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work of great capitalists and proprietors exploiting their labor. Yet marriages continue to be made between individuals of differ- ent classes. Expulsion from the tribe and deprivation of rights common to members of the tribe are the two chief means of punishment. This is true, says the illustrious geographer, among all the original peoples of Bengal Leptchas, Kotchs, Kohls, etc 1
Thus, so long as these peoples found among themselves and in their environment conditions favorable to their peaceful development, their exterior frontiers were of little consequence, as were the class distinctions within the group; but when the vacant territory had become scarce through the increase of the population, and when they came into contact with peoples already subjected, their equilibrium of equality and peace gave place to an equilibrium of inequality maintained by force, and which tended not only to their economic subjugation, but also to the destruction of their moral qualities.
In reality, it is not the hunting stage, not the pastoral stage, and not the agricultural stage in itself which is naturally peaceful or naturally warlike; it is only the external and the internal conditions of their development which imprint the one character or the other. We must therefore reject altogether that old hypothesis which explains the militarism of Sparta and Rome by their economico-agricultural hypothesis, of which the legend of the soldier-laborer is a survival. War and peace are inherent in different classes of economic existence; industrial and com- mercial societies are not from their nature essentially peaceful, contrary to the hypothesis of St. Simon, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer a hypothesis unfortunately inconsistent with the facts. The truth is that among commercial and industrial peoples, as well as among agricultural peoples, equilibrium and peace depend upon the interior organization and its correspond- ence to the exterior.
According to von Martins, quoted by E. de Laveleye, 2 in all North America there did not exist a single race as nomadic as
1 ELISEE RECLUS, New Universal Geography, Vol. VIII, pp. 327 ff.
- Property and its Primitive Forms, pp. 300 ff.
