Page:Man or the State.djvu/29

11 outlawed by their own fraternities) who did not belong to some fraternity or guilds besides his commune.

Scandinavian sagas sing their exploits. The devotion of sworn brothers is the theme of the most beautiful of these epical songs; whereas the Church and the rising kings, representatives of Byzantine or Roman law which reappears, hurl against them their anathemas and decrees, which happily remain a dead letter.

The whole history of that period loses its significance, and becomes absolutely incomprehensible, if we do not take the fraternities into account—these unions of brothers and sisters that spring up everywhere to satisfy the multiple needs of both the economic and the emotional life of man.

Nevertheless black spots accumulated on the horizon. Other unions—those of ruling minorities—are also formed; and they endeavor, little by little, to transform these free men into serfs, into subjects. Rome is dead, but its tradition revives; and the Christian Church, haunted by Oriental theocratic visions, gives its powerful support to the new powers that are seeking to constitute themselves.

Far from being the sanguinary beast that he is represented to be in order to prove the necessity of ruling over him, man has always loved tranquillity and peace. He fights rather by necessity than by ferocity, and prefers his cattle and his land to the profession of arms. Therefore, hardly had the great migration of barbarians begun to abate, hardly had hordes, and tribes more or less cantoned themselves on their respective lands, than we see the care of the defence of territory against new waves of immigrants confided to a man who engages a small band of adventurers, men hardened in wars, or brigands, to be his followers; while the great mass raises cattle or cultivates the soil. And this defender soon begins to amass wealth. He gives a horse and armor (very dear at that time) to the poor man, and reduces him to servitude; he begins to conquer the germ of military power. On the other hand, little by little, tradition, which constituted law in those times, is forgotten by the masses. There remains only an occasional old man who keeps in his memory the