it was required – for example, in Augsburg, Basle and
Kaiserslautern – that the accused person's status as serf should be sworn
to by six of his nearest blood relations, and that they should all be relations
on the mother’s side. (Maurer, Städteverfassung, I, p. 381.)

Another relic of mother-right, which was still only in process of dying out,
was the respect of the Germans for the female sex, which to the Romans was
almost incomprehensible. Young girls of noble family were considered the most
binding hostages in treaties with the Germans. The thought that their wives and
daughters might be taken captive and carried into slavery was terrible to them
and more than anything else fired their courage in battle; they saw in a woman
something holy and prophetic, and listened to her advice even in the most
important matters. Veleda, the priestess of the Bructerians on the River Lippe,
was the very soul of the whole Batavian rising in which Civilis, at the head of
the Germans and Belgae, shook the foundations of Roman rule in Gaul. In the
home, the woman seems to have held undisputed sway, though, together with the
old people and the children, she also had to do all the work, while the man
hunted, drank, or idled about. That, at least, is what Tacitus says; but as he
does not say who tilled the fields, and definitely declares that the serfs only
paid tribute, but did not have to render labor dues, the bulk of the adult men
must have had to do what little work the cultivation of the land required. The
form of marriage, as already said, was a pairing marriage which was gradually
approaching monogamy. It was not yet strict monogamy, as polygamy was permitted
for the leading members of the tribe. In general, strict chastity was required
of the girls (in contrast to the Celts), and Tacitus also speaks with special
warmth of the sacredness of the marriage tie among the Germans. Adultery by the
woman is the only ground for divorce mentioned by him. But there are many gaps
here in his report, and it is also only too apparent that he is holding up a
mirror of virtue before the dissipated Romans. One thing is certain: if the
Germans were such paragons of virtue in their forests, it only required slight
contact with the outside world to bring them down to the level of the average
man in the rest of Europe. Amidst the Roman world, the last trace of moral
austerity disappeared far more rapidly even than the German language. For
proof, it is enough to read Gregory of Tours. That in the German primeval
forests there could be no such voluptuous abandonment to all the refinements of
sensuality as in Rome is obvious; the superiority of the Germans to the Roman
world in this respect also is sufficiently great, and there is no need to endow
them with an ideal continence in things of the flesh, such as has never yet
been practiced by an entire nation.

Also derived from the gentile organization is the obligation to inherit the
enmities as well as the friendships of the father or the relatives; likewise
the Wergeld, the fine for idling or injuring, in place of blood
revenge. The Wergeld, which only a generation ago was regarded as a
specifically German institution, has now been shown to be general among
hundreds of peoples as a milder form of the blood revenge originating out of
the gentile organization. We find it, for example, among the American Indians,
who also regard hospitality as an obligation. Tacitus’ description of
hospitality as practiced among the Germans (Germania, Ch. XXI) is identical
almost to the details with that given by Morgan of his Indians.

The endless, burning controversy as to whether the Germans of Tacitus’
time had already definitely divided the land or not, and how the relevant
passages are to be interpreted, now belongs to the past. No more words need be
wasted in this dispute, since it has been established that among almost all
peoples the cultivated land was tilled collectively by the gens, and later by
communistic household communities such as were still found by Caesar among the
Suevi, and that after this stage the land was allotted to individual families
with periodical repartitions, which are shown to have survived as a local
custom in Germany down to our day. If in the one hundred and fifty years
between Caesar and Tacitus the Germans had changed from the collective
cultivation of the land expressly attributed by Caesar to the Suevi (they had
no divided or private fields whatever, he says) to individual cultivation with
annual repartition of the land, that is surely progress enough. The transition
from that stage to complete private property in land during such a short period
and without any outside interference is a sheer impossibility. What I read in
Tacitus is simply what he says in his own dry words: they change (or divide
afresh) the cultivated land every year, and there is enough common land left
over. It is the stage of agriculture and property relations in regard to the
land which exactly corresponds to the gentile constitution of the Germans at
that time.

I leave the preceding paragraph unchanged as it stood in the former
editions. Meanwhile the question has taken another turn. Since Kovalevsky has
shown (cf. pages 51-52) that the patriarchal household community was a very
common, if not universal, intermediate form between the matriarchal communistic
family and the modern isolated family, it is no longer a question of whether
property in land is communal or private, which was the point at issue between
Maurer and Waitz, but a question of the form of the communal property. There is
no doubt at all that the Suevi in Caesar's time not only owned the land in
common, but also cultivated it in common for the common benefit. Whether the
economic unit was the gens or the household community or a communistic kinship
group intermediate between the two; or whether all three groups occurred
according to the conditions of the soil – these questions will be in
dispute for a long time to come. Kovalevsky maintains, however, that the
conditions described by Tacitus presuppose the existence, not of the mark or
village community, but of the household community and that the village
community only develops out of the latter much later, as a result of the
increase in population.

According to this view, the settlements of the Germans in the territory of
which they were already in possession at the time of the Romans, and also in
the territory which they later took from the Romans, were not composed of
villages but of large household communities, which included several
generations, cultivated an amount of land proportionate to the number of their
members, and had common use with their neighbors of the surrounding waste. The
passage in Tacitus about changing the cultivated land would then have to be
taken in an agronomic sense: the community cultivated a different piece of land
every year, and allowed the land cultivated the previous year to lie fallow or
run completely to waste; the population being scanty, there was always enough
waste left over to make any disputes about land unnecessary. Only in the course
of centuries, when the number of members in the household communities had
increased so much that a common economy was no longer possible under the
existing conditions of production did the communities dissolve. The arable and
meadow lands which had hitherto been common were divided in the manner familiar
to us, first temporarily and then permanently, among the single households
which were now coming into being, while forest, pasture land, and water
remained common.

In the case of Russia this development seems to be a proved historical fact.
With regard to Germany, and, secondarily, the other Germanic countries, it
cannot be denied that in many ways this view provides a better explanation of
the sources and an easier solution to difficulties than that held hitherto,
which takes the village community back to the time of Tacitus. On the whole,
the oldest documents, such as the Codex Laureshamensis, can be explained much
better in terms of the household community than of the village community. On
the other hand, this view raises new difficulties and new questions, which have
still to be solved. They can only be settled by new investigations; but I
cannot deny that in the case also of Germany, Scandinavia and England there is
very great probability in favor of the intermediate form of the household
community.

While in Caesar’s time the Germans had only just taken up or were
still looking for settled abodes, in Tacitus’ time they already had a
full century of settled life behind them; correspondingly, the progress in the
production of the necessities of life is unmistakable. They live in log-houses;
their clothing is still very much that of primitive people of the forests:
coarse woolen mantles, skins; for women and notable people underclothing of
linen. Their food is milk, meat, wild fruits, and, as Pliny adds, oatmeal
porridge (still the Celtic national food in Ireland and Scotland). Their wealth
consists in cattle and horses, but of inferior breed; the cows are small, poor
in build and without horns; the horses are ponies, with very little speed.
Money was used rarely and in small amounts; it was exclusively Roman. They did
not work gold or silver, nor did they value it. Iron was rare, and, at least,
among the tribes on the Rhine and the Danube, seems to have been almost
entirely imported, not mined. Runic writing (imitated from the Greek or Latin
letters) was a purely secret form of writing, used only for religious magic.
Human sacrifices were still offered. In short, we here see a people which had
just raised itself from the middle to the upper stage of barbarism. But whereas
the tribes living immediately on the Roman frontiers were hindered in the
development of an independent metal and textile industry by the facility with
which Roman products could be imported, such industry undoubtedly did develop
in the northeast, on the Baltic. The fragments of weapons found in the
Schleswig marshes – long iron sword, coat of mail, silver helmet, and so
forth, together with Roman coins of the end of the second century – and
the German metal objects distributed by the migrations, show quite a pronounced
character of their own, even when they derive from an originally Roman model.
Emigration into the civilized Roman world put an end to this native industry
everywhere except in England. With what uniformity this industry arose and
developed, can be seen, for example, in the bronze brooches; those found in
Burgundy, Rumania and on the Sea of Azov might have come out of the same
workshop as those found in England and Sweden, and are just as certainly of
Germanic origin.

The constitution also corresponds to the upper stage of barbarism. According
to Tacitus, there was generally a council of chiefs (principes), which
decided minor matters, but prepared more important questions for decision by
the assembly of the people; at the lower stage of barbarism, so far as we have
knowledge of it, as among the Americans, this assembly of the people still
comprises only the members of the gens, not yet of the tribe or of the
confederacy of tribes. The chiefs (principes) are still sharply
distinguished from the military leaders (duces) just as they are among
the Iroquois; they already subsist partially on gifts of cattle, corn, etc.,
from the members of the tribe; as in America, they are generally elected from
the same family. The transition to father-right favored, as in Greece and Rome,
the gradual transformation of election into hereditary succession, and hence
the rise of a noble family in each gens. This old so-called tribal nobility
disappeared for the most part during the migrations or soon afterwards. The
military leaders were chosen without regard to their descent, solely according
to their ability. They had little power and had to rely on the force of
example. Tacitus expressly states that the actual disciplinary authority in the
army lay with the priests. The real power was in the hands of the assembly of
the people. The king or the chief of the tribe presides; the people decide:
“No” by murmurs; “Yes” by acclamation and clash of
weapons. The assembly of the people is at the same time an assembly of justice;
here complaints are brought forward and decided and sentences of death passed,
the only capital crimes being cowardice, treason against the people, and
unnatural lust. Also in the gentes and other subdivisions of the tribe all the
members sit in judgment under the presidency of the chief, who, as in all the
early German courts, can only have guided the proceedings and put questions;
the actual verdict was always given among Germans everywhere by the whole
community.

Confederacies of tribes had grown up since the time of Caesar; some of them
already had kings; the supreme military commander was already aiming at the
position of tyrant, as among the Greeks and Romans, and sometimes secured it.
But these fortunate usurpers were not by any means absolute rulers; they were,
however, already beginning to break the fetters of the gentile constitution.
Whereas freed slaves usually occupied a subordinate position, since they could
not belong to any gens, as favorites of the new kings they often won rank,
riches and honors. The same thing happened after the conquest of the Roman
Empire by these military leaders, who now became kings of great countries.
Among the Franks, slaves and freedmen of the king played a leading part first
at the court and then in the state; the new nobility was to a great extent
descended from them.

One institution particularly favored the rise of kingship: the retinues. We
have already seen among the American Indians how, side by side with the gentile
constitution, private associations were formed to carry on wars independently.
Among the Germans, these private associations had already become permanent. A
military leader who had made himself a name gathered around him a band of young
men eager for booty, whom he pledged to personal loyalty, giving the same
pledge to them. The leader provided their keep, gave them gifts, and organized
them on a hierarchic basis; a bodyguard and a standing troop for smaller
expeditions and a regular corps of officers for operations on a larger scale.
Weak as these retinues must have been, and as we in fact find them to be later
– for example, under Odoacer in Italy – they were nevertheless the
beginnings of the decay of the old freedom of the people and showed themselves
to be such during and after the migrations. For in the first place they favored
the rise of monarchic power. In the second place, as Tacitus already notes,
they could only be kept together by continual wars and plundering expeditions.
Plunder became an end in itself. If the leader of the retinue found nothing to
do in the neighborhood, he set out with his men to other peoples where there
was war and the prospect of booty. The German mercenaries who fought in great
numbers under the Roman standard even against Germans were partly mobilized
through these retinues. They already represent the first form of the system of
Landsknechte, the shame and curse of the Germans. When the Roman Empire had
been conquered, these retinues of the kings formed the second main stock, after
the unfree and the Roman courtiers, from which the later nobility was drawn.

In general, then, the constitution of those German tribes which had combined
into peoples was the same as had developed among the Greeks of the Heroic Age
and the Romans of the so-called time of the kings: assembly of the people,
council of the chiefs of the gentes, military leader, who is already striving
for real monarchic power. It was the highest form of constitution which the
gentile order could achieve; it was the model constitution of the upper stage
of barbarism. If society passed beyond the limits within which this
constitution was adequate, that meant the end of the gentile order; it was
broken up and the state took its place.

Footnotes

[1] During a few days spent
in Ireland, I realized afresh to what an extent the country people still live
in the conceptions of the gentile period. The landed proprietor, whose tenant
the farmer is, is still regarded by the latter as a kind of chief of the clan,
whose duty it is to manage the land in the interests of all, while the farmer
pays tribute in the form of rent, but has a claim upon him for assistance in
times of necessity. Similarly, everyone who is well off is considered under an
obligation to assist his poorer neighbors when they fall on hard times. Such
help is not charity; it is what the poorer member of the clan is entitled to
receive from the wealthier member or the chief. One can understand the
complaints of the political economists and jurists about the impossibility of
making the Irish peasant grasp the idea of modern bourgeois property; the
Irishman simply cannot get it into his head that there can be property with
rights but no duties. But one can also understand that when Irishmen with these
naive gentile conceptions suddenly find themselves in one of the big English or
American towns among a population with completely different ideas of morality
and justice, they easily become completely confused about both morality and
justice and lose all their bearings, with the result that masses of them become
demoralized. (Note to the Fourth Edition.)

[2] The peculiar closeness
of the bond between maternal uncle and nephew, which derives from the time of
mother-right and is found among many peoples, is only recognized by the Greeks
in their mythology of the heroic age. According to Diodorus, IV, 34, Meleager
slays the sons of Thestius, the brothers of his mother Althma. She regards this
deed as such an inexpiable crime that she curses the murderer, her own son, and
prays for his death. “The gods heard her wishes,” the story says, “and put an
end to Meleager’s life.” Also according to Diodorus (IV, 44), the Argonauts
land in Thrace under Heracles and there find that Phincus, at the instigation
of his new wife, is shamefully ill-treating the two sons born to him by his
former wife, the Boread Cleopatra, whom he has put away. But among the
Argonauts there are also Boreads, brothers of Cleopatra, therefore maternal
uncles of the maltreated boys. They at once take up their nephews’ cause, free
them, and kill their guards.

## VIII. The Formation of the State among Germans

According to Tacitus, the Germans were a very numerous people.
Caesar gives us an approximate idea of the strength of the separate German
peoples; he places the number of the Usipetans and the Tencterans who appeared
on the left bank of the Rhine at 180,000, women and children included. That is
about 100,000 to one people, [1] already considerably more than, for
instance, the total number of the Iroquois in their prime, when, no more than
20,000 strong, they were the terror of the whole country from the Great Lakes
to the Ohio and the Potomac. On the map, if we try to group the better known
peoples settled near the Rhine according to the evidence of the reports, a
single people occupies the space of a Prussian government district that is,
about 10,000 square kilometers or 182 geographical square miles. [About 4,000 square miles – Ed.] Now, the Germania
Magna of the Romans, which reached as far as the Vistula, had an area of
500,000 square kilometers in round figures. Reckoning the average number of
each people at 100,000, the total population of Germania Magna would work out
at 5,000,000 – a considerable figure for a barbarian group of peoples, but,
compared with our conditions ten persons to the square kilometer, or about 550
to the geographical square mile – extremely low. But that by no means exhausts
the number of the Germans then living. We know that all along the Carpathians
and down to the south of the Danube there were German peoples descended from
Gothic tribes, such as the Bastarnians, Peucinians and others, who were so
numerous that Pliny classes them together as the fifth main tribe of the
Germans. As early as 180 B.C. they make their appearance as mercenaries in the
service of the Macedonian King Perseus, and in the first years of Augustus,
still advancing, they almost reached Adrianople. If we estimate these at only
1,000,000, the probable total number of the Germans at the beginning of our era
must have been at least 6,000,000.

After permanent settlements had been founded in Germany, the population must
have grown with increasing rapidity; the advances in industry we mentioned are
in themselves proof of this. The objects found in the Schleswig marshes date
from the third century, according to the Roman coins discovered with them. At
this time, therefore, there was already a developed metal and textile industry
on the Baltic, brisk traffic with the Roman Empire and a certain degree of
luxury among the more wealthy – all signs of denser population. But also
at this time begins the general attack by the Germans along the whole line of
the Rhine, the Roman wall and the Danube, from the North Sea to the Black Sea
– direct proof of the continual growth and outward thrust of the
population. For three centuries the fight went on, during which the whole main
body of the Gothic peoples (with the exception of the Scandinavian Goths and
the Burgundians) thrust south-east, forming the left wing on the long front of
attack, while in the center the High Germans (Hermionians) pushed forward down
the upper Danube, and on the right wing the Ischovonians, now called Franks,
advanced along the Rhine; the Ingoevonians carried out the conquest of Britain.
By the end of the fifth century an exhausted and bleeding Roman Empire lay
helpless before the invading Germans.

In earlier chapters we were standing at the cradle of ancient Greek and
Roman civilization. Now we stand at its grave. Rome had driven the leveling
plane of its world rule over all the countries of the Mediterranean basin, and
that for centuries. Except when Greek offered resistance, all natural languages
had been forced to yield to a debased Latin; there were no more national
differences, no more Gauls, Iberians, Ligurians, Noricans; all had become
Romans. Roman administration and Roman law had everywhere broken up the old
kinship groups, and with them the last vestige of local and national
independence. The half-baked culture of Rome provided no substitute; it
expressed no nationality, only the lack of nationality. The elements of new
nations were present everywhere; the Latin dialects of the various provinces
were becoming increasingly differentiated; the natural boundaries which once
had made Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa independent territories, were still there
and still made themselves felt. But the strength was not there to fuse these
elements into new nations; there was no longer a sign anywhere of capacity for
development, or power of resistance, to say nothing of creative energy. The
enormous mass of humanity in the whole enormous territory was held together by
one bond only: the Roman state; and the Roman state had become in the course of
time their worst enemy and oppressor. The provinces had annihilated Rome; Rome
itself had become a provincial town like the rest – privileged, but no
longer the ruler, no longer the hub of the world empire, not even the seat of
the emperors or sub-emperors, who now lived in Constantinople, Treves, Milan.
The Roman state had become a huge, complicated machine, exclusively for
bleeding its subjects, Taxes, state imposts and tributes of every kind pressed
the mass of the people always deeper into poverty; the pressure was intensified
until the exactions of governors, tax-collectors, and armies made it
unbearable. That was what the Roman state had achieved with its world rule. It
gave as the justification of its existence that it maintained order within the
empire and protected it against the barbarians without. But its order was worse
than the worst disorder, and the citizens whom it claimed to protect against
the barbarians longed for the barbarians to deliver them.

Social conditions were no less desperate. Already in the last years of the
republic the policy of Roman rule had been ruthlessly to exploit the provinces;
the empire, far from abolishing this exploitation, had organized it. The more
the empire declined, the higher rose the taxes and levies, the more shamelessly
the officials robbed and extorted. The Romans had always been too occupied in
ruling other nations to become proficient in trade and industry; it was only as
usurers that they beat all who came before or after. What commerce had already
existed and still survived was now ruined by official extortion; it struggled
on only in the eastern, Greek part of the empire, which lies outside the
present study. General impoverishment; decline of commerce, handicrafts and
art; fall in the population; decay of the towns; relapse of agriculture to a
lower level-such was the final result of Roman world rule.

Agriculture, always the decisive branch of production throughout the ancient
world, was now more so than ever. In Italy, the enormous estates (latifundia)
which, since the end of the republic, occupied almost the whole country, had
been exploited in two different ways. They had been used either as pastures,
the population being displaced by sheep and cattle, which could be tended by a
few slaves, or as country estates (villae), where large-scale horticulture was
carried on with masses of slaves, partly as a luxury for the owner, partly for
sale in the town markets. The great grazing farms had kept going and had
probably even extended; the country estates and their gardens had been ruined
through the impoverishment of their owners and the decay of the towns. The
system of latifundia run by slave labor no longer paid; but at that time no
other form of large-scale agriculture was possible. Small production had again
become the only profitable form. One country estate after another was cut up
into small lots, which were handed over either to tenants, who paid a fixed sum
and had hereditary rights, or to partiarii, stewards rather than tenants, who
received a sixth or even only a ninth of the year's product in return for their
labor. For the most part, however, these small lots of land were given out to
coloni, who paid for them a definite yearly amount, were tied to the soil and
could be sold together with their lot. True, they were not slaves, but neither
were they free; they could not marry free persons, and their marriages with one
another were not regarded as full marriages, but, like those of slaves, as mere
concubinage (contubernium). They were the forerunners of the medieval serfs.

The slavery of classical times had outlived itself. Whether employed on the
land in large-scale agriculture or in manufacture in the towns, it no longer
yielded any satisfactory return – the market for its products was no
longer there. But the small-scale agriculture and the small handicraft
production to which the enormous production of the empire in its prosperous
days was now shrunk had no room for numbers of slaves. Only for the domestic
and luxury slaves of the wealthy was there still a place in society. But though
it was dying out, slavery was still common enough to make all productive labor
appear to be work for slaves, unworthy of free Romans – and everybody was
a free Roman now. Hence, on the one side, increasing manumissions of the
superfluous slaves who were now a burden; on the other hand, a growth in some
parts in the numbers of the coloni, and in other parts of the declassed freemen
(like the “poor whites” in the ex-slave states of America).
Christianity is completely innocent of the gradual dying out of ancient
slavery; it was itself actively involved in the system for centuries under the
Roman Empire, and never interfered later with slave-trading by Christians: not
with the Germans in the north, or with the Venetians in the Mediterranean, or
with the later trade in Negroes. [2] Slavery no longer paid; it was for that
reason it died out. But in dying it left behind its poisoned sting – the
stigma attaching to the productive labor of freemen. This was the blind alley
from which the Roman world had no way out: slavery was economically impossible,
the labor of freemen was morally ostracized. The one could be the basic form of
social production no longer; the other, not yet. Nothing could help here except
a complete revolution.

Things were no better in the provinces. We have most material about Gaul.
Here there was still a free small peasantry in addition to coloni. In order to
be secured against oppression by officials, judges, and usurers, these peasants
often placed themselves under the protection, the patronage, of a powerful
person; and it was not only individuals who did so, but whole communities, so
that in the fourth century the emperors frequently prohibited the practice. But
what help was this protection to those who sought it? Their patron made it a
condition that they should transfer to him the rights of ownership in their
pieces of land, in return for which he guaranteed them the use of the land for
their lifetime – a trick which the Holy Church took note of and in the
ninth and tenth centuries lustily imitated, to the increase of God’s
glory and its own lands. At this time, it is true, about the year 475, Bishop
Salvianus of Marseilles still inveighs indignantly against such theft. He
relates that oppression by Roman officials and great landlords had become so
heavy that many “Romans” fled into districts already occupied by
the barbarians, and that the Roman citizens settled there feared nothing so
much as a return to Roman rule. That parents owing to their poverty often sold
their children into slavery at this time is proved by a decree prohibiting the
practice.

In return for liberating the Romans from their own state, the German
barbarians took from them two-thirds of all the land and divided it among
themselves. The division was made according to the gentile constitution. The
conquerors being relatively few in number, large tracts of land were left
undivided, as the property partly of the whole people, partly of the individual
tribes and gentes. Within each gens the arable and meadow land was distributed
by lot in equal portions among the individual households. We do not know
whether reallotments of the land were repeatedly carried out at this time, but
in any event they were soon discontinued in the Roman provinces and the
individual lots became alienable private property, allodium. Woods and
pastures remained undivided for common use; the provisions regulating their
common use, and the manner in which the divided land was to be cultivated, were
settled in accordance with ancient custom and by the decision of the whole
community. The longer the gens remained settled in its village and the more the
Germans and the Romans gradually merged, the more the bond of union lost its
character of kinship and became territorial. The gens was lost in the mark
community, in which, however, traces of its origin in the kinship of its
members are often enough still visible. Thus, at least in those countries where
the mark community maintained itself – northern France, England, Germany and
Scandinavia – the gentile constitution changed imperceptibly into a local
constitution and thus became capable of incorporation into the state. But it
nevertheless retained that primitive democratic character which distinguishes
the whole gentile constitution, and thus even in its later enforced
degeneration and up to the most recent times it kept something of the gentile
constitution alive, to be a weapon in the hands of the oppressed.

This weakening of the bond of blood in the gens followed from the
degeneration of the organs of kinship also in the tribe and in the entire
people as a result of their conquests. As we know, rule over subjugated peoples
is incompatible with the gentile constitution. Here we can see this on a large
scale. The German peoples, now masters of the Roman provinces, had to organize
what they had conquered. But they could neither absorb the mass of Romans into
the gentile bodies nor govern them through these bodies. At the head of the
Roman local governing bodies, many of which continued for the time being to
function, had to be placed a substitute for the Roman state, and this
substitute could only be another state. The organs of the gentile constitution
had to be transformed into state organs, and that very rapidly, for the situation
was urgent. But the immediate representative of the conquering people was their
military leader. To secure the conquered territory against attack from within
and without, it was necessary to strengthen his power. The moment had come to
transform the military leadership into kingship: the transformation was made.

Let us take the country of the Franks. Here the victorious Salian people had
come into complete possession, not only of the extensive Roman state domains,
but also of the very large tracts of land which had not been distributed among
the larger and smaller district and mark communities, in particular all the
larger forest areas. On his transformation from a plain military chief into the
real sovereign of a country, the first thing which the king of the Franks did
was to transform this property of the people into crown lands, to steal it from
the people and to give it, outright or in fief, to his retainers. This retinue,
which originally consisted of his personal following of warriors and of the
other lesser military leaders, was presently increased not only by Romans
– Romanized Gauls, whose education, knowledge of writing, familiarity
with the spoken Romance language of the country and the written Latin language,
as well as with the country's laws, soon made them indispensable to him, but
also by slaves, serfs and freedmen, who composed his court and from whom he
chose his favorites. All these received their portions of the people's land, at
first generally in the form of gifts, later of benefices, usually conferred, to
begin with, for the king's lifetime. Thus, at the expense of the people the
foundation of a new nobility was laid.

And that was not all. The wide extent of the kingdom could not be governed
with the means provided by the old gentile constitution; the council of chiefs,
even if it had not long since become obsolete, would have been unable to meet,
and it was soon displaced by the permanent retinue of the king; the old
assembly of the people continued to exist in name, but it also increasingly
became a mere assembly of military leaders subordinate to the king, and of the
new rising nobility. By the incessant civil wars and wars of conquest (the
latter were particularly frequent under Charlemagne), the free land-owning
peasants, the mass of the Frankish people, were reduced to the same state of
exhaustion and penury as the Roman peasants in the last years of the Republic.
Though they had originally constituted the whole army and still remained its
backbone after the conquest of France, by the beginning of the ninth century
they were so impoverished that hardly one man in five could go to the wars. The
army of free peasants raised directly by the king was replaced by an army
composed of the serving-men of the new nobles, including bondsmen, descendants
of men who in earlier times had known no master save the king and still earlier
no master at all, not even a king. The internal wars under Charlemagne's
successors, the weakness of the authority of the crown, and the corresponding
excesses of the nobles (including the counts instituted by Charlemagne, who
were now striving to make their office hereditary), had already brought ruin on
the Frankish peasantry, and the ruin was finally completed by the invasions of
the Norsemen. Fifty years after the death of Charlemagne, the Empire of the
Franks lay as defenseless at the feet of the Norsemen as the Roman Empire, four
hundred years earlier, had lain at the feet of the Franks.

Not only was there the same impotence against enemies from without, but
there was almost the same social order or rather disorder within. The free
Frankish peasants were in a plight similar to their predecessors, the Roman
coloni. Plundered, and ruined by wars, they had been forced to put themselves
under the protection of the new nobles or of the Church, the crown being too
weak to protect them. But they had to pay dearly for it. Like the Gallic
peasants earlier, they had to transfer their rights of property in land to
their protecting lord and received the land back from him in tenancies of
various and changing forms, but always only in return for services and dues.
Once in this position of dependence, they gradually lost their personal freedom
also; after a few generations most of them were already serfs. How rapid was
the disappearance of the free peasantry is shown by Irminon’s records of
the monastic possessions of the Abbey of Saint Germain des Prés, at that time
near, now in, Paris. On the huge holdings of this Abbey, which were scattered
in the surrounding country, there lived in Charlemagne’s time 2,788
households, whose members were almost without exception Franks with German
names. They included 2,080 coloni, 35 lites [semi-free
peasants – Ed.], 220 slaves, and only eight freehold tenants! The
godless practice, as Salvianus had called it, by which the protecting lord had
the peasant’s land transferred to himself as his own property, and only
gave it back to the peasant for use during life, was now commonly employed by
the Church against the peasants. The forced services now imposed with
increasing frequency had had their prototype as much in the Roman angariae,
compulsory labor for the state, as in the services provided by members of the
German marks for bridge and road-making and other common purposes. To all
appearances, therefore, after four hundred years, the mass of the people were
back again where they had started.

But that only proved two things: first, that the social stratification and
the distribution of property in the declining Roman Empire completely
correspond to the level of agricultural and industrial production at that time,
and had therefore been inevitable; secondly, that this level of production had
neither risen nor fallen significantly during the following four centuries and
had therefore with equal necessity again produced the same distribution of
property and the same classes in the population. In the last centuries of the
Roman Empire the town had lost its former supremacy over the country, and in
the first centuries of German rule it had not regained it. This implies a low
level of development both in agriculture and industry. This general situation
necessarily produces big ruling landowners and a dependent small peasantry. How
impossible it was to graft onto such a society either the Roman system of
latifundia worked by slave-labor or the newer large-scale agriculture worked by
forced services is proved by Charlemagne's experiments with the famous imperial
country estates (villae). These experiments were gigantic in scope, but they
left scarcely a trace. They were continued only by the monasteries, and only
for them were they fruitful. But the monasteries were abnormal social bodies,
founded on celibacy; they could produce exceptional results, but for that very
reason necessarily continued to be exceptional themselves.

And yet progress was made during these four hundred years. Though at the end
we find almost the same main classes as at the beginning, the human beings who
formed these classes were different. Ancient slavery had gone, and so had the
pauper freemen who despised work as only fit for slaves. Between the Roman
colonus and the new bondsman had stood the free Frankish peasant. The “useless
memories and aimless strife” of decadent Roman culture were dead and buried.
The social classes of the ninth century had been formed, not in the rottenness
of a decaying civilization, but in the birth-pangs of a new civilization.
Compared with their Roman predecessors, the new breed, whether masters or
servants, was a breed of men. The relation of powerful landowners and subject
peasants which had meant for the ancient world the final ruin, from which there
was no escape, was for them the starting-point of a new development. And,
further, however unproductive these four centuries appear, one great product
they did leave: the modern nationalities, the new forms and structures through
which west European humanity was to make coming history. The Germans had, in
fact, given Europe new life, and therefore the break-up of the states in the
Germanic period ended, not in subjugation by the Norsemen and Saracens, but in
the further development of the system of benefices and protection into
feudalism, and in such an enormous increase of the population that scarcely two
centuries later the severe blood-letting of the Crusades was borne without
injury.

But what was the mysterious magic by which the Germans breathed new life
into a dying Europe? Was it some miraculous power innate in the Germanic race,
such as our chauvinist historians romance about? Not a bit of it. The Germans,
especially at that time, were a highly gifted Aryan tribe, and in the full
vigor of development. It was not, however, their specific national qualities
which rejuvenated Europe, but simply – their barbarism, their gentile
constitution.

Their individual ability and courage, their sense of freedom, their
democratic instinct which in everything of public concern felt itself
concerned; in a word, all the qualities which had been lost to the Romans and
were alone capable of forming new states and making new nationalities grow out
of the slime of the Roman world-what else were they than the characteristics of
the barbarian of the upper stage, fruits of his gentile constitution?

If they recast the ancient form of monogamy, moderated the supremacy of the
man in the family, and gave the woman a higher position than the classical
world had ever known, what made them capable of doing so if not their
barbarism, their gentile customs, their living heritage from the time of
mother-right?

If in at least three of the most important countries, Germany, northern
France and England, they carried over into the feudal state a genuine piece of
gentile constitution, in the form of mark communities, thus giving the
oppressed class, the peasants, even under the harshest medieval serfdom, a
local center of solidarity and a means of resistance such as neither the slaves
of classical times nor the modern proletariat found ready to their hand – to
what was this due, if not to their barbarism, their purely barbarian method of
settlement in kinship groups?

Lastly: they were able to develop and make universal the milder form of
servitude they had practiced in their own country, which even in the Roman
Empire increasingly displaced slavery; a form of servitude which, as Fourier
first stressed, gives to the bondsmen the means of their gradual liberation as
a class (“fournit aux cultivateurs des moyens d'affranchissement collectif et
progressif”); a form of servitude which thus stands high above slavery, where
the only possibility is the immediate release, without any transitional stage,
of individual slaves (abolition of slavery by successful rebellion is unknown
to antiquity), whereas the medieval serfs gradually won their liberation as a
class. And to what do we owe this if not to their barbarism, thanks to which
they had not yet reached the stage of fully developed slavery, neither the
labor slavery of the classical world nor the domestic slavery of the Orient?

All the vigorous and creative life which the Germans infused into the Roman
world was barbarism. Only barbarians are able to rejuvenate a world in the
throes of collapsing civilization. And precisely the highest stage of
barbarism, to which and in which the Germans worked their way upwards before
the migrations, was the most favorable for this process. That explains
everything.

Footnotes

[1] The number assumed here
is confirmed by a statement of Diodorus about the Celts of Gaul: “In Gaul dwell
many peoples of varying strength. Among those that are greatest the number is
about 200,000, among the smallest, 50,000” (Diodorus Siculus, V, 75). On an
average, therefore, 125,000; it can undoubtedly be assumed that, owing to their
higher stage of development, the single peoples among the Gauls were rather
larger than among the Germans.

[2] According to Bishop
Liutprand of Cremona, in the tenth century the chief industry of Verdun –
in the Holy German Empire, observe – was the manufacture of eunuchs, who
were exported at great profit to Spain for the Moorish harems.

## IX. Barbarism and Civilization

We have now traced the dissolution of the gentile constitution

in the three great instances of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Germans. In

conclusion, let us examine the general economic conditions which already

undermined the gentile organization of society at the upper stage of barbarism

and with the coming of civilization overthrew it completely. Here we shall need

Marx's Capital as much as Morgan’s book.

Arising in the middle stage of savagery, further developed during its upper

stage, the gens reaches its most flourishing period, so far as our sources

enable us to judge, during the lower stage of barbarism. We begin therefore

with this stage.

Here – the American Indians must serve as our example – we find

the gentile constitution fully formed. The tribe is now grouped in several

gentes, generally two. With the increase in population, each of these original

gentes splits up into several daughter gentes, their mother gens now appearing

as the phratry. The tribe itself breaks up into several tribes, in each of

which we find again, for the most part, the old gentes. The related tribes, at

least in some cases, are united in a confederacy. This simple organization

suffices completely for the social conditions out of which it sprang. It is

nothing more than the grouping natural to those conditions, and it is capable

of settling all conflicts that can arise within a society so organized. War

settles external conflicts; it may end with the annihilation of the tribe, but

never with its subjugation. It is the greatness, but also the limitation, of

the gentile constitution that it has no place for ruler and ruled. Within the

tribe there is as yet no difference between rights and duties; the question

whether participation in public affairs, in blood revenge or atonement, is a

right or a duty, does not exist for the Indian; it would seem to him just as

absurd as the question whether it was a right or a duty to sleep, eat, or hunt.

A division of the tribe or of the gens into different classes was equally

impossible. And that brings us to the examination of the economic basis of

these conditions.

The population is extremely sparse; it is dense only at the tribe’s

place of settlement, around which lie in a wide circle first the hunting

grounds and then the protective belt of neutral forest, which separates the

tribe from others. The division of labor is purely primitive, between the sexes

only. The man fights in the wars, goes hunting and fishing, procures the raw

materials of food and the tools necessary for doing so. The woman looks after

the house and the preparation of food and clothing, cooks, weaves, sews. They

are each master in their own sphere: the man in the forest, the woman in the

house. Each is owner of the instruments which he or she makes and uses: the man

of the weapons, the hunting and fishing implements, the woman of the household

gear. The housekeeping is communal among several and often many families. [1] What is made

and used in common is common property – the house, the garden, the long-boat.

Here therefore, and here alone, there still exists in actual fact that

“property created by the owner’s labor” which in civilized

society is an ideal fiction of the jurists and economists, the last lying legal

pretense by which modern capitalist property still bolsters itself up.

But humanity did not everywhere remain at this stage. In Asia they found

animals which could be tamed and, when once tamed, bred. The wild buffalo-cow

had to be hunted; the tame buffalo-cow gave a calf yearly and milk as well. A

number of the most advanced tribes – the Aryans, Semites, perhaps already

also the Turanians – now made their chief work first the taming of

cattle, later their breeding and tending only. Pastoral tribes separated

themselves from the mass of the rest of the barbarians: the first great social

division of labor. The pastoral tribes produced not only more necessities of

life than the other barbarians, but different ones. They possessed the

advantage over them of having not only milk, milk products and greater supplies

of meat, but also skins, wool, goat-hair, and spun and woven fabrics, which

became more common as the amount of raw material increased. Thus for the first

time regular exchange became possible. At the earlier stages only occasional

exchanges can take place; particular skill in the making of weapons and tools

may lead to a temporary division of labor. Thus in many places undoubted

remains of workshops for the making of stone tools have been found, dating from

the later Stone Age. The artists who here perfected their skill probably worked

for the whole community, as each special handicraftsman still does in the

gentile communities in India. In no case could exchange arise at this stage

except within the tribe itself, and then only as an exceptional event. But now,

with the differentiation of pastoral tribes, we find all the conditions ripe

for exchange between branches of different tribes and its development into a

regular established institution. Originally tribes exchanged with tribe through

the respective chiefs of the gentes; but as the herds began to pass into

private ownership, exchange between individuals became more common, and,

finally, the only form. Now the chief article which the pastoral tribes

exchanged with their neighbors was cattle; cattle became the commodity by which

all other commodities were valued and which was everywhere willingly taken in

exchange for them – in short, cattle acquired a money function and

already at this stage did the work of money. With such necessity and speed,

even at the very beginning of commodity exchange, did the need for a money

commodity develop.

Horticulture, probably unknown to Asiatic barbarians of the lower stage, was

being practiced by them in the middle stage at the latest, as the forerunner of

agriculture. In the climate of the Turanian plateau, pastoral life is

impossible without supplies of fodder for the long and severe winter. Here,

therefore, it was essential that land should be put under grass and corn

cultivated. The same is true of the steppes north of the Black Sea. But when

once corn had been grown for the cattle, it also soon became food for men. The

cultivated land still remained tribal property; at first it was allotted to the

gens, later by the gens to the household communities and finally to individuals

for use. The users may have had certain rights of possession, but nothing more.

Of the industrial achievements of this stage, two are particularly

important. The first is the loom, the second the smelting of metal ores and the

working of metals. Copper and tin and their alloy, bronze, were by far the most

important. Bronze provided serviceable tools and weapons, though it could not

displace stone tools; only iron could do that, and the method of obtaining iron

was not yet understood. Gold and silver were beginning to be used for ornament

and decoration, and must already have acquired a high value as compared with

copper and bronze.

The increase of production in all branches – cattle-raising,

agriculture, domestic handicrafts – gave human labor-power the capacity

to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same

time it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the

gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in

new labor forces. War provided them; prisoners of war were turned into slaves.

With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and

its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of

labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring

slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the

first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves,

exploiters and exploited.

As to how and when the herds passed out of the common possession of the

tribe or the gens into the ownership of individual heads of families, we know

nothing at present. But in the main it must have occurred during this stage.

With the herds and the other new riches, a revolution came over the family. To

procure the necessities of life had always been the business of the man; he

produced and owned the means of doing so. The herds were the new means of

producing these necessities; the taming of the animals in the first instance

and their later tending were the man’s work. To him, therefore, belonged

the cattle, and to him the commodities and the slaves received in exchange for

cattle. All the surplus which the acquisition of the necessities of life now

yielded fell to the man; the woman shared in its enjoyment, but had no part in

its ownership. The “savage” warrior and hunter had been content to

take second place in the house, after the woman; the “gentler”

shepherd, in the arrogance of his wealth, pushed himself forward into the first

place and the woman down into the second. And she could not complain. The

division of labor within the family had regulated the division of property

between the man and the woman. That division of labor had remained the same;

and yet it now turned the previous domestic relation upside down, simply

because the division of labor outside the family had changed. The same cause

which had ensured to the woman her previous supremacy in the house – that

her activity was confined to domestic labor – this same cause now ensured

the man's supremacy in the house: the domestic labor of the woman no longer

counted beside the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the

latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra. We can already see from

this that to emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains

an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labor

and restricted to private domestic labor. The emancipation of woman will only

be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale,

and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her

time. And only now has that become possible through modern large-scale

industry, which does not merely permit of the employment of female labor over a

wide range, but positively demands it, while it also tends towards ending

private domestic labor by changing it more and more into a public industry.

The man now being actually supreme in the house, the last barrier to his

absolute supremacy had fallen. This autocracy was confirmed and perpetuated by

the overthrow of mother-right, the introduction of father-right, and the

gradual transition of the pairing marriage into monogamy. But this tore a

breach in the old gentile order; the single family became a power, and its rise

was a menace to the gens.

The next step leads us to the upper stage of barbarism, the period when all

civilized peoples have their Heroic Age: the age of the iron sword, but also of

the iron plowshare and ax. Iron was now at the service of man, the last and

most important of all the raw materials which played a historically

revolutionary role – until the potato. Iron brought the tillage of large

areas, the clearing of wide tracts of virgin forest; iron gave to the

handicraftsman tools so hard and sharp that no stone, no other known metal

could resist them. All this came gradually; the first iron was often even

softer than bronze. Hence stone weapons only disappeared slowly; not merely in

the Hildebrandslied, but even as late as Hastings in 1066,

stone axes were still used for fighting. But progress could not now be stopped;

it went forward with fewer checks and greater speed. The town, with its houses

of stone or brick, encircled by stone walls, towers and ramparts, became the

central seat of the tribe or the confederacy of tribes – an enormous

architectural advance, but also a sign of growing danger and need for

protection. Wealth increased rapidly, but as the wealth of individuals. The

products of weaving, metal-work and the other handicrafts, which were becoming

more and more differentiated, displayed growing variety and skill. In addition

to corn, leguminous plants and fruit, agriculture now provided wine and oil,

the preparation of which had been learned. Such manifold activities were no

longer within the scope of one and the same individual; the second great

division of labor took place: handicraft separated from agriculture. The

continuous increase of production and simultaneously of the productivity of

labor heightened the value of human labor-power. Slavery, which during the

preceding period was still in its beginnings and sporadic, now becomes an

essential constituent part of the social system; slaves no longer merely help

with production – they are driven by dozens to work in the fields and the

workshops. With the splitting up of production into the two great main

branches, agriculture and handicrafts, arises production directly for exchange,

commodity production; with it came commerce, not only in the interior and on

the tribal boundaries, but also already overseas. All this, however, was still

very undeveloped; the precious metals were beginning to be the predominant and

general money commodity, but still uncoined, exchanging simply by their naked

weight.

The distinction of rich and poor appears beside that of freemen and slaves –

with the new division of labor, a new cleavage of society into classes. The

inequalities of property among the individual heads of families break up the

old communal household communities wherever they had still managed to survive,

and with them the common cultivation of the soil by and for these communities.

The cultivated land is allotted for use to single families, at first

temporarily, later permanently. The transition to full private property is

gradually accomplished, parallel with the transition of the pairing marriage

into monogamy. The single family is becoming the economic unit of society.

The denser population necessitates closer consolidation both for internal

and external action. The confederacy of related tribes becomes everywhere a

necessity, and soon also their fusion, involving the fusion of the separate

tribal territories into one territory of the nation. The military leader of the

people – rex, basileus, thiudans – becomes an indispensable, permanent

official. The assembly of the people takes form, wherever it did not already

exist. Military leader, council, assembly of the people are the organs of

gentile society developed into military democracy – military, since war

and organization for war have now become regular functions of national life.

Their neighbors' wealth excites the greed of peoples who already see in the

acquisition of wealth one of the main aims of life. They are barbarians: they

think it more easy and in fact more honorable to get riches by pillage than by

work. War, formerly waged only in revenge for injuries or to extend territory

that had grown too small, is now waged simply for plunder and becomes a regular

industry. Not without reason the bristling battlements stand menacingly about

the new fortified towns; in the moat at their foot yawns the grave of the

gentile constitution, and already they rear their towers into civilization.

Similarly in the interior. The wars of plunder increase the power of the

supreme military leader and the subordinate commanders; the customary election

of their successors from the same families is gradually transformed, especially

after the introduction of father-right, into a right of hereditary succession,

first tolerated, then claimed, finally usurped; the foundation of the

hereditary monarchy and the hereditary nobility is laid. Thus the organs of the

gentile constitution gradually tear themselves loose from their roots in the

people, in gens, phratry, tribe, and the whole gentile constitution changes

into its opposite: from an organization of tribes for the free ordering of

their own affairs it becomes an organization for the plundering and oppression

of their neighbors; and correspondingly its organs change from instruments of

the will of the people into independent organs for the domination and

oppression of the people. That, however, would never have been possible if the

greed for riches had not split the members of the gens into rich and poor, if

“the property differences within one and the same gens had not

transformed its unity of interest into antagonism between its members”

(Marx), if the extension of slavery had not already begun to make working for a

living seem fit only for slaves and more dishonorable than pillage.

We have now reached the threshold of civilization. Civilization opens with a

new advance in the division of labor. At the lowest stage of barbarism men

produced only directly for their own needs; any acts of exchange were isolated

occurrences, the object of exchange merely some fortuitous surplus. In the

middle stage of barbarism we already find among the pastoral peoples a

possession in the form of cattle which, once the herd has attained a certain

size, regularly produces a surplus over and above the tribe’s own

requirements, leading to a division of labor between pastoral peoples and

backward tribes without herds, and hence to the existence of two different

levels of production side by side with one another and the conditions necessary

for regular exchange. The upper stage of barbarism brings us the further

division of labor between agriculture and handicrafts, hence the production of

a continually increasing portion of the products of labor directly for

exchange, so that exchange between individual producers assumes the importance

of a vital social function. Civilization consolidates and intensifies all these

existing divisions of labor, particularly by sharpening the opposition between

town and country (the town may economically dominate the country, as in

antiquity, or the country the town, as in the middle ages), and it adds a third

division of labor, peculiar to itself and of decisive importance: it creates a

class which no longer concerns itself with production, but only with the

exchange of the products – the merchants. Hitherto whenever classes had

begun to form, it had always been exclusively in the field of production; the

persons engaged in production were separated into those who directed and those

who executed, or else into large-scale and small-scale producers. Now for the

first time a class appears which, without in any way participating in

production, captures the direction of production as a whole and economically

subjugates the producers; which makes itself into an indispensable middleman

between any two producers and exploits them both. Under the pretext that they

save the producers the trouble and risk of exchange, extend the sale of their

products to distant markets and are therefore the most useful class of the

population, a class of parasites comes into being, “genuine social

ichneumons,” who, as a reward for their actually very insignificant

services, skim all the cream off production at home and abroad, rapidly amass

enormous wealth and correspondingly social influence, and for that reason

receive under civilization ever higher honors and ever greater control of

production, until at last they also bring forth a product of their own –

the periodical trade crises.

At our stage of development, however, the young merchants had not even begun

to dream of the great destiny awaiting them. But they were growing and making

themselves indispensable, which was quite sufficient. And with the formation of

the merchant class came also the development of metallic money, the minted

coin, a new instrument for the domination of the non-producer over the producer

and his production. The commodity of commodities had been discovered, that

which holds all other commodities hidden in itself, the magic power which can

change at will into everything desirable and desired. The man who had it ruled

the world of production–and who had more of it than anybody else? The

merchant. The worship of money was safe in his hands. He took good care to make

it clear that, in face of money, all commodities, and hence all producers of

commodities, must prostrate themselves in adoration in the dust. He proved

practically that all other forms of wealth fade into mere semblance beside this

incarnation of wealth as such. Never again has the power of money shown itself

in such primitive brutality and violence as during these days of its youth.

After commodities had begun to sell for money, loans and advances in money came

also, and with them interest and usury. No legislation of later times so

utterly and ruthlessly delivers over the debtor to the usurious creditor as the

legislation of ancient Athens and ancient Rome–and in both cities it

arose spontaneously, as customary law, without any compulsion other than the

economic.

Alongside wealth in commodities and slaves, alongside wealth in money, there

now appeared wealth in land also. The individuals’ rights of possession

in the pieces of land originally allotted to them by gens or tribe had now

become so established that the land was their hereditary property. Recently

they had striven above all to secure their freedom against the rights of the

gentile community over these lands, since these rights had become for them a

fetter. They got rid of the fetter – but soon afterwards of their new

landed property also. Full, free ownership of the land meant not only power,

uncurtailed and unlimited, to possess the land; it meant also the power to

alienate it. As long as the land belonged to the gens, no such power could

exist. But when the new landed proprietor shook off once and for all the

fetters laid upon him by the prior right of gens and tribe, he also cut the

ties which had hitherto inseparably attached him to the land. Money, invented

at the same time as private property in land, showed him what that meant. Land

could now become a commodity; it could be sold and pledged. Scarcely had

private property in land been introduced than the mortgage was already invented

(see Athens). As hetaerism and prostitution dog the heels of monogamy, so from

now onwards mortgage dogs the heels of private land ownership. You asked for

full, free alienable ownership of the land and now you have got it –

“tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin.” [It's your

fault, Georges Dandin, from Molière’s play].

With trade expansion, money and usury, private property in land and

mortgages, the concentration and centralization of wealth in the hands of a

small class rapidly advanced, accompanied by an increasing impoverishment of

the masses and an increasing mass of impoverishment. The new aristocracy of

wealth, in so far as it had not been identical from the outset with the old

hereditary aristocracy, pushed it permanently into the background (in Athens,

in Rome, among the Germans). And simultaneous with this division of the

citizens into classes according to wealth there was an enormous increase,

particularly in Greece, in the number of slaves, [2] whose forced labor was the foundation on which the

superstructure of the entire society was reared.

Let us now see what had become of the gentile constitution in this social

upheaval. Confronted by the new forces in whose growth it had had no share, the

gentile constitution was helpless. The necessary condition for its existence

was that the members of a gens or at least of a tribe were settled together in

the same territory and were its sole inhabitants. That had long ceased to be

the case. Every territory now had a heterogeneous population belonging to the

most varied gentes and tribes; everywhere slaves, protected persons and aliens

lived side by side with citizens. The settled conditions of life which had only

been achieved towards the end of the middle stage of barbarism were broken up

by the repeated shifting and changing of residence under the pressure of trade,

alteration of occupation and changes in the ownership of the land. The members

of the gentile bodies could no longer meet to look after their common concerns;

only unimportant matters, like the religious festivals, were still

perfunctorily attended to. In addition to the needs and interests with which

the gentile bodies were intended and fitted to deal, the upheaval in productive

relations and the resulting change in the social structure had given rise to

new needs and interests, which were not only alien to the old gentile order,

but ran directly counter to it at every point. The interests of the groups of

handicraftsmen which had arisen with the division of labor, the special needs

of the town as opposed to the country, called for new organs. But each of these

groups was composed of people of the most diverse gentes, phratries, and

tribes, and even included aliens. Such organs had therefore to be formed

outside the gentile constitution, alongside of it, and hence in opposition to

it. And this conflict of interests was at work within every gentile body,

appearing in its most extreme form in the association of rich and poor, usurers

and debtors, in the same gens and the same tribe. Further, there was the new

mass of population outside the gentile bodies, which, as in Rome, was able to

become a power in the land and at the same time was too numerous to be

gradually absorbed into the kinship groups and tribes. In relation to this

mass, the gentile bodies stood opposed as closed, privileged corporations; the

primitive natural democracy had changed into a malign aristocracy. Lastly, the

gentile constitution had grown out of a society which knew no internal

contradictions, and it was only adapted to such a society. It possessed no

means of coercion except public opinion. But here was a society which by all

its economic conditions of life had been forced to split itself into freemen

and slaves, into the exploiting rich and the exploited poor; a society which

not only could never again reconcile these contradictions, but was compelled

always to intensify them. Such a society could only exist either in the

continuous open fight of these classes against one another, or else under the

rule of a third power, which, apparently standing above the warring classes,

suppressed their open conflict and allowed the class struggle to be fought out

at most in the economic field, in so-called legal form. The gentile

constitution was finished. It had been shattered by the division of labor and

its result, the cleavage of society into classes. It was replaced by the state.

The three main forms in which the state arises on the ruins of the gentile

constitution have been examined in detail above. Athens provides the purest,

classic form; here the state springs directly and mainly out of the class

oppositions which develop within gentile society itself. In Rome, gentile

society becomes a closed aristocracy in the midst of the numerous plebs who

stand outside it, and have duties but no rights; the victory of plebs breaks up

the old constitution based on kinship, and erects on its ruins the state, into

which both the gentile aristocracy and the plebs are soon completely absorbed.

Lastly, in the case of the German conquerors of the Roman Empire, the state

springs directly out of the conquest of large foreign territories, which the

gentile constitution provides no means of governing. But because this conquest

involves neither a serious struggle with the original population nor a more

advanced division of labor; because conquerors and conquered are almost on the

same level of economic development, and the economic basis of society remains

therefore as before–for these reasons the gentile constitution is able to

survive for many centuries in the altered, territorial form of the mark

constitution and even for a time to rejuvenate itself in a feebler shape in the

later noble and patrician families, and indeed in peasant families, as in

Ditmarschen. [3]

The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without;

just as little is it “the reality of the moral idea,” “the

image and the reality of reason,” as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a

product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission

that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is

cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in

order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests,

shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power,

apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the

conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power,

arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating

itself from it, is the state.

In contrast to the old gentile organization, the state is distinguished

firstly by the grouping of its members on a territorial basis. The old gentile

bodies, formed and held together by ties of blood, had, as we have seen, become

inadequate largely because they presupposed that the gentile members were bound

to one particular locality, whereas this had long ago ceased to be the case.

The territory was still there, but the people had become mobile. The

territorial division was therefore taken as the starting point and the system

introduced by which citizens exercised their public rights and duties where

they took up residence, without regard to gens or tribe. This organization of

the citizens of the state according to domicile is common to all states. To us,

therefore, this organization seems natural; but, as we have seen, hard and

protracted struggles were necessary before it was able in Athens and Rome to

displace the old organization founded on kinship.

The second distinguishing characteristic is the institution of a public

force which is no longer immediately identical with the people’s own

organization of themselves as an armed power. This special public force is

needed because a self-acting armed organization of the people has become

impossible since their cleavage into classes. The slaves also belong to the

population: as against the 365,000 slaves, the 90,000 Athenian citizens

constitute only a privileged class. The people’s army of the Athenian

democracy confronted the slaves as an aristocratic public force, and kept them

in check; but to keep the citizens in check as well, a police-force was needed,

as described above. This public force exists in every state; it consists not

merely of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons and coercive

institutions of all kinds, of which gentile society knew nothing. It may be

very insignificant, practically negligible, in societies with still undeveloped

class antagonisms and living in remote areas, as at times and in places in the

United States of America. But it becomes stronger in proportion as the class

antagonisms within the state become sharper and as adjoining states grow larger

and more populous. It is enough to look at Europe today, where class struggle

and rivalry in conquest have brought the public power to a pitch that it

threatens to devour the whole of society and even the state itself.

In order to maintain this public power, contributions from the state

citizens are necessary – taxes. These were completely unknown to gentile

society. We know more than enough about them today. With advancing

civilization, even taxes are not sufficient; the state draws drafts on the

future, contracts loans – state debts. Our old Europe can tell a tale about

these, too.

In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials

now present themselves as organs of society standing above society. The free,

willing respect accorded to the organs of the gentile constitution is not

enough for them, even if they could have it. Representatives of a power which

estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by means of special

decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and inviolability. The

lowest police officer of the civilized state has more “authority”

than all the organs of gentile society put together; but the mightiest prince

and the greatest statesman or general of civilization might envy the humblest

of the gentile chiefs the unforced and unquestioned respect accorded to him.

For the one stands in the midst of society; the other is forced to pose as

something outside and above it.

As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but

also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the

state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means

becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding

down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the

state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state

was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen,

and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labor

by capital. Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so

nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for

the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the

absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances

the nobility and the bourgeoisie against one another; and to the Bonapartism of

the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the

proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the

proletariat. The latest achievement in this line, in which ruler and ruled look

equally comic, is the new German Empire of the Bismarckian nation; here the

capitalists and the workers are balanced against one another and both of them

fleeced for the benefit of the decayed Prussian cabbage Junkers. [German:Krautjunker, translated as ‘country

squire’, but with pejorative overtones.]

Further, in most historical states the rights conceded to citizens are

graded on a property basis, whereby it is directly admitted that the state is

an organization for the protection of the possessing class against the

non-possessing class. This is already the case in the Athenian and Roman

property classes. Similarly in the medieval feudal state, in which the extent

of political power was determined by the extent of landownership. Similarly,

also, in the electoral qualifications in modern parliamentary states. This

political recognition of property differences is, however, by no means

essential. On the contrary, it marks a low stage in the development of the

state. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which in our

modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity and is

the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle between proletariat

and bourgeoisie can be fought out – the democratic republic no longer

officially recognizes differences of property. Wealth here employs its power

indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this in two ways: by plain

corruption of officials, of which America is the classic example, and by an

alliance between the government and the stock exchange, which is effected all

the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and the more the joint-stock

companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production

itself, and themselves have their own center in the stock exchange. In addition

to America, the latest French republic illustrates this strikingly, and honest

little Switzerland has also given a creditable performance in this field. But

that a democratic republic is not essential to this brotherly bond between

government and stock exchange is proved not only by England, but also by the

new German Empire, where it is difficult to say who scored most by the

introduction of universal suffrage, Bismarck or the Bleichroder bank. And

lastly the possessing class rules directly by means of universal suffrage. As

long as the oppressed class – in our case, therefore, the proletariat

– is not yet ripe for its self-liberation, so long will it, in its

majority, recognize the existing order of society as the only possible one and

remain politically the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme left wing. But

in the measure in which it matures towards its self-emancipation, in the same

measure it constitutes itself as its own party and votes for its own

representatives, not those of the capitalists. Universal suffrage is thus the

gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be

anything more in the modern state; but that is enough. On the day when the

thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they

as well as the capitalists will know where they stand.

The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity. There have been

societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or

state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily

involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity

because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the

development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only

ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production. They

will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with

them. The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and

equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it

will then belong – into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning

wheel and the bronze ax.

Civilization is, therefore, according to the above analysis, the stage of

development in society at which the division of labor, the exchange between

individuals arising from it, and the commodity production which combines them

both, come to their full growth and revolutionizes the whole of previous

society.

At all earlier stages of society production was essentially collective, just

as consumption proceeded by direct distribution of the products within larger

or smaller communistic communities. This collective production was very

limited; but inherent in it was the producers’ control over their process

of production and their product. They knew what became of their product: they

consumed it; it did not leave their hands. And so long as production remains on

this basis, it cannot grow above the heads of the producers nor raise up

incorporeal alien powers against them, as in civilization is always and

inevitably the case.

But the division of labor slowly insinuates itself into this process of

production. It undermines the collectivity of production and appropriation,

elevates appropriation by individuals into the general rule, and thus creates

exchange between individuals – how it does so, we have examined above.

Gradually commodity production becomes the dominating form.

With commodity production, production no longer for use by the producers but

for exchange, the products necessarily change hands. In exchanging his product,

the producer surrenders it; he no longer knows what becomes of it. When money,

and with money the merchant, steps in as intermediary between the producers,

the process of exchange becomes still more complicated, the final fate of the

products still more uncertain. The merchants are numerous, and none of them

knows what the other is doing. The commodities already pass not only from hand

to hand; they also pass from market to market; the producers have lost control

over the total production within their own spheres, and the merchants have not

gained it. Products and production become subjects of chance.

But chance is only the one pole of a relation whose other pole is named

“necessity.” In the world of nature, where chance also seems to

rule, we have long since demonstrated in each separate field the inner

necessity and law asserting itself in this chance. But what is true of the

natural world is true also of society. The more a social activity, a series of

social processes, becomes too powerful for men's conscious control and grows

above their heads, and the more it appears a matter of pure chance, then all

the more surely within this chance the laws peculiar to it and inherent in it

assert themselves as if by natural necessity. Such laws also govern the chances

of commodity production and exchange. To the individuals producing or

exchanging, they appear as alien, at first often unrecognized, powers, whose

nature Must first be laboriously investigated and established. These economic

laws of commodity production are modified with the various stages of this form

of production; but in general the whole period of civilization is dominated by

them. And still to this day the product rules the producer; still to this day

the total production of society is regulated, not by a jointly devised plan,

but by blind laws, which manifest themselves with elemental violence, in the

final instance in the storms of the periodical trade crises.

We saw above how at a fairly early stage in the development of production,

human labor-power obtains the capacity of producing a considerably greater

product than is required for the maintenance of the producers, and how this

stage of development was in the main the same as that in which division of

labor and exchange between individuals arise. It was not long then before the

great “truth” was discovered that man also can be a commodity; that

human energy can be exchanged and put to use by making a man into a slave.

Hardly had men begun to exchange than already they themselves were being

exchanged. The active became the passive, whether the men liked it or not.

With slavery, which attained its fullest development under civilization,

came the first great cleavage of society into an exploiting and an exploited

class. This cleavage persisted during the whole civilized period. Slavery is

the first form of exploitation, the form peculiar to the ancient world; it is

succeeded by serfdom in the middle ages, and wage-labor in the more recent

period. These are the three great forms of servitude, characteristic of the

three great epochs of civilization; open, and in recent times disguised,

slavery always accompanies them.

The stage of commodity production with which civilization begins is

distinguished economically by the introduction of (1) metal money, and with it

money capital, interest and usury; (2) merchants, as the class of

intermediaries between the producers; (3) private ownership of land, and the

mortgage system; (4) slave labor as the dominant form of production The form of

family corresponding to civilization and coming to definite supremacy with it

is monogamy, the domination of the man over the woman, and the single family as

the economic unit of society. The central link in civilized society is the

state, which in all typical periods is without exception the state of the

ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for

holding down the oppressed, exploited class. Also characteristic of

civilization is the establishment of a permanent opposition between town and

country as basis of the whole social division of labor; and, further, the

introduction of wills, whereby the owner of property is still able to dispose

over it even when he is dead. This institution, which is a direct affront to

the old gentile constitution, was unknown in Athens until the time of Solon; in

Rome it was introduced early, though we do not know the date; [4] among the Germans it was the clerics

who introduced it, in order that there might be nothing to stop the pious

German from leaving his legacy to the Church.

With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which

gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by setting

in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the

expense of all his other abilities. From its first day to this, sheer greed was

the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more

wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual – here

was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of

science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was

only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its

achievements.

Since civilization is founded on the exploitation of one class by another

class, its whole development proceeds in a constant contradiction. Every step

forward in production is at the same time a step backwards in the position of

the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority. Whatever benefits some

necessarily injures the others; every fresh emancipation of one class is

necessarily a new oppression for another class. The most striking proof of this

is provided by the introduction of machinery, the effects of which are now

known to the whole world. And if among the barbarians, as we saw, the

distinction between rights and duties could hardly be drawn, civilization makes

the difference and antagonism between them clear even to the dullest

intelligence by giving one class practically all the rights and the other class

practically all the duties.

But that should not be: what is good for the ruling class must also be good

for the whole of society, with which the ruling-class identifies itself.

Therefore the more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the

evils it necessarily creates with the cloak of love and charity, to palliate

them or to deny them – in short, to introduce a conventional hypocrisy

which was unknown to earlier forms of society and even to the first stages of

civilization, and which culminates in the pronouncement: the exploitation of

the oppressed class is carried on by the exploiting class simply and solely in

the interests of the exploited class itself; and if the exploited class cannot

see it and even grows rebellious, that is the basest ingratitude to its

benefactors, the exploiters. [5]

And now, in conclusion, Morgan’s judgment of civilization:

Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property

has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its

management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become,

on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands

bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come,

nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property,

and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as

the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of

society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into

just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny

of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the

past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment

of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages

yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of

a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains

the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in

society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow

the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and

knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the

liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.

[Morgan, op. cit., p. 562.–Ed.]

Footnotes

[1] Especially on the

north-west coast of America – see Bancroft. Among the Haidahs on Queen

Charlotte Islands there are households with as many as 700 persons under one

roof. Among the Nootkas whole tribes used to live under one roof.

[2] For the number of slaves

in Athens, see above, page 107. In Corinth, at the height of its power, the

number of slaves was 460,000; in Ægina, 470,000. In both cases, ten times the

population of free citizens.

[3] The first historian who

had at any rate an approximate conception of the nature of the gens was

Niebuhr, and for this he had to thank his acquaintance with the Ditmarechen

families, though he was overhasty in transferring their characteristics to the

gens.

[4] The second part of

Lassalle’s System der erworbenen Rechte (System of Acquired

Rights) turns chiefly on the proposition that the Roman testament is as

old as Rome itself, that there was never in Roman history “a time when there

were no testaments“; that, on the contrary, the testament originated in

pre-Roman times out of the cult of the dead. Lassalle, as a faithful Hegelian

of the old school, derives the provisions of Roman law not from the social

relations of the Romans, but from the “speculative concept” of the human will,

and so arrives at this totally unhistorical conclusion. This is not to be

wondered at in a book which comes to the conclusion, on the ground of the same

speculative concept, that the transfer of property was a purely secondary

matter in Roman inheritance. Lassalle not only believes in the illusions of the

Roman jurists, particularly of the earlier periods; he outdoes them.

[5] I originally intended to

place the brilliant criticism of civilization which is found scattered through

the work of Charles Fourier beside that of Morgan and my own. Unfortunately, I

have not the time. I will only observe that Fourier already regards monogamy

and private property in land as the chief characteristics of civilization, and

that he calls civilization a war of the rich against the poor. We also find

already in his work the profound recognition that in all societies which are

imperfect and split into antagonisms single families (les families

incohérentes) are the economic units.

## Appendix. A Recently Discovered Case of Group Marriage

1892

From Die Neue Zeit

Vol. XI, No. I, pp. 373-75

Since it has recently become fashionable among certain rationalistic
ethnographers to deny the existence of group marriage, the following
report is of interest; I translate it from the Russkiye Vyedomosti,
Moscow, October 14, 1892 (Old Style). Not only group marriage, i.e.,
the right of mutual sexual intercourse between a number of men and a
number of women, is expressly affirmed to be in full force, but a form
of group marriage which closely follows the punaluan marriage of the
Hawaiians, the most developed and classic phase of group marriage.
While the typical punaluan family consists of a number of brothers (own
and collateral), who are married to a number of own and collateral
sisters, we here find on the island of Sakhalin that a man is married
to all the wives of his brothers and to all the sisters of his wife,
which means, seen from the woman's side, that his wife may freely
practice sexual intercourse with the brothers of her husband and the
husbands of her sisters. It therefore differs from the typical form of
punaluan marriage only in the fact that the brothers of the husband and
the husbands of the sisters are not necessarily the same persons.

It should further be observed that this report again confirms what I
said in The Origin of the Family, 4th edition, pp. 28-29: that group
marriage does not look at all like what our brother-obsessed philistine
imagines; that the partners in group marriage do not lead in public the
same kind of lascivious life as he practices in secret, but that this
form of marriage, at least in the instances still known to occur today,
differs in practice from a loose pairing marriage or from polygamy only
in the fact that custom permits sexual intercourse in a number of cases
where otherwise it would be severely punished. That the actual
exercise of these rights is gradually dying out only proves that this
form of marriage is itself destined to die out, which is further
confirmed by its infrequency.

The whole description, moreover, is interesting because it again
demonstrates the similarity, even the identity in their main
characteristics, of the social institutions of primitive peoples at
approximately the same stage of development. Most of what the report
states about these Mongoloids on the island of Sakhalin also holds for
the Dravidian tribes of India, the South Sea Islanders at the time of
their discovery, and the American Indians. The report runs:

"At the session of October 10 (Old Style; October 22, New Style)
of the Anthropological Section of the Society of the Friends of
Natural Science, N. A. Yanchuk read an interesting communication
from Mr. Sternberg on the Gilyaks, a little-studied tribe on the
island of Sakhalin, who are at the cultural level of savagery.
The Gilyaks are acquainted neither with agriculture nor with
pottery; they procure their food chiefly by hunting and fishing;
they warm water in wooden vessels by throwing in heated stones,
etc. Of particular interest are their institutions relating to
the family and to the gens. The Gilyak addresses as father, not
only his own natural father, but also all the brothers of his
father; all the wives of these brothers, as well as all the
sisters of his mother, he addresses as his mothers; the children
of all these 'fathers' and 'mothers' he addresses as his brothers
and sisters. This system of address also exists, as is well known,
among the Iroquois and other Indian tribes of North America, as
also among some tribes of India. But whereas in these cases it
has long since ceased to correspond to the actual conditions,
among the Gilyaks it serves to designate a state still valid
today. To this day every Gilyak has the rights of a husband in
regard to the wives of his brothers and to the sisters of his
wife; at any rate, the exercise of these rights is not regarded as
impermissible. These survivals of group marriage on the basis of
the gens are reminiscent of the well-known punaluan marriage,
which still existed in the Sandwich Islands in the first half of
this century. Family and gens relations of this type form the
basis of the whole gentile order and social constitution of the
Gilyaks.

"The gens of a Gilyak consists of all-nearer and more remote, real
and nominal-brothers of his father, of their fathers and mothers
of the children of his brothers, and of his own children.

One can readily understand that a gens so constituted may comprise an
enormous number of people. Life within the gens proceeds according to
the following principles. Marriage within the gens is unconditionally
prohibited. When a Gilyak dies, his wife passes by decision of the
gens to one of his brothers, own or nominal. The gens provides for the
maintenance of all of its members who are unable to work. 'We have no
poor,' said a Gilyak to the writer. 'Whoever is in need, is fed by the
khal [gens].' The members of the gens are further united by common
sacrificial ceremonies and festivals, a common burial place, etc.

"The gens guarantees the life and security of its members against
attacks by non-gentiles; the means of repression used is blood-revenge,
though under Russian rule the practice has very much declined. Women
are completely excepted from gentile blood-revenge. In some very rare
cases the gens adopts members of other gentes. It is a general rule
that the property of a deceased member may not pass out of the gens; in
this respect the famous provision of the Twelve Tables holds literally
among the Gilyaks: si suos heredes non habet, gentiles familiam habento
– if he has no heirs of his own, the members of the gens shall
inherit. No important event takes place in the life of a Gilyak
without participation by the gens. Not very long ago, about one or two
generations, the oldest gentile member was the head of the community,
the starosta of the gens; today the functions of the chief elder of the
gens are restricted almost solely to presiding over religious
ceremonies. The gentes are often dispersed among widely distant
places, but even when separated the members of a gens still remember
one another and continue to give one another hospitality, and to
provide mutual assistance and protection, etc. Except under the most
extreme necessity, the Gilyak never leaves the fellow-members of his
gens or the graves of his gens. Gentile society has impressed a very
definite stamp on the whole mental life of the Gilyaks, on their
character, their customs and institutions. The habit of common
discussion and decision on all matters, the necessity of continually
taking an active part in all questions affecting the members of the
gens, the solidarity of blood-revenge, the fact of being compelled and
accustomed to live together with ten or more like himself in great
tents (yurtas), and to be, in short, always with other people-all this
has given the Gilyak a sociable and open character. The Gilyak is
extraordinarily hospitable; he loves to entertain guests and to come
himself as a guest. This admirable habit of hospitality is especially
prominent in times of distress. In a bad year, when a Gilyak has
nothing for himself or for his dogs to eat, he does not stretch out his
hand for alms, but confidently seeks hospitality, and is fed, often for
a considerable time.

"Among the Gilyaks of Sakhalin crimes from motives of personal
gain practically never occur. The Gilyak keeps his valuables in a
storehouse, which is never locked. He has such a keen sense of
shame that if he is convicted of a disgraceful act, he immediately
goes into the forest and hangs himself. Murder is very rare, and
is hardly ever committed except in anger, never from intentions of
gain. In his dealings with other people, the Gilyak shows himself
honest, reliable, and conscientious.

"Despite their long subjection to the Manchurians, now become
Chinese, and despite the corrupting influence of the settlement of
the Amur district, the Gilyaks still preserve in their moral
character many of the virtues of a primitive tribe. But the fate
awaiting their social order cannot be averted. One or two more
generations, and the Gilyaks on the mainland will have been
completely Russianized, and together with the benefits of culture
they will also acquire its defects. The Gilyaks on the island of
Sakhalin, being more or less remote from the centers of Russian
settlement, have some prospect of preserving their way of life
unspoiled rather longer. But among them, too, the influence of
their Russian neighbors is beginning to make itself felt. The
Gilyaks come into the villages to trade, they go to Nikolaievsk to
look for work; and every Gilyak who returns from such work to his
home brings with him the same atmosphere which the Russian worker
takes back from the town into his village. And at the same time,
working in the town, with its chances and changes of fortune,
destroys more and more that primitive equality which is such a
prominent feature of the artlessly simple economic life of these
peoples.

"Mr. Sternberg's article, which also contains information about
their religious views and customs and their legal institutions,
will appear unabridged in the Etnografitcheskoye Obozrenie
(Ethnographical Review).