KROPOTKIN mutually the mysteries of the craft-and they unite. They swear brotherhood, and practice it in a manner that strikes Europeam: in deed and not in words only. Besides, misfortune can ovenake anyone. A man, gentle and peaceful as a rule may, in a brawl, exceed the established limits of good behaviour and sociability. Heavy compensation will then have to be paid to the insulted or wounded; the aggressor will have to defend himself before the village council and prove facts on the oath of six, ten or twelve "con-jurors." This is another reason for belong.- ing to a fraternity. Moreover, man feels the necessity of talking politics and perhaps even intriguing, the necessity of propagating moral opinions or customs. There is, moreover, external peace to be safeguarded; alliances to be concluded with other tribes; federations to be constituted far off; the idea of intenribal law to be propagated. To satisfy all these needs of an emotional and intellectual kind the Kabyles, the Mongols, the Malays do not tum to a government: they have none.• Men of customary law and individual initiative, they have not been pervened by the corrupted idea of a government and a church supposed to do everything. They unite directly. They constitute sworn fraterni.ties, political and religiou~ societies, unions of crafts-guz1ds as they were called in the Middle Ages, so/s as Kabyles call them today. These sofs go beyond the boundaries of hamlets; they flourish far out in the desen and in foreign cities; and fraternity is practised in them. To refuse to help a member of your so/, even at the risk of losing belongings and life, is an act of treason to the fraternity and exposes the traitor to be treated as the murderer of a "brother". What we find to-day among Kabyles, Mongols, Malays, etc., was the essence of the life of so-called barbarians in Europe from the fifth to the twelfth and even the fifteenth century. Under the name of guilds, friendships, univer.sitates, etc., unions abounded for mutual defence and for solidarily.avenging offences against each member of the union : for substituting compensation, followed by the reception of the aggressor into the fraternity, instead of the vengeance of an "eye for an eye"; for the exercise of crafts, for helping in case of illness, for the defence of territory, for resisting the encroachments of nascent authority, for commCI:CC,for the practice of "good neighbourship," for propaganda, for everything, in a word, that the European, educated by the Rome of the Ca:sars and the Popes, asks of the State to-day. It is even doubtful if there existed at that time any man, free or serf save those outlawed by their own fraternities, who did not belong to some fraternity or guild, besides his commune. •In Kropotkin's day European Imperialism had not yet reached its zenith, and many primitive peoples which have since come more or Jess under white administration were still allowed to live according to their customary Jaw.-BD. 16 B blioteca Gino Bianco
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