KROPOTKIN grew to the detriment of the village commune. A single man assumed these two functions. He surrounded himself with armed men to put his judicial decisions into execution; he fortified himself in his turret; he accumulated the wealth of the epoch, bread, cattle and iron, for his family; and little by little he forced his rule upon the neighbouring peasants. The scientific man of the age, the witch-doctor, or priest, lost no time in bringing him support and in sharing his domination; or else, adding the sword to his power of redoubtable magician, he seized the domination for his own benefit. Much space would be needed to deal thoroughly with this subject and to tell how free men became gradually serfs, forced to work for the lay or clerical lord of the manor; how authority was constituted, in a tentative manner, over villages and boroughs; bow peasants leagued, revolted, struggled to fight the advancing domination, and how they succumbed in those struggles against the strong castle walls, and the men in armour who defended them. Suffice it for me to say, that towards the tenth and eleventh centuries, Europe seemed to be drifting towards the constitution of such barbarous kingdoms as we now discover in the heart of Africa, or ,hose Eastern theocracies which we know through history.- This could not take place in a day; but the germs of those little kingdoms a:id those little theocracies were already there and were developing. Happily, the "barbarian" spirit, Scandinavian, Saxon, Celt, German, Slav, which had led men for about seven or eight centuries 10 seek for the satisfaction of their needs in individual initiative and ir:. free agreement of fraternities and guilds, still lived in the villages and boroughs. The barbarians allowed themselves to be enslaved, they worked for a master, but their spirit of free action and free agreement was not yet corrupted. Their fraternities flourished more than ever, and the crusades only roused and developed them in the West. Then the revolution of the commune, long prepared by that federative spirit and born of the union of sworn fraternity with the village community, burst forth in the twelfth century wit:1 a s'i:riking spontaneity all over Europe. This revolution, which the mass of university historians prefer to ignore, saved Europe from the calamity with which it was menaced. It arrested the evolution of theocratic and despotic monarchies in_ which our civilisation would probably have gone down after a few centuries of pompous expansion, as the civilisations of Mesopotamia, Assyria and Babylon had done. This revolution opened up a new phase of life-that of the free communes. IV. It is easy to understand why modern historians, nurtured as they are in the spirit of the Roman law, and accustomed to look to Roman 18 Biblioteca G no Bianco
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