Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/106

94 long as they lived by sheep-farming and marauding, prohibited agriculture under pain of death. This severe interdict of a peaceful pursuit originated, not as some have supposed in the desire to foster the warlike spirit of the people, but rather in a perception of the fact that "the man who plowed up a bit of land infringed thereby on his neighbor's right of pasturage." By this act he became in a certain sense guilty of treason against pastoral society, the very foundations of which, the green sod, he broke up and destroyed with his plowshare. He not only restricted and reduced the actual area of grazing, but also struck a blow at the life of a cattle-rearing community. The practical workings of this crude and clannish conception of patriotism are recorded, as Mr. Wallace observes, on the pages of Byzantine annalists and old Russian chroniclers, who describe the periodical havoc of farmsteads committed by the nomadic tribes which from time immemorial had roamed the vast plains north of the Black and Caspian Seas, razing the houses, ravaging the fields, and leaving the bodies of the husbandmen as food for vultures.

The roving Bedouins, dwellers in the desert, as their name implies, despise the cultivators of the soil and call them contemptuously fellahin (plowers, boors); and their kinsmen the Anasis (anâsî, men) hover on the borders and levy blackmail on the villages of Syria. It is also significant for the persistency of this primitive point of view that the Arabic word for agriculture (falâhat), should also mean "fraudulent traffic," as though the permanent possession of a piece of land and the exclusive use or sale of the products of the soil were in themselves swindling operations.

These facts of to-day suffice to show the kind of opposition which Zarathustra had to face in his efforts to establish the Iranians in fixed settlements and to accustom them to the acquisition and proper utilization of landed property. In order to accomplish this purpose it was necessary to teach the holiness of husbandry and to invest seedtime and harvest with the sanctity of religion.

The Mormons, after their migration to Salt Lake, where the very existence of the community depended upon converting the desert into a garden, inaugurated the same policy, declaring through the mouth of their prophet that the human race could be redeemed and paradise regained only by means of tillage and making agriculture a sacred vocation and the pursuit of it a prominent part of their creed.

The priests of the old deva cult, the progenitors of the Brahmans, on the other hand denounced Zarathustra as a schismatic and a renegade, a contemner of the gods and blasphemer, a scorner of ancient custom and subverter of social order. They therefore opposed the innovation and fought for the faith of their fathers