But Sir Henry Maine in his work on the “Origin of International Law,” has fully proved that “Man has never been so ferocious or so stupid as to submit to such an evil as war without some kind of an effort to prevent it.” And he has shown how exceedingly great is “the number of ancient institutions which bear the marks of a design to stand in the way of war, or to provide an alternative to it.”
A pregnant suggestion is offered as to the causes of that great migration of barbarians which resulted in the overthrow of the Roman empire. “It is desiccation, a quite recent desiccation continued still at a speed which we formerly were not prepared to admit. Against it man was powerless. When the inhabitants of North-West Mongolia and East Turkestan saw that water was abandoning them they had no course open to them but to move down the broad valleys leading to the lowlands, and to thrust westward the inhabitants of the plains.” And so the one great war recorded of the barbarians, was thrust upon them by absolute physical necessity.
The barbarians had no social problem, for that private property in the means of life which constitutes the foundation of modern individualism, and from which the degradation and poverty of modern civilization results, was unknown among them. They were communists. The interest of one was the care of all. Nothing was owned privately until it reached the very point of consumption and not always then, as food was largely eaten at communal meals. This social form still survives especially in Russia, and Kropotkin says: “The sight of a Russian commune mowing a meadow--the men rivalling each other in their advance with the scythe, while the women turn the grass over and throw it up into heaps--is one of the most inspiring sights; it shows what human work might be and ought to be. The hay, in such case, is divided among the separate households, and it is evident that no one has the right of taking hay from a neighbor’s stack without his permission; but the limitation of this last rule among the Caucasian Ossetes is most noteworthy. When the cuckoo cries and announces that spring is coming, and that the meadows will soon be clothed again with grass, every one in need has the right of taking from a neighbor’s stack the hay he wants for his cattle. The old communal rights are thus reasserted, as if to prove how contrary unbridled individualism is to human nature.”