Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/274

260 the bondwoman, who milks and who fetches water, now from a well at hand and now from one farther off, varies from day to day; and its worth, as compared with the worths of other works, cannot be known. So with the preparation of skins, the making of clothing, the setting up of the tents. All these miscellaneous services, differing in arduousness, duration, skill, cannot be paid for in money or produce while there exists neither currency nor market in which the relative values of articles and labors may be established by competition. Doubtless a bargain for services rudely estimated as worth so many cattle or sheep may be entered into. But beyond the fact that this form of payment, admitting of but very rough equivalence, cannot conveniently be carried out with all members of the group, there is the fact that, even supposing it to be carried out, the members of the group cannot separately utilize their respective portions. The sheep have to be herded together; it would never do to send them out in small divisions, each requiring its attendant. The milk which cows yield must be dealt with in the mass—could not without great loss of labor be taken by so many separate milk-maids and treated afterward in separate portions. So is it throughout. The members of the group are naturally led into the system of giving their respective labors and satisfying from the produce their respective wants: they have to live as a corporate body. The patriarch, at once family-head, director of industry, owner of all members of the group and its belongings, regulates the labor of his dependents; and, maintaining them out of the common stock that results, is restrained in his distribution, as in his conduct at large, only by traditional custom and by the prospect of resistance and secession if he disregards too far the average opinion.

The mention of secession introduces a remaining trait of the patriarchal group. Small societies, mostly at enmity with surrounding societies, are anxious to increase the numbers of their men that they may be stronger for war. Hence sometimes female infanticide, that the rearing of males may be facilitated; hence in some places, as parts of Africa, a woman is forgiven any amount of irregularity if she bears many children; hence the fact that among the Hebrews barrenness was so great a reproach. This wish to strengthen itself by adding to its fighting-men leads each group to welcome fugitives from other groups. Everywhere, and in all times, there goes on desertion—sometimes of rebels, sometimes of criminals. Stories of feudal ages, telling of knights and men-at-arms who, being ill-treated or in danger of punishment, escape and take service with other princes or nobles, remind us of what goes on at the present day in various parts of Africa, where the dependents of a chief who treats them too harshly leave him and join some neighboring chief, and of what goes on among such wandering South American tribes as the Coroados, members of which join now one horde and now another, as impulse prompts. And