.
We have now to see how far at different epochs the cultivation of the
soil has been carried on by means of slaves, as in the palmy days of
Greece, or by means of tenants, like the socage tenure, since the
Middle Ages, and then what has been the social function of the greater
landlordism at different periods of history.

If Herr Duehring means that the mastery of man by men as a preliminary
to the mastery of nature by man is a universal law, that our present
economic condition, the stage attained to-day in agriculture and
industry, is the result of a society which has developed itself in
class antagonisms, in mastership on the one hand and in slavery on the
other hand, he says something which is a mere commonplace since the
publication of the Communist Manifesto. We have thus to explain the
existence of these classes and when Herr Duehring has no further
explanation to give than "force" we are right back at the beginning
again. The mere fact that the subject and the plundered have always
been more numerous and that therefore the actual force has rested with
them is enough 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