horse. The smallest muscle springs forth, hard and tough like a
whiplash, says an English painter.

Such was human society and its members, before the division into classes
had taken place. And a comparison of that social condition with the
condition of the overwhelming majority of present day society shows the
enormous chasm that separates our proletarian and small farmer from the
free gentile of old.

That is one side of the question. We must not overlook, however, that
this organization was doomed. It did not pass beyond the tribe. The
league of tribes marked the beginning of its downfall, as we shall see,
and as the attempts of the Iroquois at subjugating others showed.
Whatever went beyond the tribe, went outside of gentilism. Where no
direct peace treaty existed, there war reigned from tribe to tribe. And
this war was carried on with the particular cruelty that distinguishes
man from other animals, and that was modified later on simply by
self-interest.

The gentile constitution in its most flourishing time, such as we saw it
in America, presupposed a very undeveloped state of production, hence a
population thinly scattered over a wide area. Man was almost completely
dominated by nature, a strange and incomprehensible riddle to him. His
simple religious conceptions clearly reflect this. The tribe remained
the boundary line for man, as well in regard to himself as to strangers
outside. The gens, the tribe and their institutions were holy and
inviolate. They were a superior power instituted by nature, and the
feelings, thoughts and actions of the individual remained
unconditionally subject to them. Commanding as the people of this epoch
appear to us, nothing distinguishes one from another. They are still
attached, as Marx has it, to the navel string of the primordial
community.

The power of these natural and spontaneous communities had to be broken,
and it was. But it was done by influences that from the very beginning
bear the mark of degradation, of a downfall from the simple moral
grandeur of the old gentile society. The new system of classes is
inaugurated by the meanest impulses: vulgar covetousness, brutal lust,
sordid avarice, selfish robbery of common wealth. The old gentile
society without classes is undermined and brought to fall by the most
contemptible means: theft, violence, cunning, treason. And during all
the thousands of years of its existence, the new society has never been
anything else but t