Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/195

189 all public affairs as its own affairs, in short all those properties which the Romans had lost and which were alone capable of forming new states and raising new nationalities out of the muck of the Roman world—what were they but characteristic marks of the barbarians in the upper stage, fruits of the gentile constitution?

If they transformed the antique form of monogamy, mitigated the male rule in the family and gave a higher position to women than the classic world had ever known, what enabled them to do so, unless it was their barbarism, their gentile customs, their living inheritance of the time of maternal law?

If they could safely transmit a trace of the genuine gentile order, the mark communes, to the feudal states of at least three of the most important countries—Germany, North of France, and England—and thus give a local coherence and the means of resistance to the oppressed class, the peasants, even under the hardest medieval serfdom; means which neither the slaves of antiquity nor the modern proletarian found ready at hand—to whom did they owe this, unless it was again their barbarism, their exclusively barbarian mode of settling in gentes?

And in conclusion, if they could develop and universally introduce the mild form of servitude which they had been practicing at home, and which more and more displaced slavery also in the Roman empire—to whom was it due, unless it was again their barbarism thanks to which they had not yet arrived at complete slavery, neither in the form of the ancient labor slaves, nor in that of the oriental house slaves?

This milder form of servitude, as Fourier first stated, gave to the oppressed the means of their gradual emancipation as a class (fournit aux cultivateurs des moyens d'affranchissement collectif et