Chapter 5 The Later Marxism

Marx worked out his system of theory in the main during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. He came to the work from the standpoint given him by his early training in German thought, such as the most advanced and aggressive German thinking was through the middle period of the century, and he added to this German standpoint the further premises given him by an exceptionally close contact with and alert observation of the English situation. The result is that he brings to his theoretical work a twofold line of premises, or rather of preconceptions.

By early training he is a neo-Hegelian, and from this German source he derives his peculiar formulation of the Materialistic Theory of History. By later experience he acquired the point of view of that Liberal-Utilitarian school which dominated English thought through the greater part of his active life. To this experience he owes (probably) the somewhat pronounced individualistic preconceptions on which the doctrines of the Full Product of Labor and the Exploitation of Labor are based. These two not altogether compatible lines of doctrine found their way together into the tenets of scientific[2] socialism, and gives its characteristic Marxian features to the body of socialist economics.

The socialism that inspires hopes and fears to-day is of the school of Marx. No one is seriously apprehensive of any other so-called socialistic movement, and no one is seriously concerned to criticise or refute the doctrines set forth by any other school of "socialists." It may be that the socialists of the Marxist observance are not always or at all points in consonance with the best accepted body of Marxist doctrine. Those who make up the body of the movement may not always be familiar with the details-perhaps not even with the general features-of the Marxian scheme of economics; but with such consistency as may fairly be looked for in any popular movement, the socialists of all countries gravitate toward the theoretical position of the avowed Marxism. In proportion as the movement in any given community grows in mass, maturity, and conscious purpose, it unavoidably takes on a more consistently Marxian complexion. It is not the Marxism of Marx, but the materialism of Darwin, which the socialists of to-day have adopted. The Marxist socialists of Germany have the lead, and the socialists of other countries largely take their cue from the German leaders.

The authentic spokesmen of the current international socialism are avowed Marxists. Exceptions to that rule are very few. On the whole, the substantial truth of the Marxist doctrines is not seriously questioned within the lines of the socialists, though there may be some appreciable divergence as to what the true Marxist position is on one point and another. Much and eager controversy circles about questions of that class.

The keepers of the socialist doctrines are passably agreed as to the main position and the general principles. Indeed, so secure is this current agreement on the general principles that a very lively controversy on matters of detail may go on without risk of disturbing the general position. This general position is avowedly Marxism. But it is not precisely the position held by Karl Marx. It has been modernised, adapted, filled out, in response to exigencies of a later date than those which conditioned the original formulation of the theories. It is, of course, not admitted by the followers of Marx that any substantial change or departure from the original position has taken place. They are somewhat jealously orthodox, and are impatient of any suggested "improvements" on the Marxist position, as witness the heat engendered in the "revisionist" controversy of a few years back. But the jealous protests of the followers of Marx do not alter the fact that Marxism has undergone some substantial change since it left the hands of its creator. Now and then a more or less consistent disciple of Marx will avow a need of adapting the received doctrines to circumstances that have arisen later than the formulation of the doctrines; and amendments, qualifications, and extensions, with this need in view, have been offered from time to time. But more pervasive though unavowed changes have come in the teachings of Marxism by way of interpretation and an unintended shifting of the point of view. Virtually, the whole of the younger generation of socialist writers shows such a growth. A citation of personal instances would be quite futile.

It is the testimony of his friends as well as of his writings that the theoretical position of Marx, both as regards his standpoint and as regards his main tenets, fell into a definitive shape relatively early, and that his later work was substantially a working out of what was contained in the position taken at the outset of his career.[3] By the latter half of the forties, if not by the middle of the forties, Marx and Engels had found the outlook on human life which came to serve as the point of departure and the guide for their subsequent development of theory. Such is the view of the matter expressed by Engels during the later years of his life.[4] The position taken by the two great leaders, and held by them substantially intact, was a variant of neo-Hegelianism, as has been indicated in an earlier section of this paper.[5] But neo-Hegelianism was short-lived, particularly considered as a standpoint for scientific theory. The whole romantic school of thought, comprising neo-Hegelianism with the rest, began to go to pieces very soon after it had reached an approach to maturity, and its disintegration proceeded with exceptional speed, so that the close of the third quarter of the century saw the virtual end of it as a vital factor in the development of human knowledge. In the realm of theory, primarily of course in the material sciences, the new era belongs not to romantic philosophy, but to the evolutionists of the school of Darwin. Some few great figures, of course, stood over from the earlier days, but it turns out in the sequel that they have served mainly to mark the rate and degree in which the method of scientific knowledge has left them behind. Such were Virchow and Max Müller, and such, in economic science, were the great figures of the Historical School, and such, in a degree, were also Marx and Engels. The later generation of socialists, the spokesmen and adherents of Marxism during the closing quarter of the century, belong to the new generation, and see the phenomena of human life under the new light. The materialistic conception in their handling of it takes on the color of the time in which they lived, even while they retain the phraseology of the generation that went before them.[6]

The difference between the romantic school of thought, to which Marx belonged, and the school of the evolutionists into whose hands the system has fallen,-or perhaps, better, is falling,-is great and pervading, though it may not show a staring superficial difference at any one point,-at least not yet. The discrepancy between the two is likely to appear more palpable and more sweeping when the new method of knowledge has been applied with fuller realisation of its reach and its requirement in that domain of knowledge that once belonged to the neo-Hegelian Marxism. The supplanting of the one by the other has been taking place slowly, gently, in large measure unavowedly, by a sort of precession of the point of view from which men size up the facts and reduce them to intelligible order.

The neo-Hegelian, romantic, Marxian standpoint was wholly personal, whereas the evolutionistic-it may be called Darwinian-standpoint is wholly impersonal. The continuity sought in the facts of observation and imputed to them by the earlier school of theory was a continuity of a personal kind,-a continuity of reason and consequently of logic. The facts were construed to take such a course as could be established by an appeal to reason between intelligent and fair-minded men. They were supposed to fall into a sequence of logical consistency. The romantic (Marxian) sequence of theory is essentially an intellectual sequence, and it is therefore of a teleological character. The logical trend of it can be argued out. That is to say, it tends to a goal. On the other hand, in the Darwinian scheme of thought, the continuity sought in and imputed to the facts is a continuity of cause and effect. It is a scheme of blindly cumulative causation, in which there is no trend, no final term, no consummation. The sequence is controlled by nothing but the vis a tergo of brute causation, and is essentially mechanical. The neo-Hegelian (Marxian) scheme of development is drawn in the image of the struggling ambitious human spirit: that of Darwinian evolution is of the nature of a mechanical process.[7]

What difference, now, does it make if the materialistic conception is translated from the romantic concepts of Marx into the mechanical concepts of Darwinism? It distorts every feature of the system in some degree, and throws a shadow of doubt on every conclusion that once seemed secure.[8] The first principle of the Marxian scheme is the concept covered by the term "Materialistic," to the effect that the exigencies of the material means of life control the conduct of men in society throughout, and thereby indefeasibly guide the growth of institutions and shape every shifting trait of human culture. This control of the life of society by the material exigencies takes effect through men's taking thought of material (economic) advantages and disadvantages, and choosing that which will yield the fuller material measure of life. When the materialistic conception passes under the Darwinian norm, of cumulative causation, it happens, first, that this initial principle itself is reduced to the rank of a habit of thought induced in the speculator who depends on its light, by the circumstances of his life, in the way of hereditary bent, occupation, tradition, education, climate, food supply, and the like. But under the Darwinian norm the question of whether and how far material exigencies control human conduct and cultural growth becomes a question of the share which these material exigencies have in shaping men's habits of thought, i.e., their ideals and aspirations, their sense of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Whether and how far these traits of human culture and the institutional structure built out of them are the outgrowth of material (economic) exigencies becomes a question of what kind and degree of efficiency belongs to the economic exigencies among the complex of circumstances that conduce to the formation of habits. It is no longer a question of whether material exigencies rationally should guide men's conduct, but whether, as a matter of brute causation, they do induce such habits of thought in men as the economic interpretation presumes, and whether in the last analysis economic exigencies alone are, directly or indirectly, effective in shaping human habits of thought.

Tentatively and by way of approximation some such formulation as that outlined in the last paragraph is apparently what Bernstein and others of the "revisionists" have been seeking in certain of their speculations,[9] and, sitting austere and sufficient on a dry shoal up stream, Kautsky has uncomprehendingly been addressing them advice and admonition which they do not understand.[10] The more intelligent and enterprising among the idealist wing-where intellectual enterprise is not a particularly obvious trait-have been struggling to speak for the view that the forces of the environment may effectually reach men's spiritual life through other avenues than the calculus of the main chance, and so may give rise to habitual ideals and aspirations independent of, and possibly alien to, that calculus.[11]

So, again, as to the doctrine of the class struggle. In the Marxian scheme of dialectical evolution the development which is in this way held to be controlled by the material exigencies must, it is held, proceed by the method of the class struggle. This class struggle is held to be inevitable, and is held inevitably to lead at each revolutionary epoch to a more efficient adjustment of human industry to human uses, because, when a large proportion of the community find themselves ill served by the current economic arrangements, they take thought, band together, and enforce a readjustment more equitable and more advantageous to them. So long as differences of economic advantage prevail, there will be a divergence of interests between those more advantageously placed and those less advantageously placed. The members of society will take sides as this line of cleavage indicated by their several economic interests may decide. Class solidarity will arise on the basis of this class interest, and a struggle between the two classes so marked off against each other will set in,-a struggle which, in the logic of the situation, can end only when the previously less fortunate class gains the ascendancy,-and so must the class struggle proceed until it shall have put an end to that diversity of economic interest on which the class struggle rests. All this is logically consistent and convincing, but it proceeds on the ground of reasoned conduct, calculus of advantage, not on the ground of cause and effect. The class struggle so conceived should always and everywhere tend unremittingly toward the socialistic consummation, and should reach that consummation in the end, whatever obstructions or diversions might retard the sequence of development along the way. Such is the notion of it embodied in the system of Marx. Such, however, is not the showing of history. Not all nations or civilisations have advanced unremittingly toward a socialistic consummation, in which all divergence of economic interest has lapsed or would lapse. Those nations and civilisations which have decayed and failed, as nearly all known nations and civilisations have done, illustrate the point that, however reasonable and logical the advance by means of the class struggle may be, it is by no means inevitable. Under the Darwinian norm it must be held that men's reasoning is largely controlled by other than logical, intellectual forces; that the conclusion reached by public or class opinion is as much, or more, a matter of sentiment than of logical inference; and that the sentiment which animates men, singly or collectively, is as much, or more, an outcome of habit and native propensity as of calculated material interest. There is, for instance, no warrant in the Darwinian scheme of things for asserting a priori that the class interest of the working class will bring them to take a stand against the propertied class. It may as well be that their training in subservience to their employers will bring them again to realise the equity and excellence of the established system of subjection and unequal distribution of wealth. Again, no one, for instance, can tell to-day what will be the outcome of the present situation in Europe and America. It may be that the working classes will go forward along the line of the socialistic ideals and enforce a new deal, in which there shall be no economic class discrepancies, no international animosity, no dynastic politics. But then it may also, so far as can be foreseen, equally well happen that the working class, with the rest of the community in Germany, England, or America, will be led by the habit of loyalty and by their sportsmanlike propensities to lend themselves enthusiastically to the game of dynastic politics, which alone their sportsmanlike rulers consider worth while. It is quite impossible on Darwinian ground to foretell whether the "proletariat" will go on to establish the socialistic revolution or turn aside again, and sink their force in the broad sands of patriotism. It is a question of habit and native propensity and of the range of stimuli to which the proletariat are exposed and are to be exposed, and what may be the outcome is not a matter of logical consistency, but of response to stimulus.

So, then, since Darwinian concepts have begun to dominate the thinking of the Marxists, doubts have now and again come to assert themselves both as to the inevitableness of the irrepressible class struggle and to its sole efficacy. Anything like a violent class struggle, a seizure of power by force, is more and more consistently deprecated. For resort to force, it is felt, brings in its train coercive control with all its apparatus of prerogative, mastery, and subservience.[12]

So, again, the Marxian doctrine of progressive proletarian distress, the so-called Verelendungstheorie, which stands pat on the romantic ground of the original Marxism, has fallen into abeyance, if not into disrepute, since the Darwinian conceptions have come to prevail. As a matter of reasoned procedure, on the ground of enlightened material interest alone, it should be a tenable position that increasing misery, increasing in degree and in volume, should be the outcome of the present system of ownership, and should at the same time result in a well-advised and well-consolidated working-class movement that would replace the present system by a scheme more advantageous to the majority. But so soon as the question is approached on the Darwinian ground of cause and effect, and is analysed in terms of habit and of response to stimulus, the doctrine that progressive misery must effect a socialistic revolution becomes dubious, and very shortly untenable. Experience, the experience of history, teaches that abject misery carries with it deterioration and abject subjection. The theory of progressive distress fits convincingly into the scheme of the Hegelian three-phase dialectic. It stands for the antithesis that is to be merged in the ulterior synthesis; but it has no particular force on the ground of an argument from cause to effect.[13]

It fares not much better with the Marxian theory of value and its corollaries and dependent doctrines when Darwinian concepts are brought in to replace the romantic elements out of which it is built up. Its foundation is the metaphysical equality between the volume of human life force productively spent in the making of goods and the magnitude of these goods considered as human products. The question of such an equality has no meaning in terms of cause and effect, nor does it bear in any intelligible way upon the Darwinian question of the fitness of any given system of production or distribution. In any evolutionary system of economics the central question touching the efficiency and fitness of any given system of production is necessarily the question as to the excess of serviceability in the product over the cost of production.[14] It is in such an excess of serviceability over cost that the chance of survival lies for any system of production, in so far as the question of survival is a question of production, and this matter comes into the speculation of Marx only indirectly or incidentally, and leads to nothing in his argument.

And, as bearing on the Marxian doctrines of exploitation, there is on Darwinian ground no place for a natural right to the full product of labor. What can be argued in that connection on the ground of cause and effect simply is the question as to what scheme of distribution will help or hinder the survival of a given people or a given civilisation.[15]

But these questions of abstruse theory need not be pursued, since they count, after all, but relatively little among the working tenets of the movement. Little need be done by the Marxists to work out or to adapt the Marxian system of value theory, since it has but slight bearing on the main question,-the question of the trend towards socialism and of its chances of success. It is conceivable that a competent theory of value dealing with the excess of serviceability over cost, on the one hand, and with the discrepancy between price and serviceability, on the other hand, would have a substantial bearing upon the advisability of the present as against the socialistic régime, and would go far to clear up the notions of both socialists and conservatives as to the nature of the points in dispute between them. But the socialists have not moved in the direction of this problem, and they have the excuse that their critics have suggested neither a question nor a solution to a question along any such line. None of the value theorists have so far offered anything that could be called good, bad, or indifferent in this connection, and the socialists are as innocent as the rest. Economics, indeed, has not at this point yet begun to take on a modern tone, unless the current neglect of value theory by the socialists be taken as a negative symptom of advance, indicating that they at least recognise the futility of the received problems and solutions, even if they are not ready to make a positive move.

The shifting of the current point of view, from romantic philosophy to matter-of-fact, has affected the attitude of the Marxists towards the several articles of theory more than it has induced an avowed alteration or a substitution of new elements of theory for the old. It is always possible to make one's peace with a new standpoint by new interpretations and a shrewd use of figures of speech, so far as the theoretical formulation is concerned, and something of this kind has taken place in the case of Marxism; but when, as in the case of Marxism, the formulations of theory are drafted into practical use, substantial changes of appreciable magnitude are apt to show themselves in a changed attitude towards practical questions. The Marxists have had to face certain practical problems, especially problems of party tactics, and the substantial changes wrought in their theoretical outlook have come into evidence here. The real gravity of the changes that have overtaken Marxism would scarcely be seen by a scrutiny of the formal professions of the Marxists alone. But the exigencies of a changing situation have provoked readjustments of the received doctrinal position, and the shifting of the philosophical standpoint and postulates has come into evidence as marking the limits of change in their professions which the socialistic doctrinaires could allow themselves.

The changes comprised in the cultural movement that lies between the middle and the close of the nineteenth century are great and grave, at least as seen from so near a standpoint as the present day, and it is safe to say that, in whatever historical perspective they may be seen, they must, in some respects, always assert themselves as unprecedented. So far as concerns the present topic, there are three main lines of change that have converged upon the Marxist system of doctrines, and have led to its latter-day modification and growth. One of these-the change in the postulates of knowledge, in the metaphysical foundations of theory-has been spoken of already, and its bearing on the growth of socialist theory has been indicated in certain of its general features. But, among the circumstances that have conditioned the growth of the system, the most obvious is the fact that since Marx's time his doctrines have come to serve as the platform of a political movement, and so have been exposed to the stress of practical party politics dealing with a new and changing situation. At the same time the industrial (economic) situation to which the doctrines are held to apply-of which they are the theoretical formulation-has also in important respects changed its character from what it was when Marx first formulated his views. These several lines of cultural change affecting the growth of Marxism cannot be held apart in so distinct a manner as to appraise the work of each separately. They belong inextricably together, as do the effects wrought by them in the system.

In practical politics the Social Democrats have had to make up their account with the labor movement, the agricultural population, and the imperialistic policy. On each of these heads the preconceived programme of Marxism has come in conflict with the run of events, and on each head it has been necessary to deal shrewdly and adapt the principles to the facts of the time. The adaptation to circumstances has not been altogether of the nature of compromise, although here and there the spirit of compromise and conciliation is visible enough. A conciliatory party policy may, of course, impose an adaptation of form and color upon the party principles, without thereby seriously affecting the substance of the principles themselves; but the need of a conciliatory policy may, even more, provoke a substantial change of attitude toward practical questions in a case where a shifting of the theoretical point of view makes room for a substantial change.

Apart from all merely tactical expedients, the experience of the past thirty years has led the German Marxists to see the facts of the labor situation in a new light, and has induced them to attach an altered meaning to the accepted formulations of doctrine. The facts have not freely lent themselves to the scheme of the Marxist system, but the scheme has taken on such a new meaning as would be consistent with the facts. The untroubled Marxian economics, such as it finds expression in the Kapital and earlier documents of the theory, has no place and no use for a trade-union movement, or, indeed, for any similar non-political organisation among the working class, and the attitude of the Social-Democratic leaders of opinion in the early days of the party's history was accordingly hostile to any such movement,[16]-as much so, indeed, as the loyal adherents of the classical political economy. That was before the modern industrial era had got under way in Germany, and therefore before the German socialistic doctrinaires had learned by experience what the development of industry was to bring with it. It was also before the modern scientific postulates had begun to disintegrate the neo-Hegelian preconceptions as to the logical sequence in the development of institutions.

In Germany, as elsewhere, the growth of the capitalistic system presently brought on trade-unionism; that is to say, it brought on an organised attempt on the part of the workmen to deal with the questions of capitalistic production and distribution by business methods, to settle the problems of working-class employment and livelihood by a system of non-political, businesslike bargains. But the great point of all socialist aspiration and endeavor is the abolition of all business and all bargaining, and, accordingly, the Social Democrats were heartily out of sympathy with the unions and their endeavors to make business terms with the capitalist system, and make life tolerable for the workmen under that system. But the union movement grew to be so serious a feature of the situation that the socialists found themselves obliged to deal with unions, since they could not deal with the workmen over the heads of the unions. The Social Democrats, and therefore the Marxian theorists, had to deal with a situation which included the union movement, and this movement was bent on improving the workman's conditions of life from day to day. Therefore it was necessary to figure out how the union movement could and must further the socialistic advance; to work into the body of doctrines a theory of how the unions belong in the course of economic development that leads up to socialism, and to reconcile the unionist efforts at improvement with the ends of Social Democracy. Not only were the unions seeking improvement by unsocialistic methods, but the level of comfort among the working classes was in some respects advancing, apparently as a result of these union efforts. Both the huckstering animus of the workmen in their unionist policy and the possible amelioration of working-class conditions had to be incorporated into the socialistic platform and into the Marxist theory of economic development. The Marxist theory of progressive misery and degradation has, accordingly, fallen into the background, and a large proportion of the Marxists have already come to see the whole question of working-class deterioration in some such apologetic light as is shed upon it by Goldscheid in his Verelendungs-oder Meliorationstheorie. It is now not an unusual thing for orthodox Marxists to hold that the improvement of the conditions of the working classes is a necessary condition to the advance of the socialistic cause, and that the unionist efforts at amelioration must be furthered as a means toward the socialistic consummation. It is recognised that the socialistic revolution must be carried through not by an an?mic working class under the pressure of abject privation, but by a body of full-blooded workingmen gradually gaining strength from improved conditions of life. Instead of the revolution being worked out by the leverage of desperate misery, every improvement in working-class conditions is to be counted as a gain for the revolutionary forces. This is a good Darwinism, but it does not belong in the neo-Hegelian Marxism.

Perhaps the sorest experience of the Marxist doctrinaires has been with the agricultural population. Notoriously, the people of the open country have not taken kindly to socialism. No propaganda and no changes in the economic situation have won the sympathy of the peasant farmers for the socialistic revolution. Notoriously, too, the large-scale industry has not invaded the agricultural field, or expropriated the small proprietors, in anything like the degree expected by the Marxist doctrinaires of a generation ago. It is contained in the theoretical system of Marx that, as modern industrial and business methods gain ground, the small proprietor farmers will be reduced to the ranks of the wage-proletariat, and that, as this process of conversion goes on, in the course of time the class interest of the agricultural population will throw them into the movement side by side with the other wage-workmen.[17] But at this point the facts have hitherto not come out in consonance with the Marxist theory. And the efforts of the Social Democrats to convert the peasant population to socialism have been practically unrewarded. So it has come about that the political leaders and the keepers of the doctrines have, tardily and reluctantly, come to see the facts of the agrarian situation in a new light, and to give a new phrasing to the articles of Marxian theory that touch on the fortunes of the peasant farmer. It is no longer held that either the small properties of the peasant farmer must be absorbed into larger properties, and then taken over by the State, or that they must be taken over by the State directly, when the socialistic revolution is established. On the contrary, it is now coming to be held that the peasant proprietors will not be disturbed in their holdings by the great change. The great change is to deal with capitalistic enterprise, and the peasant farming is not properly "capitalistic." It is a system of production in which the producer normally gets only the product of his own labor. Indeed, under the current régime of markets and credit relations, the small agricultural producer, it is held, gets less than the product of his own labor, since the capitalistic business enterprises with which he has to deal are always able to take advantage of him. So it has become part of the overt doctrine of socialists that as regards the peasant farmer it will be the consistent aim of the movement to secure him in the untroubled enjoyment of his holding, and free him from the vexatious exactions of his creditors and the ruinous business traffic in which he is now perforce involved. According to the revised code, made possible by recourse to Darwinian concepts of evolution instead of the Hegelian three-phase dialectic, therefore, and contrary to the earlier prognostications of Marx, it is no longer held that agricultural industry must go through the capitalistic mill; and it is hoped that under the revised code it may be possible to enlist the interest and sympathy of this obstinately conservative element for the revolutionary cause. The change in the official socialist position on the agricultural question has come about only lately, and is scarcely yet complete, and there is no knowing what degree of success it may meet with either as a matter of party tactics or as a feature of the socialistic theory of economic development. All discussions of party policy, and of theory so far as bears on policy, take up the question; and nearly all authoritative spokesmen of socialism have modified their views in the course of time on this point.

The socialism of Karl Marx is characteristically inclined to peaceable measures and disinclined to a coercive government and belligerent politics. It is, or at least it was, strongly averse to international jealousy and patriotic animosity, and has taken a stand against armaments, wars, and dynastic aggrandisement. At the time of the French-Prussian war the official organisation of Marxism, the International, went so far in its advocacy of peace as to urge the soldiery on both sides to refuse to fight. After the campaign had warmed the blood of the two nations, this advocacy of peace made the International odious in the eyes of both French and Germans. War begets patriotism, and the socialists fell under the reproach of not being sufficiently patriotic. After the conclusion of the war the Socialistic Workingmen's Party of Germany sinned against the German patriotic sentiment in a similar way and with similarly grave results. Since the foundation of the empire and of the Social-Democratic party, the socialists and their doctrines have passed through a further experience of a similar kind, but on a larger scale and more protracted. The government has gradually strengthened its autocratic position at home, increased its warlike equipment, and enlarged its pretensions in international politics, until what would have seemed absurdly impossible a generation ago is now submitted to by the German people, not only with a good grace, but with enthusiasm. During all this time that part of the population that has adhered to the socialist ideals has also grown gradually more patriotic and more loyal, and the leaders and keepers of socialist opinion have shared in the growth of chauvinism with the rest of the German people. But at no time have the socialists been able to keep abreast of the general upward movement in this respect. They have not attained the pitch of reckless loyalty that animates the conservative German patriots, although it is probably safe to say that the Social Democrats of to-day are as good and headlong patriots as the conservative Germans were a generation ago. During all this period of the new era of German political life the socialists have been freely accused of disloyalty to the national ambition, of placing their international aspirations above the ambition of imperial aggrandisement.

The socialist spokesmen have been continually on the defensive. They set out with a round opposition to any considerable military establishment, and have more and more apologetically continued to oppose any "undue" extension of the warlike establishments and the warlike policy. But with the passage of time and the habituation to warlike politics and military discipline, the infection of jingoism has gradually permeated the body of Social Democrats, until they have now reached such a pitch of enthusiastic loyalty as they would not patiently hear a truthful characterisation of. The spokesmen now are concerned to show that, while they still stand for international socialism, consonant with their ancient position, they stand for national aggrandisement first and for international comity second. The relative importance of the national and the international ideals in German socialist professions has been reversed since the seventies.[18] The leaders are busy with interpretation of their earlier formulations. They have come to excite themselves over nebulous distinctions between patriotism and jingoism. The Social Democrats have come to be German patriots first and socialists second, which comes to saying that they are a political party working for the maintenance of the existing order, with modifications. They are no longer a party of revolution, but of reform, though the measure of reform which they demand greatly exceeds the Hohenzollern limit of tolerance. They are now as much, if not more, in touch with the ideas of English liberalism than with those of revolutionary Marxism.

The material and tactical exigencies that have grown out of changes in the industrial system and in the political situation, then, have brought on far-reaching changes of adaptation in the position of the socialists. The change may not be extremely large at any one point, so far as regards the specific articles of the programme, but, taken as a whole, the resulting modification of the socialistic position is a very substantial one. The process of change is, of course, not yet completed,-whether or not it ever will be,-but it is already evident that what is taking place is not so much a change in amount or degree of conviction on certain given points as a change in kind,-a change in the current socialistic habit of mind.

The factional discrepancies of theory that have occupied the socialists of Germany for some years past are evidence that the conclusion, even a provisional conclusion, of the shifting of their standpoint has not been reached. It is even hazardous to guess which way the drift is setting. It is only evident that the past standpoint, the standpoint of neo-Hegelian Marxism, cannot be regained,-it is a forgotten standpoint. For the immediate present the drift of sentiment, at least among the educated, seems to set toward a position resembling that of the National Socials and the Rev. Mr. Naumann; that is to say, imperialistic liberalism. Should the conditions, political, social, and economic, which to-day are chiefly effective in shaping the habits of thought among the German people, continue substantially unchanged and continue to be the chief determining causes, it need surprise no one to find German socialism gradually changing into a somewhat characterless imperialistic democracy. The imperial policy seems in a fair way to get the better of revolutionary socialism, not by repressing it, but by force of the discipline in imperialistic ways of thinking to which it subjects all classes of the population. How far a similar process of sterilisation is under way, or is likely to overtake the socialist movement in other countries, is an obscure question to which the German object-lesson affords no certain answer.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Reprinted by permission from The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. XXI, Feb., 1907.

[2] "Scientific" is here used in the half-technical sense which by usage it often has in this connection, designating the theories of Marx and his followers.

[3] There is, indeed, a remarkable consistency, amounting substantially to an invariability of position, in Marx's writing, from the Communist Manifesto to the last volume of the Capital. The only portion of the great Manifesto which became antiquated, in the apprehension of its creators, is the polemics addressed to the "Philosophical" socialists of the forties and the illustrative material taken from contemporary politics. The main position and the more important articles of theory-the materialistic conception, the doctrine of class struggle, the theory of value and surplus value, of increasing distress, of the reserve army, of the capitalistic collapse-are to be found in the Critique of Political Economy (1859), and much of them in the Misery of Philosophy (1847), together with the masterful method of analysis and construction which he employed throughout his theoretical work.

[4] Cf. Engels, Feuerbach (English translation, Chicago, 1903), especially Part IV, and various papers published in the Neue Zeit; also the preface to the Communist Manifesto written in 1888; also the preface to volume ii. of Capital, where Engels argues the question of Marx's priority in connection with the leading theoretical principles of his system.

[5] Cf. Feuerbach, as above; The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science, especially sections ii and iii.

[6] Such a socialist as Anton Menger, e.g., comes into the neo-Marxian school from without, from the field of modern scientific inquiry, and shows, at least virtually, no Hegelian color, whether in the scope of his inquiry, in his method, or in the theoretical work which he puts forth. It should be added that his Neue Staatslehre, and Neue Sittenlehre are the first socialistic constructive work of substantial value as a contribution to knowledge, outside of economic theory proper, that has appeared since Lassalle. The efforts of Engels (Ursprung der Familie) and Bebel (Die Frau) would scarcely be taken seriously as scientific monographs even by hot-headed socialists if it were not for the lack of anything better. Menger's work is not Marxism, whereas Engels's and Bebel's work of this class is practically without value or originality. The unfitness of the Marxian postulates and methods for the purposes of modern science shows itself in the sweeping barrenness of socialistic literature all along that line of inquiry into the evolution of institutions for the promotion of which the materialistic dialectic was invented.

[7] This contrast holds between the original Marxism of Marx and the scope and method of modern science; but it does not, therefore, hold between the latter-day Marxists-who are largely imbued with post-Darwinian concepts-and the non-Marxian scientists. Even Engels, in his latter-day formulation of Marxism, is strongly affected with the notions of post-Darwinian science, and reads Darwinism into Hegel and Marx with a good deal of na?veté. (See his Feuerbach, especially pp. 93-98 of the English translation.) So, also, the serious but scarcely quite consistent qualifications of the materialistic conception offered by Engels in the letters printed in the Sozialistische Akademiker, 1895.

[8] The fact that the theoretical structures of Marx collapse when their elements are converted into the terms of modern science should of itself be sufficient proof that those structures were not built by their maker out of such elements as modern science habitually makes use of. Marx was neither ignorant, imbecile, nor disingenuous, and his work must be construed from such a point of view and in terms of such elements as will enable his results to stand substantially sound and convincing.

[9] Cf. Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus, especially the first two (critical) chapters. Bernstein's reverent attitude toward Marx and Engels, as well as his somewhat old-fashioned conception of the scope and method of science, gives his discussion an air of much greater consonance with the orthodox Marxism than it really has. In his later expressions this consonance and conciliatory animus show up more strongly rather than otherwise. (See Socialism and Science, including the special preface written for the French edition.) That which was to Marx and Engels the point of departure and the guiding norm-the Hegelian dialectic-is to Bernstein a mistake from which scientific socialism must free itself. He says, e.g. (Voraussetzungen, end of ch. iv.), "The great things achieved by Marx and Engels they have achieved not by the help of the Hegelian dialectic, but in spite of it."

The number of the "revisionists" is very considerable, and they are plainly gaining ground as against the Marxists of the older line of orthodoxy. They are by no means agreed among themselves as to details, but they belong together by virtue of their endeavor to so construe (and amend) the Marxian system as to bring it into consonance with the current scientific point of view. One should rather say points of view, since the revisionists' endeavors are not all directed to bringing the received views in under a single point of view. There are two main directions of movement among the revisionists: (a) those who, like Bernstein, Conrad Schmidt, Tugan-Baranowski, Labriola, Ferri, aim to bring Marxism abreast of the standpoint of modern science, essentially Darwinists; and (b) those who aim to return to some footing on the level of the romantic philosophy. The best type and the strongest of the latter class are the neo-Kantians, embodying that spirit of revulsion to romantic norms of theory that makes up the philosophical side of the reactionary movement fostered by the discipline of German imperialism. (See K. Vorl?nder, Die neukantische Bewegung im Sozialismus.)

Except that he is not officially inscribed in the socialist calendar, Sombart might be cited as a particularly effective revisionist, so far as concerns the point of modernising Marxism and putting the modernised materialistic conception to work.

[10] Cf. the files of the Neue Zeit, particularly during the controversy with Bernstein, and Bernstein und das Sozialdemokratische Programm.

[11] The "idealist" socialists are even more in evidence outside of Germany. They may fairly be said to be in the ascendant in France, and they are a very strong and free-spoken contingent of the socialist movement in America. They do not commonly speak the language either of science or of philosophy, but, so far as their contentions may be construed from the standpoint of modern science, their drift seems to be something of the kind indicated above. At the same time the spokesmen of this scattering and shifting group stand for a variety of opinions and aspirations that cannot be classified under Marxism, Darwinism, or any other system of theory. At the margin they shade off into theology and the creeds.

[12] Throughout the revisionist literature in Germany there is a visible softening of the traits of the doctrine of the class struggle, and the like shows itself in the programmes of the party. Outside of Germany the doctrinaire insistence on this tenet is weakening even more decidedly. The opportunist politicians, with strong aspirations, but with relatively few and ill-defined theoretical preconceptions, are gaining ground.

[13] Cf. Bernstein, Die heutige Sozialdemokratie in Theorie und Praxis, an answer to Brunhuber, Die heutige Sozialdemokratie, which should be consulted in the same connection: Goldscheid, Verelendungs- oder Meliorationstheorie; also Sombart, Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung, 5th edition, pp. 86-89.

[14] Accordingly, in later Marxian handling of the questions of exploitation and accumulation, the attention is centered on the "surplus product" rather than on the "surplus value." It is also currently held that the doctrines and practical consequences which Marx derived from the theory of surplus value would remain substantially well founded, even if the theory of surplus value was given up. These secondary doctrines could be saved-at the cost of orthodoxy-by putting a theory of surplus product in the place of the theory of surplus value, as in effect is done by Bernstein (Socialdemokratie in Theorie und Praxis, sec. 5. Also various of the essays included in Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Sozialismus).

[15] The "right to the full product of labor" and the Marxian theory of exploitation associated with that principle has fallen into the background, except as a campaign cry designed to stir the emotions of the working class. Even as a campaign cry it has not the prominence, nor apparently the efficacy, which it once had. The tenet is better preserved, in fact, among the "idealists", who draw for their antecedents on the French Revolution and the English philosophy of natural rights, than among the latter-day Marxists.

[16] It is, of course, well known that even in the transactions and pronounciamentos of the International a good word is repeatedly said for the trade-unions, and both the Gotha and the Erfurt programmes speak in favor of labor organisations, and put forth demands designed to further the trade-union endeavors. But it is equally well known that these expressions were in good part perfunctory, and that the substantial motive behind them was the politic wish of the socialists to conciliate the unionists, and make use of the unions for the propaganda. The early expressions of sympathy with the unionist cause were made for an ulterior purpose. Later on, in the nineties, there comes a change in the attitude of the socialist leaders toward the unions.

[17] Cf. Kapital, vol. i, ch. xiii, sect 10.

[18] Cf. Kautsky, Erfurter Programm, ch. v, sect. 13; Bernstein, Voraussetzungen, ch. iv, sect. e.

THE MUTATION THEORY AND THE BLOND

RACE[1]

The theories of racial development by mutation, associated with the name of Mendel, when they come to be freely applied to man, must greatly change the complexion of many currently debated questions of race-as to origins, migrations, dispersion, chronology, cultural derivation and sequence. In some respects the new theories should simplify current problems of ethnology, and they may even dispense with many analyses and speculations that have seemed of great moment in the past.

The main postulate of the Mendelian theories-the stability of type-has already done much service in anthropological science, being commonly assumed as a matter of course in arguments dealing with the derivation and dispersion of races and peoples. It is only by force of this assumption that ethnologists are able to identify any given racial stock over intervals of space or time, and so to trace the racial affinities of any given people. Question has been entertained from time to time as to the racial fixity of given physical traits-as, e.g., stature, the cephalic indices, or hair and eye color-but on the whole these and other standard marks of race are still accepted as secure grounds of identification.[2] Indeed, without some such assumption any ethnological inquiry must degenerate into mere wool-gathering.

But along with this, essentially Mendelian, postulate of the stability of types, ethnologists have at the same time habitually accepted the incompatible Darwinian doctrine that racial types vary incontinently after a progressive fashion, arising through insensible cumulative variations and passing into new specific forms by the same method, under the Darwinian rule of the selective survival of slight and unstable (non-typical) variations. The effect of these two incongruous premises has been to leave discussions of race derivation somewhat at loose ends wherever the two postulates cross one another.

If it be assumed, or granted, that racial types are stable, it follows as a matter of course that these types or races have not arisen by the cumulative acquirement of unstable non-specific traits, but must have originated by mutation or by some analogous method, and this view must then find its way into anthropology as into the other biological sciences. When such a step is taken an extensive revision of questions of race will be unavoidable, and an appreciable divergence may then be looked for among speculations on the mutational affinities of the several races and cultures.

Among matters so awaiting revision are certain broad questions of derivation and ethnography touching the blond race or races of Europe. Much attention, and indeed much sentiment, has been spent on this general topic. The questions involved are many and diverse, and many of them have been subject of animated controversy, without definitive conclusions.

The mutation theories, of course, have immediately to do with the facts of biological derivation alone, but when the facts are reviewed in the light of these theories it will be found that questions of cultural origins and relationship are necessarily drawn into the inquiry. In particular, an inquiry into the derivation and distribution of the blond stock will so intimately involve questions of the Aryan speech and institutions as to be left incomplete without a somewhat detailed attention to this latter range of questions. So much so that an inquiry into the advent and early fortunes of the blond stock in Europe will fall, by convenience, under two distinct but closely related captions: The Origin of the Blond Type, and The Derivation of the Aryan Culture.

(a) It is held, on the one hand, that there is but a single blond race, type or stock (Keane, Lapouge, Sergi), and on the other hand that there are several such races or types, more or less distinct but presumably related (Deniker, Beddoe, and other, especially British, ethnologists). (b) There is no good body of evidence going to establish a great antiquity for the blond stock, and there are indications, though perhaps inconclusive, that the blond strain, including all the blond types, is of relatively late date-unless a Berber (Kabyle) blond race is to be accepted in a more unequivocal manner than hitherto. (c) Neither is there anything like convincing evidence that this blond strain has come from outside of Europe-except, again, for the equivocal Kabyle-or that any blond race has ever been widely or permanently distributed outside of its present European habitat, (d) The blond race is not found unmixed. In point of pedigree all individuals showing the blond traits are hybrids, and the greater number of them show their mixed blood in their physical traits. (e) There is no community, large or small, made up exclusively of blonds, or nearly so, and there is no good evidence available that such an all-blond or virtually all-blond community ever has existed, either in historic or prehistoric times. The race appears never to have lived in isolation. (f) It occurs in several (perhaps hybrid) variants-unless these variants are to be taken (with Deniker) as several distinct races, (g) Counting the dolicho-blond as the original type of the race, its nearest apparent relative among the races of mankind is the Mediterranean (of Sergi), at least in point of physical traits. At the same time the blond race, or at least the dolicho-blond type, has never since neolithic times, so far as known, extensively and permanently lived in contact with the Mediterranean. (h) The various (national) ramifications of the blond stock-or rather the various racial mixtures into which an appreciable blond element enters-are all, and to all appearance have always been, of Aryan ("Indo-European," "Indo-Germanic") speech-with the equivocal exception of the Kabyle. (i) Yet far the greater number and variety (national and linguistic) of men who use the Aryan speech are not prevailingly blond, or even appreciably mixed with blond. (j) The blond race, or the peoples with an appreciable blond admixture, and particularly the communities in which the dolicho-blond element prevails, show little or none of the peculiarly Aryan institutions-understanding by that phrase not the known institutions of the ancient Germanic peoples, but that range of institutions said by competent philologists to be reflected in the primitive Aryan speech. (k) These considerations raise the presumption that the blond race was not originally of Aryan speech or of Aryan culture, and they also suggest (l) that the Mediterranean, the nearest apparent relative of the dolicho-blond, was likewise not originally Aryan.

Accepting the mutation theory, then, for the purpose in hand, and leaving any questions of Aryanism on one side for the present, a canvass of the situation so outlined may be offered in such bold, crude and summary terms as should be admissible in an analysis which aims to be tentative and provisional only. It may be conceived that the dolichocephalic blond originated as a mutant of the Mediterranean type (which it greatly resembles in its scheme of biometric measurements[3]) probably some time after that race had effected a permanent lodgment on the continent of Europe. The Mediterranean stock may be held (Sergi and Keane) to have come into Europe from Africa,[4] whatever its remoter derivation may have been. It is, of course, not impossible that the mutation which gave rise to the dolicho-blond may have occurred before the parent stock left Africa, or rather before it was shut out of Africa by the submergence of the land connection across Sicily, but the probabilities seem to be against such a view. The conditions would appear to have been less favorable to a mutation of this kind in the African habitat of the parent stock than in Europe, and less favorable in Europe during earlier quaternary time than toward the close of the glacial period.

The causes which give rise to a variation of type have always been sufficiently obscure, whether the origin of species be conceived after the Darwinian or the Mendelian fashion, and the mutation theories have hitherto afforded little light on that question. Yet the Mendelian postulate that the type is stable except for such a mutation as shall establish a new type raises at least the presumption that such a mutation will take place only under exceptional circumstances, that is to say, under circumstances so substantially different from what the type is best adapted to as to subject it to some degree of physiological strain. It is to be presumed that no mutation will supervene so long as the conditions of life do not vary materially from what they have been during the previous uneventful life-history of the type. Such is the presumption apparently involved in the theory and such is also the suggestion afforded by the few experimental cases of observed mutation, as, e.g., those studied by De Vries.

A considerable climatic change, such as would seriously alter the conditions of life either directly or through its effect on the food supply, might be conceived to bring on a mutating state in the race; or the like effect might be induced by a profound cultural change, particularly any such change in the industrial arts as would radically affect the material conditions of life. These considerations, mainly speculative it is true, suggest that the dolicho-blond mutant could presumably have emerged only at a time when the parent stock was exposed to notably novel conditions of life, such as would be presumed (with De Vries) to tend to throw the stock into a specifically unstable (mutating) state; at the same time these novel conditions of life must also have been specifically of such a nature as to favor the survival and multiplication of this particular human type. The climatic tolerance of the dolicho-blond, e.g., is known to be exceptionally narrow. Now, it is not known, indeed there is no reason to presume, that the Mediterranean race was exposed to such variations of climate or of culture before it entered Europe as might be expected to induce a mutating state in the stock, and at the same time a mutant gifted with the peculiar climatic intolerance of the dolicho-blond would scarcely have survived under the conditions offered by northern Africa in late quaternary time. But the required conditions are had later on in Europe, after the Mediterranean was securely at home in that continent.

The whole episode may be conceived to have run off somewhat in the following manner. The Mediterranean race is held to have entered Europe in force during quaternary time, presumably after the quaternary period was well advanced, most likely during the last genial, interglacial period. This race then brought the neolithic culture, but without the domestic animals (or plants?) that are a characteristic feature of the later neolithic age, and it encountered at least the remnants of an older, palaeolithic population. This older European population was made up of several racial stocks, some of which still persist as obscure and minor elements in the later peoples of Europe. The (geologic) date to be assigned this intrusion of the Mediterranean race into Europe is of course not, and can perhaps never be, determined with any degree of nicety or confidence. But there is a probability that it coincides with the recession of the ice-sheet, following one or another of the severer periods of glaciations, that occurred before the submergence of the land connection between Europe and Africa, over Gibraltar, Sicily, and perhaps Crete. How late in quaternary time the final submergence of the Mediterranean basin occurred is still a matter of surmise; the intrusion of the Mediterranean race into Europe appears, on archaeological evidence, to have occurred in late quaternary time, and in the end this archaeological evidence may help to decide the geologic date of the severance of Europe from Africa.

The Mediterranean race seems to have spread easily over the habitable surface of Europe and shortly to have grown numerous and taken rank as the chief racial element in the neolithic population; which argues that no very considerable older population occupied the European continent at the time of the Mediterranean invasion; which in turn implies that the fairly large (Magdalenian) population of the close of the palaeolithic age was in great part destroyed or expelled by the climatic changes that coincided with or immediately preceded the advent of the Mediterranean race. The known characteristics of the Magdalenian culture indicate a technology, a situation and perhaps a race, somewhat closely paralleled by the Eskimo;[5] which argues that the climatic situation before which this Magdalenian race and culture gave way would have been that of a genial interglacial period rather than a period of glaciation.

During this genial (perhaps sub-tropical) inter-glacial period immediately preceding the last great glaciation the Magdalenian stock would presumably find Europe climatically untenable, judging by analogy with the Eskimo; whereas the Mediterranean stock should have found it an eminently favorable habitat, for this race has always succeeded best in a warm-temperate climate. Both the extensive northward range of the early neolithic (Mediterranean) settlements and the total disappearance of the Magdalenian culture from the European continent point to a climatic situation in Europe more favorable to the former race and more unwholesome for the latter than the conditions known to have prevailed at any time since the last interglacial period, especially in the higher latitudes. The indications would seem to be that the whole of Europe, even the Baltic and Arctic seaboards, became climatically so fully impossible for the Magdalenian race during this interglacial period as to result in its extinction or definitive expulsion; for when, in recent times, climatically suitable conditions return, on the Arctic seaboard, the culture which takes the place that should have been occupied by the Magdalenian is the Finnic (Lapp)-a culture unrelated to the Magdalenian either in race or technology, although of much the same cultural level and dealing with a material environment of much the same character. And this genial interval that was fatal to the Magdalenian was, by just so much, favorable to the Mediterranean race.

But glacial conditions presently returned, though with less severity than the next preceding glacial period; and roughly coincident with the close of the genial interval in Europe the land connection with Africa was cut off by submergence, shutting off retreat to the south. How far communication with Asia may have been interrupted during the subsequent cold period, by the local glaciation of the Caucasus, Elburz and Armenian highlands, is for the present apparently not to be determined, although it is to be presumed that the outlet to the east would at least be seriously obstructed during the glaciation. There would then be left available for occupation, mainly by the Mediterranean race, central and southern Europe together with the islands, notably Sicily and Crete, left over as remnants of the earlier continuous land between Europe and Africa. The southern extensions of the mainland, and more particularly the islands, would still afford a favorable place for the Mediterranean race and its cultural growth. So that the early phases of the great Cretan (Aegean) civilisation are presumably to be assigned to this period that is covered by the last advance of the ice in northern Europe. But the greater portion of the land area so left accessible to the Mediterranean race, in central or even in southern Europe, would have been under glacial or sub-glacial climatic conditions. For this race, essentially native to a warm climate, this situation on the European mainland would be sufficiently novel and trying, particularly throughout that ice-fringed range of country where they would be exposed to such cold and damp as this race has never easily tolerated.

The situation so outlined would afford such a condition of physiological strain as might be conceived to throw the stock into a specifically unstable state and so bring on a phase of mutation. At the same time this situation, climatic and technological, would be notably favorable to the survival and propagation of a type gifted with all the peculiar capacities and limitations of the dolicho-blond; so that any mutant showing the traits characteristic of that type would then have had an eminently favorable chance of survival. Indeed, it is doubtful, in the present state of the available evidence, whether such a type of man could have survived in Europe from or over any period of quaternary time prior to the last period of glaciation. The last preceding interglacial period appears to have been of a sufficiently genial (perhaps sub-tropical) character throughout Europe to have definitively eliminated the Magdalenian race and culture, and a variation of climate in the genial sense sufficiently pronounced to make Europe absolutely untenable for the Magdalenian-presumed to be something of a counterpart to the Eskimo both in race and culture-should probably have reached the limit of tolerance for the dolicho-blond as well. The latter is doubtless not as intolerant of a genial-warm-temperate-climate as the former, but the dolicho-blond after all stands much nearer to the Eskimo in this matter of climatic tolerance than to either of the two chief European stocks with which it is associated. Apparently no racial stock with a climatic tolerance approximately like that of the Eskimo, the Magdalenian, or the current races of the Arctic seaboard, survived over the last inter-glacial period; and if the dolicho-blond is conceived to have lived through that period it would appear to have been by a precariously narrow margin. So that, on one ground and another, the mutation out of which the dolicho-blond has arisen is presumably to be assigned to the latest period of glaciation in Europe, and with some probability to the time when the latest glaciation was at its maximum, and to the region where glacial and seaboard influences combined to give that racial type a differential advantage over all others.

This dolicho-blond mutation may, of course, have occurred only once, in a single individual, but it should seem more probable, in the light of De Vries' experiments, that the mutation will have been repeated in the same specific form in several individuals in the same general locality and in the same general period of time. Indeed, it would seem highly probable that several typically distinct mutations will have occurred, repeatedly, at roughly the same period and in the same region, giving rise to several new types, some of which, including the dolicho-blond, will have survived. Many, presumably the greater number, of these mutant types will have disappeared, selectively, being unfit to survive under those sub-glacial seaboard conditions that were eminently favorable to the dolicho-blond; while other mutants arising out of the same mutating period and adapted to climatic conditions of a more continental character, suitable to more of a continental habitat, less humid, at a higher altitude and with a wider seasonal variation of temperature, may have survived in the regions farther inland, particularly eastward of the selectively defined habitat of the dolicho-blond. These latter may have given rise to several blond races, such as are spoken for by Deniker[6] and certain British ethnologists.

The same period of mutation may well have given rise also to one or more brunet types, some of which may have survived. But if any new brunet type has come up within a period so recent as this implies, the fact has not been noted or surmised hitherto-unless the brunet races spoken for by Deniker are to be accepted as typically distinct and referred to such an origin. The evidence for the brunet stocks has not been canvassed with a question of this kind in view. These stocks have not been subject of such eager controversy as the dolicho-blond, and the attention given them has been correspondingly less. The case of the blond is unique in respect of the attention spent on questions of its derivation and prehistory, and it is also singular in respect of the facility with which it can be isolated for the purposes of such an inquiry. This large and persistent attention, from all sorts of ethnologists, has brought the evidence bearing on the dolicho-blond into such shape as to permit more confident generalisations regarding that race than any other.

In any case the number of mutant individuals, whether of one or of several specific types, will have been very few as compared with the numbers of the parent stock from which they diverged, even if they may have been somewhat numerous as counted absolutely, and the survivors whose offspring produced a permanent effect on the European peoples will have been fewer still. It results that these surviving mutants will not have been isolated from the parent stock, and so could not breed in isolation, but must forthwith be crossed on the parent stock and could therefore yield none but hybrid offspring. From the outset, therefore, the community or communities in which the blond mutants were propagated would be made up of a mixture of blond and brunet, with the brunet greatly preponderating. It may be added that in all probability there were also present in this community from the start one or more minor brunet elements besides the predominant Mediterranean, and that at least shortly after the close of the glacial period the new brachycephalic brunet (Alpine) race comes into the case; so that the chances favor an early and persistent crossing of the dolicho-blond with more than one brunet type, and hence they favor complications and confusion of types from the start. It follows that, in point of pedigree, according to this view there neither is nor ever has been a pure-bred dolicho-blond individual since the putative original mutant with which the type came in. But under the Mendelian rule of hybrids it is none the less to be expected that, in the course of time and of climatically selective breeding, individuals (perhaps in appreciable numbers) will have come up from time to time showing the type characters unmixed and unweakened, and effectively pure-bred in point of heredity. Indeed, such individuals, effectively pure-bred or tending to the establishment of a pure line, will probably have emerged somewhat frequently under conditions favorable to the pure type. The selective action of the conditions of life in the habitat most favorable to the propagation of the dolicho-blond has worked in a rough and uncertain way toward the establishment, in parts of the Baltic and North Sea region, of communities made up prevailingly of blonds. Yet none of these communities most favorably placed for a selective breeding in the direction of a pure dolicho-blond population have gone far enough in that direction to allow it safely to be said that the composite population of any such given locality is more than half blond.

Placed as it is in a community of nations made up of a hybrid mixture of several racial stocks there is probably no way at present of reaching a convincing demonstration of the typical originality of this dolicho-blond mutant, as contrasted with the other blond types with which it is associated in the European population; but certain general considerations go decidedly, perhaps decisively, to enforce such a view: (a) This type shows such a pervasive resemblance to a single one of the known older and more widely distributed types of man (the Mediterranean) as to suggest descent by mutation from this one rather than derivation by crossing of any two or more known types. The like can not be said of the other blond types, all and several of which may plausibly be explained as hybrids of known types. They have the appearance of blends, or rather of biometrical compromises, between two or more existing varieties of man. Whereas it does not seem feasible to explain the dolicho-blond as such a blend or compromise between any known racial types. (b) The dolicho-blond occurs, in a way, centrally to the other blond types, giving them a suggestive look of being ramifications of the blond stock, by hybridisation, into regions not wholly suited to the typical blond. The like can scarcely be said for any of the other European types or races. The most plausible exception would be Deniker's East-European or Oriental race, Beddoe's Saxon, which stands in a somewhat analogous spacial relation to the other blond types. But this brachycephalic blond is not subject to the same sharp climatic limitations that hedge about the dolicho-blond; it occurs apparently with equally secure viability within the littoral home area of the dolicho-blond and in continental situations where conditions of altitude and genial climate would bar the latter from permanent settlement. The ancient and conventionally accepted center of diffusion of blondness in Europe lies within the seaboard region bordering on the south Baltic, the North Sea and the narrow waters of the Scandinavian peninsulas. Probably, if this broad central area of diffusion were to be narrowed down to a particular spot, the consensus of opinion as to where the narrower area of characteristic blondness is to be looked for, would converge on the lands immediately about the narrow Scandinavian waters. This would seem to hold true for historic and for prehistoric times alike. This region is at the same time, by common consent, the peculiar home of the dolicho-blond, rather than of any other blond type. (c) The well known but little discussed climatic limitation of the blond race applies particularly to the dolicho-blond, and only in a pronouncedly slighter degree to the other blond types. The dolicho-blond is subject to a strict regional limitation, the other blond types to a much less definite and wider limitation of the same kind. Hence these others are distributed somewhat widely, over regions often remote and climatically different from the home area of the dolicho-blond, giving them the appearance of being dispersed outward from this home area as hybrid extensions of the central and typical blond stock. A further and equally characteristic feature of this selective localisation of the dolicho-blond race is the fact that while this race does not succeed permanently outside the seaboard region of the south Baltic and North Sea, there is no similar selective bar against other races intruding into this region. Although the dolicho-blond perhaps succeeds better within its home area than any other competing stock or type, yet several other types of man succeed so well within the same region as to hold it, and apparently always to have held it, in joint tenancy with the dolicho-blond.

A close relationship, amounting to varietal identity, of the Kabyle with the dolicho-blond has been spoken for by Keane and by other ethnologists. But the very different climatic tolerance of the two races should put such an identity out of the question. The Kabyle lives and thrives best, where his permanent home area has always been, in a high and dry country, sufficiently remote from the sea to make it a continental rather than a littoral habitat. The dolicho-blond, according to all available evidence, can live in the long run only in a seaboard habitat, damp and cool, at a high latitude and low altitude. There is no known instance of this race having gone out from its home area on the northern seaboard into such a region as that inhabited by the Kabyle and having survived for an appreciable number of generations. That this type of man should have come from Mauritania, where it could apparently not live under the conditions known to have prevailed there in the recent or the remoter past, would seem to be a biologic impossibility. Hitherto, when the dolicho-blond has migrated into such or a similar habitat it has not adapted itself to the new climatic requirements but has presently disappeared off the face of the land. Indeed, the experiment has been tried in Mauritanian territory. If the Kabyle blond is to be correlated with those of Europe, it will in all probability have to be assigned an independent origin, to be derived from an earlier mutation of the same Mediterranean stock to which the dolicho-blond is to be traced.

Questions of race in Europe are greatly obscured by the prevalence of hybrid types having more or less fixity and being more or less distinctly localised. The existing European peoples are hybrid mixtures of two or more racial stocks. The further fact is sufficiently obvious, though it has received less critical attention than might be, that these several hybrid populations have in the course of time given rise to a number of distinct national and local types, differing characteristically from one another and having acquired a degree of permanence, such as to simulate racial characters and show well marked national and local traits in point of physiognomy and temperament. Presumably, these national and local types of physique and temperament are hybrid types that have been selectively bred into these characteristic forms in adaptation to the peculiar circumstances of environment and culture under which each particular local population is required to live, and that have been so fixed (provisionally) by selective breeding of the hybrid material subject to such locally uniform conditions-except so far as the local characters in question are of the nature of habits and are themselves therefore to be classed as an institutional element rather than as characteristics of race.

It is evident that under the Mendelian law of hybridisation the range of favorable, or viable, variations in any hybrid population must be very large-much larger than the range of fluctuating (non-typical) variations obtainable under any circumstances in a pure-bred race. It also follows from these same laws of hybridisation that by virtue of the mutual exclusiveness of allelomorphic characters or groups of characters it is possible selectively to obtain an effectually "pure line" of hybrids combining characters drawn from each of the two or more parent stocks engaged, and that such a composite pure line may selectively be brought to a provisional fixity[7] in any such hybrid population. And under conditions favorable to a type endowed with any given hybrid combination of characters so worked out the given hybrid type (composite pure line) may function in the racial mixture in which it is so placed very much as an actual racial type would behave under analogous circumstances; so that, e.g., under continued intercrossing such a hybrid population would tend cumulatively to breed true to this provisionally stable hybrid type, rather than to the actual racial type represented by any one of the parent stocks of which the hybrid population is ultimately made up, unless the local conditions should selectively favor one or another of these ultimate racial types. Evidently, too, the number of such provisionally stable composite pure lines that may be drawn from any hybrid mixture of two or more parent stocks must be very considerable-indeed virtually unlimited; so that on this ground there should be room for any conceivable number of provisionally stable national or local types of physique and temperament, limited only by the number of characteristically distinguishable local environments or situations that might each selectively act to characterise and establish a locally characteristic composite pure line; each answering to the selective exigencies of the habitat and cultural environment in which it is placed, and each responding to these exigencies in much the same fashion as would an actual racial type-provided only that this provisionally stable composite pure line is not crossed on pure-bred individuals of either of the parent stocks from which it is drawn, pure-bred in respect of the allelomorphic characters which give the hybrid type its typical traits.

When the hybrid type is so crossed back on one or other of its parent stocks it should be expected to break down; but in so slow-breeding a species as man, with so large a complement of unit characters (some 4000 it has been estimated), it will be difficult to decide empirically which of the two lines-the hybrid or the parent stock-proves itself in the offspring effectively to be a racial type; that is to say, which of the two (or more) proves to be an ultimately stable type arisen by a Mendelian mutation, and which is a provisionally stable composite pure line selectively derived from a cross. The inquiry at this point, therefore, will apparently have to content itself with arguments of probability drawn from the varying behavior of the existing hybrid types under diverse conditions of life.

Such general consideration of the behavior of the blond types of Europe, other than the dolicho-blond, and more particularly consideration of their viability under divergent climatic conditions, should apparently incline to the view that they are hybrid types, of the nature of provisionally stable composite pure lines.

So far, therefore, as the evidence has yet been canvassed, it seems probable on the whole that the dolicho-blond is the only survivor from among the several mutants that may have arisen out of this presumed mutating period; that the other existing blond types, as well as certain brunets, are derivatives of the hybrid offspring of the dolicho-blond crossed on the parent Mediterranean stock or on other brunet stocks with which the race has been in contact early or late; and that several of these hybrid lines have in the course of time selectively been established as provisionally stable types (composite pure lines), breakable only by a fresh cross with one or other of the parent types from which the hybrid line sprang, according to the Mendelian rule.[8]

All these considerations may not be convincing, but they are at least suggestive to the effect that if originality is to be claimed for any one of the blond types or stocks it can best be claimed for the dolicho-blond, while the other blond types may better be accounted for as the outcome of the crossing of this stock on one or another of the brunet stocks of Europe.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Reprinted by permission from The Journal of Race Development, Vol. III, No. 4.

[2] Cf., however, W. Ridgeway, "The Application of Zo?logical Laws to Man," Report, British Association for Advancement of Science (Dublin), 1908.

[3] Cf. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, ch. xi, xiii.

[4] Sergi, Arii e Italici; Keane, Man Past and Present, ch. xii.

[5] Cf. W. J. Sollas, "Palaeolithic Races and their Modern Representatives," Science Progress, vol. iv, 1909-1910.

[6] The Races of Mankind; and "Les six races composant la population de l'Europe," Journal Anth. Inst., 1906.

[7] Illustrated by the various pure breeds or "races" of domestic animals.

[8] Mr. R. B. Bean's discussion of Deniker's "Six Races," e.g., goes far to show that such is probably the standing of the blond types, other than the dolicho-blond, among these six races of Europe; although such is not the conclusion to which Mr. Bean comes. Philippine Journal of Science, September, 1909.

THE BLOND RACE AND THE ARYAN CULTURE[1]

It has been argued in an earlier paper[2] that the blond type or types of man (presumably the dolichocephalic blond) arose by mutation from the Mediterranean stock during the last period of severe glaciation in Europe. This would place the emergence of this racial type roughly coincident with the beginning of the European neolithic; the evidence going presumptively to show that the neolithic technology came into Europe with the Mediterranean race, at or about the same time with that race, and that the mutation which gave rise to the dolicho-blond took place after the Mediterranean race was securely settled in Europe. Since this blond mutant made good its survival under the circumstances into which it so was thrown it should presumably be suited by native endowment to the industrial and climatic conditions that prevailed through the early phases of the neolithic age in Europe; that is to say, it would be a type of man selectively adapted to the technological situation characteristic of the early neolithic but lacking as yet the domestic animals (and crop-plants?) that presently give much of its character to that culture.

Beginning, then, with the period of the last severe glaciation, and starting with this technological equipment, those portions of the European population that contained an appreciable and increasing admixture of the blond may be conceived to have ranged across the breadth of Europe, particularly in the lowlands, in the belt of damp and cool country that fringed the ice, and to have followed the receding ice-sheet northward when the general climate of Europe began to take on its present character with the returning warmth and dryness. By force of the strict climatic limitation to which this type is subject, the blond element, and more particularly the dolicho-blond, will presently have disappeared by selective elimination from the population of those regions from which the ice-sheet and its fringe of cool and humid climate had receded. The cool and humid belt suited to the propagation of the blond mutant (and its blond hybrids) would shift northward and shorten down to the seaboard as the glacial conditions in which it had originated presently ceased. So that presently, when Europe finally lost its ice-sheet, the blond race and its characteristic hybrids would be found confined nearly within the bounds which have marked its permanent extension in historic times. These limits have, no doubt, fluctuated somewhat in response to secular variations of climate; but on the whole they appear to have been singularly permanent and singularly rigid.

Apparently after the dolicho-blond had come to occupy the restricted habitat which the stock has since continued to hold on the northern seaboard of Europe, toward the close of what is known in Danish chronology as the "older stone age," the early stock of domestic animals appear to have been introduced into Europe from Asia; the like statement will hold more doubtfully for the older staple crop plants, with the reservation that their introduction appears to antedate that of the domestic animals. At least some such date seems indicated by their first appearance in Denmark late in the period of the "kitchen middens." Virtually all of these essential elements of their material civilisation appear to have come to the blond-hybrid communities settled on the narrow Scandinavian waters, as to the rest of Europe, from Turkestan. This holds true at least for the domestic animals as a whole, the possible exceptions among the early introductions being not of great importance. Some of the early crop plants may well have come from what is now Mesopotamian or Persian territory, and may conceivably have reached western Europe appreciably earlier, without affecting the present argument. If the European horse had been domesticated in pal?olithic times, as appears at least extremely probable, that technological gain appears to have been lost before the close of the pal?olithic age; perhaps along with the extinction of the European horse.

These new elements of technological equipment, the crop plants and animals, greatly affected the character of the neolithic culture in Europe; visibly so as regards the region presumably occupied by the dolicho-blond,-or the blond-hybrid peoples. On the material side of the community's life they would bring change direct and immediate, altering the whole scheme of ways and means and shifting the pursuit of a livelihood to new lines; and on the immaterial side their effect would be scarcely less important, in that the new ways and means and the new manner of life requisite and induced by their use would bring on certain new institutional features suitable to a system of mixed farming. Whatever may have been the manner of their introduction, whether they were transmitted peaceably by insensible diffusion from group to group or were carried in with a high hand by a new intrusive population that overran the country and imposed its own cultural scheme upon the Europeans along with the new ways and means of life,-in any case these new cultural elements will have spread over the face of Europe somewhat gradually and will have reached the blond-hybrid communities in their remote corner of the continent only after an appreciable lapse of time. Yet, it is to be noted, it is after all relatively early in neolithic times that certain of the domestic plants and animals first come into evidence in the Scandinavian region.

The crop plants appear to have come in earlier than the domestic animals, being perhaps brought in by the peoples of the Mediterranean race at their first occupation of Europe in late quaternary time. With tillage necessarily goes a sedentary manner of life. So that at their first introduction the domestic animals were intruded into a system of husbandry carried on by a population living in settled communities, and drawing their livelihood in great part from the tilled ground but also in part from the sea and from the game-bearing forests that covered much of the country at that time. It was into such a situation that the domestic animals were intruded on their first coming into Europe,-particularly into the seaboard region of north Europe.

On the open ranges of western and central Asia, from which these domestic animals came, and even in the hill country of that general region, the peoples that draw their livelihood from cattle and sheep are commonly of a nomadic habit of life, in the sense that the requirements of forage for their herds and flocks hold them to an unremitting round of seasonal migration. It results that, except in the broken hill country, these peoples habitually make use of movable habitations, live in camps rather than in settled, sedentary communities. Certain peculiar institutional arrangements also result from this nomadic manner of life associated with the care of flocks and herds on a large scale. But on their introduction into Europe the domestic animals appear on the whole not to have supplanted tillage and given rise to such a nomadic-pastoral scheme of life, exclusively given to cattle raising, but rather to have fallen into a system of mixed farming which combined tillage with a sedentary or quasi-sedentary grazing industry. Such particularly appears to have been the case in the seaboard region of the north, where there is no evidence of tillage having been displaced by a nomadic grazing industry. Indeed, the small-scale and broken topography of this European region has never admitted a large-scale cattle industry, such as has prevailed on the wide Asiatic ranges. An exception, at least partial and circumscribed, may perhaps be found in the large plains of the extreme Southeast and in the Danube valley; and it appears also that grazing, after the sedentary fashion, took precedence of tillage in prehistoric Ireland as well as here and there in the hilly countries of southern and central Europe.

Such an introduction of tillage and grazing would mean a revolutionary change in the technology of the European stone age, and a technological revolution of this kind will unavoidably bring on something of a radical change in the scheme of institutions under which the community lives; primarily in the institutions governing the details of its economic life, but secondarily also in its domestic and civil relations. When such a change comes about through the intrusion of new material factors the presumption should be that the range of institutions already associated with these material factors in their earlier home will greatly influence the resulting new growth of institutions in the new situation, even if circumstances may not permit these alien institutions to be brought in and put into effect with the scope and force which they may have had in the culture out of which they have come. Some assimilation is to be looked for even if circumstances will not permit the adoption of the full scheme of institutions, and the institutions originally associated with the intrusive technology will be found surviving with least loss or qualification in those portions of the invaded territory where the invaders have settled in force, and particularly where conditions have permitted them to retain something of their earlier manner of life.

The bringers of these new elements of culture, material and immaterial, had acquired what they brought with them on the open sheep and cattle ranges of the central-Asiatic plains and uplands,-as is held to be the unequivocal testimony of the Aryan speech, and as is borne out by the latest explorations in that region. These later explorations indicate west-central Turkestan as the probable center of the domestication and diffusion of the animals, if not also of the crop plants, that have stocked Europe. Of what race these bearers of the new technology and culture may have been, and just what they brought into Europe, is all a matter of inference and surmise. It was once usual to infer, as a ready matter of course, that these immigrant pastoral nomads from the Asiatic uplands were "Aryans," "Indo-Europeans," "Indo-Germans," of a predominantly blond physique. But what has been said above as well as in the earlier paper referred to comes near excluding the possibility of these invaders being blonds, or more specifically the dolicho-blond. It is, of course, conceivable, with Keane (if his speculations on this head are to be taken seriously), that a fragment of the alleged blond race from Mauretania may have wandered off into Turkestan by way of the Levant, and so may there have acquired the habits of a pastoral life, together with the Aryan speech and institutions, and may then presently have carried these cultural factors into Europe and imposed them on the European population, blond and brunet. But such speculations, which once were allowable though idle, have latterly been put out of all question, at least for the present, by the recent Pumpelly explorations in Turkestan. It is, for climatic reasons, extremely improbable that any blond stock should have inhabited any region of the central-Asiatic plains or uplands long enough to acquire the pastoral habits of life and the concomitant Aryan speech and institutions, and it is fairly certain that the dolicho-blond could not have survived for that length of time under the requisite conditions of climate and topography.

It is similarly quite out of the question that the dolicho-blond, arising as a mutant type late in quaternary time, should have created the Aryan speech and culture in Europe, since neither the arch?ological evidence nor the known facts of climate and topography permit the hypothesis that a pastoral-nomadic culture of home growth has ever prevailed in Europe on a scale approaching that required for such a result. And there is but little more possibility that the bringers of the new (Aryan) culture should have been of the Mediterranean race; although the explorations referred to make it nearly certain that the communities which domesticated the pastoral animals (and perhaps the crop-plants) in Turkestan were of that race. The Mediterranean race originally is Hamitic, not Aryan, it is held by men competent to speak on that matter, and the known (presumably) Mediterranean prehistoric settlements in Turkestan, at Anau, are moreover obviously the settlements of a notably sedentary people following a characteristically peaceable mode of life. The population of these settlements might of course conceivably have presently acquired the nomadic and predatory habits reflected by the Aryan speech and institutions, but there is no evidence of such an episode at Anau, where the finds show an uninterrupted peaceable and sedentary occupation of the sites throughout the period that could come in question. The population of the settlements at Anau could scarcely have made such a cultural innovation, involving the adoption of an alien language, except under the pressure of conquest by an invading people; which would involve the subjection of the peaceable communities of Anau and the incorporation of their inhabitants as slaves or as a servile class in the predatory organisation of their masters. The Mediterranean people of Anau could accordingly have had a hand in carrying this pastoral-predatory (Aryan) culture into the West only as a subsidiary racial element in a migratory community made up primarily of another racial stock.

This leaves the probability that an Asiatic stock, without previous settled sedentary habits of life, acquired the domesticated animals from the sedentary and peaceable communities of Anau, or from some similar village (pueblo) or villages of western Turkestan, and then through a (moderately) long experience of nomadic pastoral life acquired also the predatory habits and institutions that commonly go with a pastoral life on a large scale. These cultural traits they acquired in such a degree of elaboration and maturity as is implied by the primitive Aryan (or, better, proto-Aryan) speech, including a more or less well developed patriarchal system; so that they would presently become a militant and migratory community somewhat after the later-known Tatar fashion, and so made their way westward as a self-sufficient migratory host and carried the new material culture into Europe together with the alien Aryan speech. It is at the same time almost unavoidable that in such an event this migratory host would have carried with them into the West an appreciable servile contingent made up primarily of enslaved captives from the peaceable agricultural settlements of the Mediterranean race, which had originally supplied them with their stock of domestic animals.

Along with these new technological elements and the changes of law and custom which their adoption would bring on, there will also have come in the new language that was designed to describe these new ways and means of life and was adapted to express the habits of thought which the new ways and means bred in the peoples that adopted them. The immigrant pastoral (proto-Aryan) language and the pastoral (patriarchal and predatory) law and custom will in some degree have been bound up with the technological ways and means out of which they arose, and they would be expected to have reached and affected the various communities of Europe in somewhat the same time and the same measure in which these material facts of the pastoral life made their way among these peoples. In the course of the diffusion of these cultural elements, material and immaterial, among the European communities the language and in a less degree the domestic and civil usages and ideals bred by the habits of the pastoral life might of course come to be dissociated from their material or technological basis and might so be adopted by remoter peoples who never acquired any large measure of the material culture of those pastoral nomads whose manner of life had once given rise to these immaterial features of Aryan civilisation.

Certain considerations going to support this far-flung line of conjectural history may be set out more in detail: (a) The Aryan civilisation is of the pastoral type, with such institutions, usages and preconceptions as a large-scale pastoral organisation commonly involves. Such is said by competent philologists to be the evidence of the primitive Aryan speech. It is substantially a servile organisation under patriarchal rule, or, if the expression be preferred, a militant or predatory organisation; these alternative phrases describe the same facts from different points of view. It is characterised by a well-defined system of property rights, a somewhat pronounced subjection of women and children, and a masterful religious system tending strongly to monotheism. A pastoral culture on the broad plains and uplands of a continental region, such as west-central Asia, will necessarily fall into some such shape, because of the necessity of an alert and mobile readiness for offense and defense and the consequent need of soldierly discipline. Insubordination, which is the substance of free institutions, is incompatible with a prosperous pastoral-nomadic mode of life. When worked out with any degree of maturity and consistency the pastoral-nomadic culture that has to do with sheep and cattle appears always to have been a predatory, and therefore a servile culture, particularly when drawn on the large scale imposed by the topography of the central-Asiatic plains, and re?nforced with the use of the horse. (The reindeer nomads of the arctic seaboard may appear to be an exception, at least in a degree, but they are a special case, admitting a particular explanation, and their case does not affect the argument for the Aryan civilisation.) The characteristic and pervasive human relation in such a culture is that of master and servant, and the social (domestic and civil) structure is an organisation of graded servitude, in which no one is his own master but the overlord, even nominally. The family is patriarchal, women and children are in strict tutelage, and discretion vests in the male head alone. If the group grows large its civil institutions are of a like coercive character, it commonly shows a rigorous tribal organisation, and in the end, with the help of warlike experience, it almost unavoidably becomes a despotic monarchy.

It has not been unusual to speak of the popular institutions of Germanic paganism-typified, e.g., by the Scandinavian usages of local self-government in pagan times-as being typically Aryan institutions, but that is a misnomer due to uncritical generalisation guided by a chauvinistic bias. These ancient north-European usages are plainly alien to the culture reflected by the primitive Aryan Speech, if we are to accept the consensus of the philological ethnologists to the effect that the people who used the primitive Aryan speech must have been a community of pastoral nomads inhabiting the plains and uplands of a continental region. That many of these philological ethnologists also hold to the view that these Aryans were north-European pagan blonds may raise a personal question of consistency but does not otherwise touch the present argument.

(b) A racial stock that has ever been of first-rate consequence in the ethnology of Europe (the Alpine, brachycephalic brunet, the homo alpinus of the Linnean scheme) comes into Europe at this general period, from Asia; and this race is held to have presently made itself at home, if not dominant, throughout middle Europe, where it has in historic times unquestionably been the dominant racial element.

(c) The pastoral-nomadic institutions spoken of above appear to have best made their way in those regions of Europe where this brachycephalic brunet stock has been present in some force if not as a dominant racial factor. The evidence is perhaps not conclusive, but there is at least a strong line of suggestion afforded by the distribution of the patriarchal type of institutions within Europe, including the tribal and gentile organisation. There is a rough concomitance between the distribution of these cultural elements presumably derived from an Aryan source on the one hand, and the distribution past or present of the brachycephalic brunet type on the other hand. The regions where this line of institutions are known to have prevailed in early times are, in the main, regions in which the Alpine racial type is also known to have been present in force, as, e.g., in the classic Greek and Roman republics.

At the same time a gentile organisation seems also to have been associated from the outset with the Mediterranean racial stock and may well have been comprised in the institutional furniture of that race as it stood before the advent of the Alpine stock; but the drift of later inquiry and speculation on this head appears to support the view that this Mediterranean gentile system was of a matrilinear character, such as is found in many extant agricultural communities of the lower barbarian culture, rather than of a patriarchal kind, such as characterises the pastoral nomads. The northern blond communities alone appear, on the available evidence, to have had no gentile or tribal institutions, whether matrilinear or patriarchal. The classic Greek and Roman communities appear originally to have been of the Mediterranean race and to have always retained a broad substratum of the Mediterranean stock as the largest racial element in their population, but the Alpine stock was also largely represented in these communities at the period when their tribal and gentile institutions are known to have counted for much, as, indeed, it has continued ever since.

Apart from these communities of the Mediterranean seaboard, the peoples of the Keltic culture appear to have had the tribal and gentile system, together with the patriarchal family, in more fully developed form than it is to be found in Europe at large. The peoples of Keltic speech are currently believed by ethnologists to have originally been of a blond type, although opinions are not altogether at one on that head,-the tall, perhaps red-haired, brachycephalic blond, the "Saxon" of Beddoe, the "Oriental" of Deniker. But this blond type is perhaps best accounted for as a hybrid of the dolicho-blond crossed on the Alpine brachycephalic brunet. Some such view of its derivation is fortified by what is known of the prehistory and the peculiar features of the early Keltic culture. This culture differs in some respects radically from that of the dolicho-blond communities, and it bears more of a resemblance to the culture of such a brunet group of peoples as the early historic communities of upper and middle Italy. If the view is to be accepted which is coming into currency latterly, that the Keltic is to be affiliated with the culture of Hallstatt and La Tène, such affiliation will greatly increase the probability that it is to be counted as a culture strongly influenced if not dominated by the Alpine stock. The Hallstatt culture, lying in the valley of the Danube and its upper affluents, lay in the presumed westward path of immigration of the Alpine stock; its human remains are of a mixed character, showing a strong admixture of the brachycephalic brunet type; and it gives evidence of cultural gains due to outside influence in advance of the adjacent regions of Europe. This Keltic culture, then, as known to history and prehistory, runs broadly across middle Europe along the belt where blond and brunet elements meet and blend; and it has some of the features of that predatory-pastoral culture reflected by the primitive Aryan speech, in freer development, or in better preservation, than the adjacent cultural regions to the north; at the same time the peoples of this Keltic culture show more of affiliation to or admixture with the brachycephalic brunet than the other blond-hybrid peoples do.

On the other hand the communities of dolicho-blond hybrids on the shores of the narrow Scandinavian waters, remote from the centers of the Alpine culture, show little of the institutions peculiar to a pastoral people. These dolicho-blond hybrids of the North come into history at a later date, but with a better preserved and more adequately recorded paganism than the other barbarians of Europe. The late-pagan Germanic-Scandinavian culture affords the best available instance of archaic dolicho-blond institutions, if not the sole instance; and it is to be noted that among these peoples the patriarchal system is weak and vague,-women are not in perpetual tutelage, the discretion of the male head of the household is not despotic nor even unquestioned, children are not held under paternal discretion beyond adult age, the patrimony is held to no clan liabilities and is readily divisible on inheritance, and so forth. Neither is there any serious evidence of a tribal or gentile system among these peoples, early or late, nor are any of them, excepting the late and special instance of the Icelandic colony, known ever to have been wholly or mainly of pastoral habits; indeed, they are known to have been without the pastoral animals until some time in the neolithic period. The only dissenting evidence on these heads is that of the Latin writers, substantially C?sar and Tacitus, whose testimony is doubtless to be thrown out as incompetent in view of the fact that it is supported neither by circumstantial evidence nor by later and more authentic records. In speaking of "tribes" among the Germanic hordes these Latin writers are plainly construing Germanic facts in Roman terms, very much as the Spanish writers of a later day construed Mexican and Peruvian facts in medi?val-feudalistic terms,-to the lasting confusion of the historians; whereas in enlarging on the pastoral habits of the Germanic communities they go entirely on data taken from bodies of people on the move and organised for raiding, or recently and provisionally settled upon a subject population presumably of Keltic derivation or of other alien origin and inhabiting the broad lands of middle Europe remote from the permanent habitat of the dolicho-blond. Great freedom of assumption has been used and much ingenuity has been spent in imputing a tribal system to the early Germanic peoples, but apart from the sophisticated testimony of these classical writers there is no evidence for it. The nearest approach to a tribal or a gentile organisation within this culture is the "kin" which counts for something in early Germanic law and custom; but the kin is far from being a gens or clan, and it will be found to have more of the force of a clan organisation the farther it has strayed from the Scandinavian center of diffusion of the dolicho-blond and the more protracted the warlike discipline to which the wandering host has been exposed. All these properly Aryan institutions are weakest or most notably wanting where the blond is most indubitably in evidence.

Taking early Europe as a whole, it will appear that among the European peoples at large institutions of the character reflected in the primitive Aryan speech and implied in the pastoral-nomadic life evidenced by the same speech are relatively weak, ill-defined or wanting, arguing that Europe was never fully Aryanised. And the peculiar geographical and ethnic distribution of this Aryanism of institutions argues further that the dolicho-blond culture of the Scandinavian region was less profoundly affected by the Aryan invasion than any other equally well known section of Europe. What is known of this primitive Aryan culture, material, domestic, civil and religious, through the Sanskrit and other early Asiatic sources, may convincingly be contrasted with what is found in early Europe. These Asiatic records, which are our sole dependence for a competent characterisation of the Aryan culture, shows it to have resembled the culture of the early Hebrews or that of the pastoral Turanians more closely than it resembles the early European culture at large, and greatly more than it resembles the known culture of the early communities of dolicho-blond hybrids.

(d) Scarcely more conclusive, but equally suggestive, is the evidence from the religious institutions of the Aryanised Europeans. As would be expected in any predatory civilisation, such as the pastoral-nomadic cultures typically are, the Aryan religious system is said to have leaned strongly toward a despotic monarchical form, a hierarchically graded polytheism, culminating in a despotic monotheism. There is little of all this to be found in early pagan Europe. The nearest well-known approach to anything of the kind is the late-Greek scheme of Olympian divinities with Zeus as a doubtful suzerain,-known through latter-day investigations to have been superimposed on an earlier cult of a very different character. The Keltic (Druidical) system is little known, but it is perhaps not beyond legitimate conjecture, on the scant evidence available, that this system had rather more of the predatory, monarchical-despotic cast than the better known pagan cults of Europe. The Germanic paganism, as indicated by the late Scandinavian-which alone is known in any appreciable degree-was a lax polytheism which imputed little if any coercive power to the highest god, and which was not taken so very seriously anyway by the "worshipers,"-if Snorri's virtually exclusive account is to be accepted without sophistication. The evidence accorded by the religious cults of Europe yields little that is conclusive, beyond throwing the whole loose-jointed, proliferous European paganism out of touch with anything that can reasonably be called Aryan. And this in spite of the fact that all the available evidence is derived from the European cults as they stood after having been exposed to long centuries of Aryanisation. So that it may well be held that such systematisation of myths and observances as these European cults give evidence of, and going in the direction of a despotic monotheism, is to be traced to the influence of the intrusive culture of the Aryan or Aryanised invaders,-as is fairly plain in the instance of the Olympians.

(e) That the languages of early Europe, so far as known, belong almost universally to the Aryan family may seem an insurmountable obstacle to the view here spoken for. But the difficulties of the case are not appreciably lessened by so varying the hypothesis as to impute the Aryan speech to the dolicho-blond, or to any blond stock, as its original bearer. Indeed, the difficulties are increased by such an hypothesis, since the Aryan-speaking peoples of early times, as of later times, have in the main been communities made up of brunets without evidence of a blond admixture, not to speak of an exclusively blond people. (There is no evidence of the existence of an all-blond people anywhere, early or late.)

The early European situation, so far as known, offers no exceptional obstacles to the diffusion of an intrusive language. Certain mass movements of population, or rather mass movements of communities shifting their ground by secular progression, are known to have taken place, as, e.g., in the case of the Hallstatt-La Tène-Keltic culture moving westward on the whole as it gained ground and spread by shifting and ramification outward from its first-known seat in the upper Danube valley. All the while, as this secular movement of growth, ramification and advance was going on, the Hallstatt-La Tène-Keltic peoples continued to maintain extensive trade relations with the Mediterranean seaboard and the ?gean on the one side and reaching the North-Sea littoral on the other side. In all probability it is by trade relations of this kind-chiefly, no doubt, through trade carried on by itinerant merchants-that the new speech made its way among the barbarians of Europe; and it is no far-fetched inference that it made its way, in the North at least, as a trade jargon. All this accords with what is going on at present under analogous circumstances. The superior merit by force of which such a new speech would make its way need be nothing more substantial than a relatively crude syntax and phonetics-such as furthers the dissemination of English to-day in the form of Chinook jargon, Pidgin English, and Beach la Mar. Such traits, which might in some other light seem blemishes, facilitate the mutilation of such a language into a graceless but practicable trade jargon. With jargons as with coins the poorer (simpler) drives out the better (subtler and more complex). A second, and perhaps the chief, point of superiority by virtue of which a given language makes its way as the dominant factor in such a trade jargon, is the fact that it is the native language of the people who carry on the trade for whose behoof the jargon is contrived. The traders, coming in contact with many men, of varied speech, and carrying their varied stock of trade goods, will impose their own names for the articles bartered and so contribute that much to the jargon vocabulary,-and a jargon is at its inception little more than a vocabulary. The traders at the same time are likely to belong to the people possessed of the more efficient technology, since it is the superior technology that commonly affords them their opportunity for advantageous trade; hence the new or intrusive words, being the names of new or intrusive facts, will in so far find their way unhindered into current speech and further the displacement of the indigenous language by the jargon.

Such a jargon at the outset is little else than a vocabulary comprising names for the most common objects and the most tangible relations. On this simple but practicable framework new varieties of speech will develop, diversified locally according to the kind and quantity of materials and linguistic tradition contributed by the various languages which it supplants or absorbs.

In so putting forward the conjecture that the several forms of Aryan speech have arisen out of trade jargons that have run back to a common source in the language of an intrusive proto-Aryan people, and developing into widely diversified local and ethnic variants according as the mutilated proto-Aryan speech (vocabulary) fell into the hands of one or another of the indigenous barbarian peoples,-in this suggestion there is after all nothing substantially novel beyond giving a collective name to facts already well accepted by the philologists. Working backward analytically step by step from the mature results given in the known Aryan languages they have discovered and divulged-with what prolixity need not be alluded to here-that in their beginnings these several idioms were little else than crude vocabularies covering the commonest objects and most tangible relations, and that by time-long use and wont the uncouth strings of vocables whereby the beginners of these languages sought to express themselves have been worked down through a stupendously elaborate fabric of prefixes, infixes and suffixes, etc., etc., to the tactically and phonetically unexceptionable inflected languages of the Aryan family as they stood at their classical best. And what is true of the European languages should apparently hold with but slight modification for the Asiatic members of the family. These European idioms are commonly said to be, on the whole, less true to the pattern of the inferentially known primitive Aryan than are its best Asiatic representatives; as would be expected in case the latter were an outgrowth of jargons lying nearer the center of diffusion of the proto-Aryan speech and technology.

As regards the special case of the early north-European communities of dolicho-blond hybrids, the trade between the Baltic and Danish waters on the one hand and the Danube valley, Adriatic and ?gean on the other hand is known to have been continued and voluminous during the neolithic and bronze ages,-as counted by the Scandinavian chronology. In the course of this traffic, extending over many centuries and complicated as it seems to have been with a large infiltration of the brachycephalic brunet type, much might come to pass in the way of linguistic substitution and growth.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Reprinted by permission from The University of Missouri Bulletin, Science Series, vol. ii, No. 3.

[2] "The Mutation Theory and the Blond Race," in The Journal of Race Development, April, 1913.

AN EARLY EXPERIMENT IN TRUSTS[1]

According to Much,[2] following in the main the views of Penka, Wilser, De Lapouge, Sophus Müller, Andreas Hansen, and other spokesmen of the later theories touching Aryan origins, the area of characterisation of the West-European culture, as well as of that dolicho-blond racial stock that bears this culture, is the region bordering on the North Sea and the Baltic, and its center of diffusion is to be sought on the southern shores of the Baltic. This region is in a manner, then, the primary focus of that culture of enterprise that has reshaped the scheme of life for mankind during the Christian era. Its spirit of enterprise and adventure has carried this race to a degree of material success that is without example in history, whether in point of the extent or of the scope of its achievements. Up to the present the culminating achievement of this enterprise is dominion in business, and its most finished instrument is the quasi-voluntary coalition of forces known as a Trust.

In its method and outward form this enterprise of the Indo-germanic racial stock has varied with the passage of time and the change of circumstances; but in its spirit and objective end it has maintained a singularly consistent character through all the mutations of name and external circumstance that have passed over it in the course of history.

In its earlier, more elemental expression this enterprise takes the form of raiding, by land and sea. A shrewd interpretation might, without particular violence to the facts, find a coalition of forces of the kind which is later known as a Trust in the Barbarian raids spoken of as the V?lkerwanderung. Such an interpretation would seem remote, however, and not particularly apt. The beginnings of a bona fide trust enterprise are of a more businesslike character and have left a record more amenable to the tests of accountancy. A trust, as that term is colloquially understood, is a business organisation.

Now, the line of enterprise, of indigenous growth in the north-European cultural region, which first falls into settled shape as an orderly, organised business is the traffic of those seafaring men of the North known to fame as the Vikings. And it is in this traffic, so far as the records show, that a trust, with all essential features, is first organised. The term "viking" covers, somewhat euphemistically, two main facts: piracy and slave-trade. Without both of these lines of business the traffic could not be maintained in the long run; and both, but more particularly the latter, presume, as an indispensable condition to their successful prosecution, a regular market and an assured demand for the output. It is a traffic in which, in order to get the best results, a relatively large initial investment must be sunk, and the period of turnover-the "period of production"-is necessarily of some duration; the risk is also considerable. Further, certain technological prerequisites must be met, in the way particularly of shipbuilding, navigation, and the manufacture of weapons; an adequate accumulation of capital goods must be had, coupled with a sagacious spirit of adventure; there must also be an available supply of labor. There appears to have been a concurrence of all these circumstances, together with favorable market conditions, in the south-Baltic region from about the sixth century onward; the circumstances apparently growing gradually more favorable through the succeeding four centuries.

The viking trade appears to have grown up gradually on the Baltic seaboard, as well as in the Sound country and throughout the fjord region of Norway, as a by-occupation of the farming population. Its beginnings are earlier than any records, so that the earliest traditions speak of it as an institution well understood and fully legitimate. The well-to-do freehold farmers, including some who laid claim to the rank of jarl, seem to have found it an agreeable and honorable diversion, as well as a lucrative employment for their surplus wealth and labor supply. From such sporadic and occasional beginnings it passed presently into an independently organised and self-sustaining line of business enterprise, and in the course of time it attained a settled business routine and a defined code of professional ethics. Syndication, of a loose form, had begun as early as the oldest accounts extant, but it is evident from the way in which the matter is spoken of that combination had not at that date-say, about the beginning of the ninth century-long been the common practice. It was not then a matter of course. The early combinations were relatively small and transient. They took the form of "gentlemen's agreements," pools, working arrangements, division of territory, etc., rather than hard and fast syndicates. In those early days a combine would be formed for a season between two or more capitalist-undertakers, for the most part employing their own capital only, without recourse to credit; although credit arrangements occur quite early, but are not very common in the earlier recorded phases of the trade. Such a loose combine, say about the middle of the ninth century, might comprise from two to a dozen boats. What may be called the normal unit in the trade at that time was a boat of perhaps thirty tons' burden, with an effective crew of some eighty men. Boats and crews gradually increase both in size and efficiency for a century and a half after that time.

Syndication, of an increasingly close texture and increasingly permanent effect, appears to have rapidly grown in favor through the ninth and tenth centuries. The reasons for this movement of coalition are plain. The volume of the trade, as well as its territorial extension, increased uninterruptedly. The technique of the trade was gradually improved, and the equipment and management were improved and reduced to standard forms. The tonnage employed at any given time can, of course, not be ascertained with anything like a confident approximation; but its steady increase is unmistakable. Year by year the boats and crews increase in average size as well as in number, until by the middle of the tenth century the number of men and ships engaged, as well as the volume of capital invested in the trade, are probably larger than the corresponding figures for any other form of lucrative enterprise at that time. It is, at that time, altogether the best-organised line of enterprise in the West-European region in respect of its business management, and the most efficient and progressive in respect of its equipment and technology. At a conservative guess, the aggregate number of ships engaged about the middle of the tenth century must have appreciably exceeded six hundred, and may have reached one thousand; with crews which had also grown gradually larger until they may by this time have averaged 150 or 200 men. There was consequently what would in modern phrase be called an "overproduction" of piratical craft-overinvestment in the viking trade and consequent cut-throat competition. The various coalitions came into violent conflict, and many of them went under, with great resultant loss of capital, impoverishment of well-to-do families, hardship and demoralisation of the entire trade.

Added to these untoward conditions within the trade was the open disfavor of the crown, in each of the three Scandinavian kingdoms. The traffic had long passed out of the stage at which it had offered a lucrative opening for farmers' sons who were tired of the farm and eager to find excitement, reputation, and creature comforts in that wider human contact and busier life for which the tedium of the farm had sharpened their appetites. The larger capitalists alone could succeed as organisers or directors of a viking concern under the changed conditions. The common run of well-to-do farmers had neither the tangible assets nor the "good-will" requisite to the successful promotion of a new company of freebooters. At the best, their sons could enter the business only as employees and with but a very uncertain outlook to speedy promotion to an executive position. On the other hand, as the trade became better organised in stronger hands, with a larger equipment, and as the competition within the trade grew more severe, the blackmail from which much of the profits of the trade was drawn grew more excessive and more uncertain, both as to its amount and as to the manner and incidents with which it was levied. As competition grew severe and the small vikings practically disappeared, and as the demoralisation that goes with cut-throat competition set in, the livelihood of the common people, at whose expense the vikings lived, grew progressively more precarious, and even their domestic peace and household industry grew insecure. Popular sentiment was running strongly against the whole traffic. So much so, indeed, as to threaten the tenure of courts and sovereigns if the popular hardship incident to the continuance of the trade were not abated.

The politicians, therefore, made a strenuous show of effort to regulate, or even to repress, the viking organisations. Outright and indiscriminate repression was scarcely a feasible remedy, certainly not an agreeable one. The viking companies were a source of strength to the country, both in that they might be drawn on for support in case of war and in that they brought funds into the country. The remedy to which the politicians turned, by preference, therefore, was a regulation of the companies in such a manner as to let "the foreigners pay the tax," to adapt a modern phrase. If the freebooters of a given state could be induced, by stringent regulations, to prey upon the people of the neighboring states, and particularly if they worked at cross-purposes with similar companies of freebooters domiciled in such neighboring states, it was then plain to the sagacious politicians of those days that the companies might be more of a blessing than a curse. On trial it was found that this policy of control gave at the best but very dubious results, and consequently the repressive hand of the authorities perforce fell with increasingly rigorous pressure on the viking organisations, particularly on the smaller ones which were scarcely of national importance. The competition in the trade was too severe to admit of a consistent avoidance of excesses and irregularities on the part of the vikings, and these irregularities obliged the authorities to interfere.

Under these circumstances it is plain that no viking combine could hope to prosper in the long run unless it were strong enough to take an international position and to maintain a practical monopoly of the trade. "International" in these premises means within the Scandinavian countries. In the days of its finest development the viking trade was domiciled in the Scandinavian countries, almost exclusively. This means the two Scandinavian peninsulas, with Iceland, the Faroes, Orkneys, Hebrides, and the Scandinavian portions of Scotland. To this, for completeness of statement, is to be added a stretch of Wendish seaboard on the south of the Baltic and a negligible patch of German territory. The trade, so far as regards its home offices, to use a modern phrase, gathered in the main about two chief centers: the Orkneys and the south end of the Baltic. Outlying regions, such as the Norwegian fjord country and the Hebrides, are by no means negligible, but the two regions named above are after all the chief seats of the traffic; and of these two centers the Baltic-chiefly Danish-region is in many respects the more notable. Its viking traffic is better, more regularly organised, is carried on with a more evident sense of a solidarity of interests and a more consistent view to a long-term prosperity. As one might say, looking at the matter from the modern standpoint, it has more of a look of stability and conservative management, such as belongs to an investment business, and has less of a speculative air, than the trade that centers in the western isles.

Perhaps it is just on this account, because of its greater stability of interests and more conservative animus, that the traffic of this region responds with greater alacrity to the pressure of excessive competition and political interference, and so enters on a policy of larger and closer coalition. It may be added that many of the great captains of adventure in this region are men of good family and substantial standing in the community. As may often happen in a like conjuncture, when the irksomeness of this competitive situation in the Baltic was fast becoming intolerable, there arose a man of far-seeing sagacity and settled principles, of executive ability and businesslike integrity, who saw the needs of the hour and the available remedy, and who saw at the same glance his own opportunity of gain. This man was Pálnatoki, the descendant of an honorable line of country gentlemen in the island of Funen, whose family had from time immemorial borne an active and prudent part in the trade, and had been well seen at court and in society. He was a man of mature experience, with a large investment in the traffic, and with a body of "good-will" that gave him perhaps his most decisive advantage.

During the reign of Harald Gormsson, about the middle of the tenth century, Pálnatoki seems to have cast about for a basis on which to promote an international coalition of vikings, such as would put an end to headlong competition in the trade and would at the same time be placed above the accidents of national politics. To this end it was necessary to find a neutral ground on which to establish the home office of the concern. Such a medi?val-Scandinavian New Jersey was the Wendish kingdom at the south of the Baltic.

Jómsborg (on the island of Wollin, at the mouth of the Oder) seems to have been a resort of vikings before Pálnatoki organised his company there and strengthened the harbor, which may have been fortified by those who held it before him. Here the new company was incorporated under a special franchise from the Wendish crown, with the stipulation that it was to do business only outside the Wendish territories. The tangible assets of the corporation were the harbor and fortified town of Jómsborg, together with the ships and other equipment of such vikings as were admitted to fellowship; its intangible assets were its franchise and the good-will of the promoter and the underlying companies. Its by-laws were very strict, both as to the discipline of the personnel and as to the distribution of earnings. The promoter, who was the first president of the corporation, was given extreme powers for the enforcement of the by-laws, and throughout his long incumbency of office he exercised his powers with the greatest discretion and with a most salutary effect.

This neutral, international corporation of piracy rapidly won a great prestige. In modern phrase, its intangible assets grew rapidly larger. Backed by the competitive pressure which the new corporation was able to bring upon the smaller companies and syndicates, this prestige of the Jómsvikings brought a steady run of applications for admission into the trust. The trust's policy was substantially the same as has since become familiar in other lines of enterprise, with the difference that in those early days the competitive struggle took a less sophisticated form. Outstanding syndicates and private firms were given the alternative of submission to the trust's terms or retirement from the traffic. There was great hardship among the outstanding concerns, especially among that large proportion of them that were unable to meet the scale of requirements imposed on applicants for admission into the trust. The qualifications both as to equipment and personnel were extremely strict, so that a large percentage of the applicants were excluded; and the unfortunates who failed of admission found themselves in a doubtful position that grew more precarious with every year that passed. Practically, such concerns were either frozen out of the business or forced into a liquidation which permanently wound up their affairs and terminated their corporate existence.

The accounts extant are of course not reliable in minute details, being not strictly contemporary, nor are they cast in such modern terms as would give an easy comparison with present-day facts. The chief documents in the case are Jómsvikingasaga, Saxo Grammaticus, Heimskringla, and Olafssaga Tryggvasonar; but nearly the whole of the saga literature bears on the development of the viking trade, and characteristic references to the Jómsviking trust occur throughout. The evidence afforded by these accounts converges to the conclusion that toward the close of the tenth century the trust stood in a high state of prosperity and was in a position virtually to dictate the course of the traffic for all that portion of the viking trade that centered in the Baltic. Its prestige and influence were strong wherever the traffic extended, even in the region of the western isles and in the fjord country of Norway. It had even come to be a factor of first-rate consequence in international politics, and its power was feared and courted by those two sovereigns who established the Danish rule in England, as well as by their Swedish, Norwegian, and Russian contemporaries. It is probably not an overstatement to say that the Danish conquest of England would not have been practicable except for the alliance of the trust with Svend, which enabled him to turn his attention from the complications of Scandinavian politics to his English interests.

The extent of the trust's material equipment at the height of its prosperity is a matter of surmise rather than of statistical information. Some notion of its strength may be gathered from the statement that the fortified harbor of Jómsborg included within its castellated sea-wall an inclosed basin capable of floating three hundred ships at anchor. In the great raid against the kingdom of Norway, whose failure inaugurated the disintegration of the trust, the number of ships sent out is variously given by different authorities. The Jómsvikingasaga says that they numbered one long hundred. This fleet, however, was made up of craft selected from among the ships that were under the immediate command of four of the great captains of adventure. The fleet, as it lay in the Sound before the final selection, is said to have numbered 185, but the context shows that this fleet was but a fraction of the aggregate Jómsviking tonnage. Of this disastrous expedition but a fraction returned; yet various later expeditions of the Jómsvikings are mentioned in which some scores of their ships took part.

The trust having become an international power, it undertook to shape the destiny of nations and dynasties, and it broke under the strain. It, or its directors, took a contract to bring Norway into subjection to the Danish crown. Partly through untoward accidents, partly through miscalculation and hurried preparations, it failed in this undertaking, which brought the affairs of the trust to a spectacular crisis. From this disaster it never recovered. With the opening of the eleventh century the viking trust fell into abeyance, and in a few years it disappeared from the field. There are several good reasons for its failure. On the death of its founder the management had passed into the hands of Sigvaldi, a man of less sagacity and less integrity as well as of more unprincipled personal ambition, and somewhat given to flighty ventures in the field of politics. It was Sigvaldi's overweening personal ambition that committed the corporation to the ill-advised expedition against Norway. The trust, moreover, being supreme within its field, the discipline grew lax and its exactions grew arbitrary, sometimes going to unprovoked excesses. As one might say, too little thought was given to "economies of production," and the charges were pushed beyond "what the traffic would bear." But for all that, in spite of its meddling in politics, and in spite of jobbery and corruption in its management, the trust still had a fair outlook for continued success, except that the bottom dropped out of the trade. For better or worse, the slave-trade in the north of Europe collapsed on the introduction of Christianity, at least so far as regards the trade in Christians; and without a slave market the viking enterprise had no chance of reasonable earnings. At the same time, the risk and hardships of the traffic-the "cost of production"-grew heavier as the countries to the south became better able to defend their shores. The passenger traffic failed almost entirely, and the goods traffic was in a disorganised and unprofitable state. The costs were fast becoming prohibitive, even to men so enterprising and necessitous as the Norwegian freebooters. The situation changed in such a way as to leave the trust out.

Some show of corporate existence was still maintained for a short period after the trust's great crisis, but there was an end of discipline and authoritative control. The minor concerns and private establishments that had once formed part of the trust continued in the trade on an independent footing, but with decreasing regularity and with diminishing strength. As the equipment wore out it was not replaced, and the trade lapsed. The great captains of the industry, like Sigvaldi, Thorkel Haraldson, Sigurd Kápa, and Vagn Akason, turned their holdings to the service of the dynastic politics which were then engaging the attention of the northern countries. Much of this body of enterprise and wealth was exhausted in working out the imperialistic schemes of expansion of Svend and Knut the Great; and what was left over shared the fortunes of the other available forces of the Scandinavian countries, being dissipated in political dissensions, extortionate government organisations, and the establishment of a church and a nobility.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Reprinted by permission from The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. XII, March, 1904.

[2] Matthaeus Much, Die Heimat der Indogermanen.

THE END