Lamarck was the first to present the theory of Evolution in a thoroughly scientific manner. Then Darwin discovered “the great principle which rules the evolution of organisms”; the principle of “natural selection.” Then Weismann repudiated current ideas as to how the fittest “arrived,” or “originated,” and presented in their place a theory of his own, which is still under discussion. DeVries raised the question as to whether new species “arrive” by a gradual accumulation of tiny changes, or by sudden leaps—mutations—and demonstrated the latter by his experiments with the evening primrose.

And now comes Kropotkin with the question, “Who are the fittest?” What constitutes the fitness, which makes for survival? Are those organisms the fittest which are constantly waging a war of extermination against every other organism in the struggle for existence, or, are those the fittest which co-operate with each other in the preservation of the common life of all? The raising of this question brings to light another striking instance of the influence of class interests on scientific thought. It is a matter of common observation that any class, struggling for what it conceives to be its own emancipation, looks to the past for justification and precedent. In the English speaking world there is a widely prevailing opinion that the Magna Charta, extorted from King John at Runnymede, is the foundation of modern liberty.

The French bourgeoisie, struggling to overthrow the feudal monarchy, sought its justification in that “state of nature” which a despotic monarchy was said to contravene. Thus writers like Rousseau idealized nature, representing it as comparatively perfect, and declared that a restoration of “natural rights” was essential to liberty. But when this same bourgeoisie had won its victory and enthroned itself, and instead of increasing the liberty, had in many respects, deepened the degradation of the mass of the French people, its ideas about the “state of nature” underwent a radical change. And this happened not only in France but wherever the bourgeoisie triumphed.

Now the “state of nature” was one of constant carnage; nature was “red in tooth and claw.” And this chamber of horrors was supposed to support the exploitation of labor, and countenance a brutalization of childhood that constitutes the blackest stain on human history. So strong was the swirl that Huxley was swept into it; but, although he maintained the “gladiatorial” view of nature, he repudiated the social atrocities which capitalist apologists such as Spencer sought to deduce from it. In later years, Spencer partially abandoned his premise as to the animal world but, strangely enough, kept it intact for primitive man.

For this view of nature as full of nothing but darkness and cruelty, where, as Hobbes had put it, there waged “the war of every one against everybody,” the great authority of Darwin was invoked. In fact, Darwin was supposed to be almost solely responsible for the theory, and its overthrow by Kropotkin was heralded by the uninformed as another of those “death-blows” of which Darwinism is thought to have received so many during the last quarter of a century.

Kropotkin, however, in his introduction, claims that the idea of mutual aid is “in reality, nothing but a further development of the ideas expressed by Darwin in the ‘Descent of Man’”. Darwin said: “Those communities which included the greatest number of sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.” Kropotkin complains that Darwin did not sufficiently develop this idea, but over-emphasized the idea of “competition” for life, and this error, he insists, was further accentuated by his disciples. “It happened with Darwin’s theory,” he says, “as it always happens with theories having any bearing upon human relations. Instead of widening it according to his own hints, his followers narrowed it still more.”

It is a mistake to suppose that Kropotkin denies the Darwinian principle of mutual struggle. “It is evident,” says he, “that no review of evolution can be complete unless these two dominant currents are analyzed. * * * The struggles between these two forces make, in fact, the substance of history.” He anticipates the objection that his work only emphasizes the principle of mutual aid by insisting that the principle of struggle has “already been analyzed, described, and glorified from time immemorial. In fact, up to the present time, this current alone has received attention from the epical poet, the annalist, the historian, and the sociologist.”

The main body of his book is a solid mass of evidence of the existence of mutual aid everywhere in the living world, from the lowest insects to the highest mammals; and from the first stone age to the twentieth century. It consists of eight chapters, the first two of which are devoted to “Mutual Aid among Animals.”

Here, the theory of the human origin of society is utterly demolished. Complex social arrangements, popularly supposed to be limited to ants and bees, are shown to flourish everywhere, especially among birds.

With the parrot mutual aid is developed to such an extent that Kropotkin places it “at the very top of the whole feathered world for the development of its intelligence.” The white cockatoos of Australia, in raiding a crop, mutually aid each other so shrewdly as to “baffle all stratagems” to thwart them. “Before starting to plunder a cornfield, they first send out a reconnoitering party which occupies the highest trees in the vicinity of the field, while other scouts perch upon the intermediate trees between the field and the forest and transmit signals. If the report runs ‘all right,’ a score of cockatoos will separate from the bulk of the band, take a flight in the air, and then fly towards the trees nearest to the field. They also will scrutinize the neighborhood for a long while, and only then will give the signal for general advance, after which the whole band starts at once and plunders the field in no time.”

Mutual aid is very conspicuous among pelicans. “They always go fishing in numerous bands and after having chosen an appropriate bay, they form a wide half circle in face of the shore, and narrow it by paddling towards the shore, catching all the fish that happen to be enclosed in the circle. On narrow rivers and canals they even divide into two parties, each of which draws up on a half circle, and both paddle to meet each other, just as if two parties of men dragging two long nets should advance to capture all the fish taken between the nets when both parties come to meet.”

Our familiar friend, the house sparrow, is not overlooked and is said to have practiced mutual aid to such an extent as to be recognized even by the ancient Greeks. Kropotkin quotes from memory, the Greek Orator who exclaimed: “While I am speaking to you a sparrow has come to tell other sparrows that a slave has dropped on the floor a sack of corn, and they all go there to feed on the grain.” Sparrows also maintain social discipline: “If a lazy sparrow intends appropriating the nest a comrade is building, or even steals from it a few sprays of straw, the group interferes against the lazy comrade.” Kropotkin presents a number of well authenticated observations of the great compassion and sympathy prevailing among those wild creatures, which are popularly supposed to be always flying at each others’ throats: J.C. Woods’ narrative “of a weasel which came to pick up and carry away an injured comrade;” Brehm, who “himself saw two crows feeding in a hollow tree a third crow which had a wound several weeks old.” Captain Stansbury, on his journey to Utah, as quoted by Darwin, “saw a blind pelican which was fed, and well fed, by other pelicans upon fishes which had to be brought a distance of thirty miles.”

From these and a multitude of similar cases Kropotkin concludes that while “no naturalist will doubt that the idea of a struggle for life, carried on through organic nature, is the greatest generalization of our century, that struggle is very often collective, against adverse circumstances.”

Kropotkin in concluding his consideration of animals, immensely strengthens his position by pointing out various methods by which new species may develop or old ones disappear, without the operation of a deadly competition between individuals. “The squirrels, for instance, when there is a scarcity of cones in the larch forests, remove to the fir-tree forests, and this change of food has certain well known physiological effects on squirrels. If this change of habits does not last—if next year the cones are again plentiful in the dark larch wood—no new variety of squirrels will evidently arise from this cause. But if part of the wide area occupied by the squirrels begins to have its physical characters altered—in consequence of, let us say, a milder climate or desiccation, (drying up) which both bring about an increase of the pine forests in proportion to the larch woods—and if some other conditions occur to induce squirrels to dwell on the outskirts of the desiccating region—we shall then have a new, i. e., an incipient new species of squirrels. A larger proportion of squirrels of the new, better-adapted variety would survive each year, and the intermediate links would die in the course of time, without having been starved out by Malthusian competitors.”

Again: “If we take the horses and cattle which are grazing all the winter through in the Steppes of Transbaikalia, we find them very lean and exhausted at the end of the winter. But they grow exhausted not because there is not enough food for all of them—the grass buried under a thin sheet of snow is everywhere in abundance—but because of the difficulty of getting it from beneath the snow and this difficulty is the same for all horses alike. * * * We can safely say that their number are not kept down by competition; that at no time of the year they need struggle, for food and that if they never reach anything, approaching over-population, the cause is in the climate, and not in competition.”

After citing the rodents that combine to store food for the winter, or fall asleep about the time competition should set in; and the buffaloes which form immense herds to migrate across a continent to where food is plentiful; and beavers, which when they grow numerous, divide into two parties, and go, the old ones down the river, and the young ones up the river and avoid competition; after citing these and many others, he declares the mandate of nature to be: “Don’t compete!—competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it! * * * Therefore combine—practice mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually, and morally.” The third chapter deals with “Mutual Aid Among Savages.” Here we meet the question as to whether the family is an ancient institution, antedating the tribe and clan or whether it appeared at a much later date as an outgrowth of the clan. Kropotkin takes the latter view as advocated by Morgan, Bachofen, Maine, Lubbock and Tylor, and rejects the former as presented by Starcke and Westermarck.

The savage of anthropological research is shown to be a very different creature from the blood-thirsty monster of popular tradition. “Sometimes he is a cannibal, it is true, but not often, and then it is closely associated with economic necessity, and is abandoned when food becomes plentiful.” The custom of leaving old men in the woods to die, is bad enough, but not so bad as supposed. They usually carry the old man with them in their migrations until he himself grows tired of being a burden and begs to be killed. When this point is reached, he is given more than his share of food, and left in the woods to die, because no one has the heart to kill him. Infanticide is practiced from the same motive which induces savages to take all kinds of measures for diminishing the birth-rate—they cannot rear all of their children. In times of plenty it disappears. It was when these customs were enveloped in a religious halo and preserved as sacred ceremonies, after all necessity for them had disappeared, that they attained their most revolting characters.

He believed in revenge but it was to be strictly measured by the offense. It must be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; not a head for an eye, or an eye for a tooth. He only killed his enemies, and he always, at all costs, defended the members of his own tribe. “Within the tribe everything is shared in common; every morsel of food is divided among all present; and if the savage is alone in the woods, he does not begin his meal until he has loudly shouted thrice an invitation to any one who may hear his voice to share his meal.”... “If he infringes one of the smaller tribal rules, he is prosecuted by the mockeries of the women.” “When he enters his neighbors’ territory he must loudly announce his coming, and if he enters a house he must deposit his hatchet at the entrance. If one shows greediness when spoil is divided all the others give him their share to shame him.” Scolding and scorning are greatly condemned. Their children are not very quarrelsome and very rarely fight. The most they may say, is, “Your mother does not know sewing,” or “Your father is blind of one eye.”

The savage identified his interests with those of his tribe; he was no individualist, and under no circumstances would he have consented to child labor.

When we reach the barbarians, who are considered in the fourth chapter, we enter the historical period. At first sight, mutual aid seems to be non-existent at this period. Here there seems to be nothing but battle and bloodshed. But the reason is not far to seek; it is because, until recently historians regaled us exclusively with what has been aptly called, “drum and trumpet history.” “They hand down to posterity the most minute descriptions of every war, every battle and skirmish, every contest and act of violence, every kind of individual suffering; but they hardly give any trace of the countless acts of mutual support and devotion which every one of us knows from his own experience * * * The annalists of old never failed to chronicle the petty wars and calamities which harrassed their contemporaries but they paid no attention whatever to the life of the masses, although the masses chiefly used to toil peacefully while the few indulged in fighting.”

But Sir Henry Maine in his work on the “Origin of International Law,” has fully proved that “Man has never been so ferocious or so stupid as to submit to such an evil as war without some kind of an effort to prevent it.” And he has shown how exceedingly great is “the number of ancient institutions which bear the marks of a design to stand in the way of war, or to provide an alternative to it.”

A pregnant suggestion is offered as to the causes of that great migration of barbarians which resulted in the overthrow of the Roman empire. “It is desiccation, a quite recent desiccation continued still at a speed which we formerly were not prepared to admit. Against it man was powerless. When the inhabitants of North-West Mongolia and East Turkestan saw that water was abandoning them they had no course open to them but to move down the broad valleys leading to the lowlands, and to thrust westward the inhabitants of the plains.” And so the one great war recorded of the barbarians, was thrust upon them by absolute physical necessity.

The barbarians had no social problem, for that private property in the means of life which constitutes the foundation of modern individualism, and from which the degradation and poverty of modern civilization results, was unknown among them. They were communists. The interest of one was the care of all. Nothing was owned privately until it reached the very point of consumption and not always then, as food was largely eaten at communal meals. This social form still survives especially in Russia, and Kropotkin says: “The sight of a Russian commune mowing a meadow—the men rivalling each other in their advance with the scythe, while the women turn the grass over and throw it up into heaps—is one of the most inspiring sights; it shows what human work might be and ought to be. The hay, in such case, is divided among the separate households, and it is evident that no one has the right of taking hay from a neighbor’s stack without his permission; but the limitation of this last rule among the Caucasian Ossetes is most noteworthy. When the cuckoo cries and announces that spring is coming, and that the meadows will soon be clothed again with grass, every one in need has the right of taking from a neighbor’s stack the hay he wants for his cattle. The old communal rights are thus reasserted, as if to prove how contrary unbridled individualism is to human nature.”

When the early Christians “had all things in common,” they were not reaching forward to modern Socialism; they were harking back to this primitive communism which shed its joy and plenty on the sons and daughters of men for a thousand generations. These barbarian communists were thorough democrats, and their folkmotes, where everybody gathered and had their say, were the only semblance of government they possessed, and so thoroughly were its decisions respected that no officers were needed to enforce them. They were also our superiors not only in refusing to work their children, but also in scorning to beat them. They said: “The body of the child reddens from the stroke, but the face of him who strikes reddens from shame.”

The two chapters on “Mutual Aid in the Medieval City” treat the guild as the chief manifestation of the principle during this period. A picture is presented, in some detail of the struggle of the free cities against the increasing encroachments of the centralizing states. The medieval cities are finally defeated, the guilds destroyed, but the indestructible principle of mutual aid takes on new forms and accommodates itself to new conditions.

This brings us to the closing chapters on “Mutual Aid Among Ourselves.” The first of these two chapters is devoted almost entirely to the mutual aid habits and institutions which still survive in the present day villages of Russia, Switzerland, France and Germany. The last chapter takes up really modern instances of the principle, the first and most important are the Labor unions and their strikes, Co-operative societies, Life-boat associations, Charitable organizations.

The illustration of this principle which is cited first after the Labor union is the Socialist movement. Kropotkin presents his conception of the Socialist movement as a manifestation of mutual aid in existing society in the following eloquent passage:

“Every experienced politician knows that all great political movements were fought upon large and often distant issues, and that those of them were the strongest which provoked most disinterested enthusiasm. All great historical movements have had this character, and for our own generation Socialism stands in that case. ‘Paid agitators,’ is, no doubt, the favorite refrain of those who know nothing about it. The truth however, is that—to speak only of what I know personally—if I had kept a diary for the last twenty-four years, the reader of such a diary would have had the word ‘heroism’ constantly on his lips. But the men I would have spoken of were not heroes; they were average men, inspired by a grand idea. Every Socialist newspaper—and there are hundreds of them in Europe alone—has the same history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward, and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal ambition. I have seen families living without knowing what would be their food tomorrow, the husband boycotted all round in his little town for his part in the paper, and the wife supporting the family by sewing, and such a situation lasting for years, until the family would retire, without a word of reproach, simply saying: ‘Continue; we can hold out no more!’ I have seen men, dying from consumption, and knowing it, and yet knocking about in snow and fog to prepare meetings within a few weeks from death, and only then retiring to the hospital with the words: ‘Now friends I am done; the doctors say I have but a few weeks to live. Tell the comrades I shall be happy if they come to see me.’ I have seen facts that would be described as ‘idealization’ if I told them in this place; and the very names of these men, hardly known outside a narrow circle of friends, will soon be forgotten when the friends too have passed away. In fact, I don’t know myself which most to admire, the unbounded devotion of these few or the sum total of petty acts of devotion of the great number. Every quire of a penny paper sold, every meeting, every hundred votes which are won at a Socialist election, represent an amount of energy and sacrifices of which no outsider has the faintest idea. And what is now done by Socialists has been done by every popular and advanced party, political and religious, in the past. All past progress has been promoted by like men and by a like devotion.”