HKB
to show the stupidity of the entire force theory. We have therefore still to explain the origin of master and subject classes. They have come into being in two ways.
When men originally sprang from the lower animals they came into history, still half-wild animals, elementary, with no power over the forces of nature, still unacquainted with their own powers, as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they. There prevailed a certain equality in the conditions of life and as far as the heads of families were concerned an equality of social condition--there was at least an absence of those class distinctions which developed later in the agricultural communities. In such a social state there were certain common interests which overrode the interests of the individual in certain respects, the settlement of disputes, the repression of individuals who exceeded their rights, the looking after the water supply, particularly in hot countries, and finally under the conditions of life in the primeval forests, religious functions. We find analogous communal duties exercised by communal officials at all periods as well in the oldest German mark communities as in India to-day. These are contemporaneous with a sort of beginning of authority and state power in a rudimentary form. The productive forces develop; a denser population produces common and then conflicting interests between members of the society, the grouping of which in accordance with a new division of labor causes the creation of new organs for the purpose of maintaining the society on the one hand and repressing the antagonistic interests on the other. These organs which act for the entire group have different forms according to the varying circumstances of the individual groups, partly through the natural growth of a hereditary leadership in a world where everything proceeds naturally and partly through a growing need owing to the development of conflicts with other groups. How these social functions which were subsidiary to society came in the course of time to triumph over society; how the original servant, under favorable conditions became transformed into the master, how, according to circumstances, this master made his appearance as Oriental despot or satrap, as Greek chieftain, as Celtic clan chief, etc., how far he relied on force for this transformation and finally how the individual leaders associated themselves into a dominant class we have here no opportunity to consider. We can only state that real social duties lay at the base of the political domination and that the political supremacy has only existed as long as the politically supreme fulfilled these social functions. How many despotisms have risen and fallen among the Persians and Hindoos, and everybody knows quite well that the public management of the irrigation was the prime necessity of agriculture in those places. The "educated" English were the first to observe this among the Hindoos; they let the canals and locks fall into disuse and they have now discovered by the regular recurrence of famine that they have neglected the only opportunity to make their rule at least as righteous as that of their predecessors.