Freeland

T >> Theodor Hertzka >> Freeland

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When Johnston released the Kavirondo and Nangi prisoners, he invited them
to send, on the 19th, as numerous an embassy as possible of their elders to
Naivasha, where we would confirm the newly formed alliance and seal it with
rich presents. He left the whole of his army at Naivasha, partly to cover
the retreat of the discharged prisoners, and partly to watch the booty (the
Masai still hesitated to take back the booty, and even forbade their
captured wives and children to leave our camp), while he himself,
accompanied by only a few horsemen, hastened to Eden Vale, there to get
further instructions. The proposal which he laid before the committee was
that everything should now be demanded from the Masai--the iron could be
forged if struck when it was hot; and as conditions of the renewal of
friendship he suggested the following three points: dissolution of the
_el-moran_ kraals, emancipation of all slaves whatever, formation of
agricultural associations. Of course we were not to be content with the
statement of these demands, but must ourselves take in hand the work of
carrying them out. Particularly would it be necessary to assist the Masai
in the organisation of the agricultural associations, to furnish them with
suitable agricultural implements, and to give them instruction in rational
agriculture. Finally, and chiefly, was it necessary to win over the
_el-moran_ by employing them in relays as soldiers for us. The ideal of
these brown braves was the routine of a military life. The alliance with
the Kavirondo and Nangi might lead to hostile complications with Uganda,
the country adjoining Kavirondo, when we could very well make use of a
Masai militia, and thus accomplish two ends at once--viz. the complete
pacification and civilisation of Masailand, and assistance against Uganda,
the great raiding State on the Victoria Nyanza, with which sooner or later
we must necessarily come into collision.

The committee adopted these suggestions after a short deliberation. Five
hundred fresh volunteers (as a matter of course, all our expeditions
consisted of volunteers) from among our agriculturists were placed under
Johnston's orders, as agricultural teachers for the Masai; whilst a part of
the five hundred men already at Naivasha were selected to superintend the
military training of the _el-moran_. Further, Johnston received for his
work the whole of the ploughs which had been thrown out of use in Freeland
by the introduction of steam-machinery. There were not less than 3,000 of
these ploughs, as well as a corresponding number of harrows and other
agricultural implements. With these were also granted 6,000 oxen accustomed
to the plough, as well as supplies of seeds, &c. The committee at once
telegraphed to Europe for 10,000 breechloaders and a million cartridges,
with 10,000 sidearms, which were supplied cheaply by the Austrian
Government out of the stock of disused Werndl rifles, and could reach
Naivasha by the end of June. Five complete field-batteries and eight
rocket-batteries were at the same time ordered in Europe; these, however,
were not for the Masai militia, but for our own use in any future
contingencies. An English firm promised to deliver two weeks later 10,000
very picturesque and strikingly designed complete uniforms, of which,
moreover, our Eden Vale sewing-factory speedily got ready several hundred
made of our large stores of brightly coloured woollen goods, so that the
_el-moran_ were able to see, on the 19th and 20th of June, the splendours
in store for them.

Thus furnished, Johnston left Eden Vale on the 12th of June, and reached
the shore of the Naivasha on the 16th, leaving his caravan of goods a few
days' march behind him. The elders and _leitunus_ of all the Masai tribes,
as well as the ambassadors of the Kavirondo and Nangi, already awaited him.
The negotiations with the latter were soon ended: the conditions of
alliance were again discussed, rich presents exchanged (the Kavirondo had
brought several thousand head of cattle for their magnanimous victors), and
on this side nothing further stood in the way of the approaching
covenant-feast. We had thus secured trustworthy friends as far as the
Victoria Nyanza, a great part of the shore of which was in the hands of the
Kavirondo; in return for which, it is true, we had undertaken--what we did
not for a moment overlook--the heavy responsibility of protecting the
Kavirondo against all foes, even against the powerful Uganda.

The Masai, on the other hand, were at first greatly troubled by the
conditions demanded of them. Johnston's eloquence, however, soon convinced
them that their acceptance of these conditions was not merely unavoidable,
but would be very profitable to themselves. He overcame their prejudice
against labour by showing them that an occupation to which we powerful and
rich white men were glad to devote ourselves could be neither degrading nor
burdensome. They were not to suppose that we intended them to grub about in
the earth, like the barbarous negroes, with wretched spades; the hard work
would be done by oxen; they need only walk behind the implements, which
were already on the way ready to be distributed among them. A few hours'
light work a day for a few months in the year would suffice to make them
richer than they had ever been made by the labour of their slaves. Even the
_el-moran_ were won over without very much difficulty by the promise that,
if they would only work a little in turns, they should now be trained to
become invincible warriors like ourselves, and should receive fine clothing
and yet finer weapons. And when at last the endless caravan with the oxen
and the agricultural implements arrived; when the wonderful celerity with
which tire ploughs cut through the ground was demonstrated; and when
Johnston dressed up a chosen band of _el-moran_ in the baggy red hose and
shirts, the green jackets, and the dandyish plumed hats, with rifle,
bayonet, and cartridge-box, and made them march out as models of the future
soldiery, the resignation which had hitherto been felt gave way to
unrestrained jubilation. The Masai had originally yielded out of fear of
our anger, and more still of the danger lest our friendship to the
surrounding tribes might lead to the unconditional deliverance of the Masai
into the hands of their hereditary foes. The numerous embassies which had
appeared from all points of the compass (for the Wa-Kikuyu, Wa-Taveta,
Wa-Teita, and Wa-Duruma--even the Wa-Kwafi and Swahili tribes--had sent
representatives laden with rich presents to take part in the Naivasha
festival) were significant reminders to them. But now they accepted our
terms with joy, and were not a little proud of being able to show to the
others that they were still the first in our favour.

And as the Masai, when they have made any engagement, are honourably
ambitious--unlike the negroes--to keep it, the carrying out of the
stipulations was a comparatively easy and speedy matter. A hasty census,
which we made for several purposes, showed that there were some 180,000
souls in the twelve Masai tribes scattered over a district of nearly 20,000
square miles, from Lykipia in the extreme north to Kilimanjaro in the
south. The country, although dry and sterile in the south-west, is
exuberantly fertile in the east and north, and--particularly around the
numerous ranges of hills, which rise to a height of 15,000 feet--equals in
beauty the Teita, Kilima, and Kenia districts, and could well support a
population a hundred times as large as the present one; but the perpetual
wars and the licentiousness of the people have hitherto limited the
increase of the population. Among the 180,000 were about 54,000 men capable
of labour, the _el-moran_ being included in that number. We handed over to
the Masai 12,000 yoke-oxen, in exchange for which we received the same
number of oxen for fattening. Our 500 agricultural instructors now looked
out for the most suitable arable ground for their pupils, whom they
organised into 280 associations similar to ours, without a right of
property in the soil and with the amount of labour as the sole measure of
the distribution of produce. The instructors taught them the use of the
implements; and were able, two months later, to report to Eden Vale, with
considerable satisfaction, that above 50,000 acres had been sown with all
kinds of field-produce. The harvest proved to be abundantly sufficient not
only to cover all the needs of the Masai, but also to secure to their white
teachers, both agricultural and military, the payment then customary in
Freeland.

While in this way, on the one hand, the agricultural associations were set
to work, on the other hand some 300 military instructors initiated relays
of 6,500 _el-moran_ into the mysteries of the European art of war. The
26,000 Masai warriors were divided into four companies, each of which was
put into uniform and exercised for a year. The rifles remained our
property, the uniforms became the property of the Masai warriors, but could
be worn only when the owners were on duty. There was no pay for peace
duty--rather, as above mentioned, the Masai defrayed the cost of their
military training out of the proceeds of their agriculture.

The agricultural as well as the military instructors made themselves useful
in other ways, by imparting to their pupils all kinds of skill and
knowledge. There were no specially learned men among them, but they opened
up a new world to the Masai, exercised a refining and ennobling influence
upon their habits and morals, and in a surprisingly short time made
tolerably civilised men of them. The Masai, on their part, enjoyed their
new lives very much. They were well aware that their altered condition made
them the object of all their neighbours' envy, whilst they were still more
highly respected than before. And, what was the main thing--at the
beginning at least--they enjoyed their new wealth and their increased
honour without finding their labour at all painful to those needs. For in
this fortunate country it required very little labour expended in a
rational way to get from the fruitful soil the little that was there looked
upon as extraordinary wealth. He who twice a year spent a few weeks in
sowing and harvesting could for the rest of the year indulge in the still
favourite luxury of _dolce far niente_. In later years, when the needs of
the Masai had been largely multiplied by their growing culture, more labour
was required to satisfy those needs; but in the meantime our pupils had got
rid of their former laziness; and it may be confidently asserted that not
one of them ever regretted that we had imposed our civilisation upon his
nation. On the contrary, the example of the Masai stimulated the
neighbouring peoples; and, in the course of the following years, the most
diverse tribes voluntarily came to us with the request that we would do
with them as we had done with the Masai. The suppression of property in the
soil among those negro races who--unlike the Masai and most of the other
peoples of Equatorial Africa--possessed such an institution in a developed
form, in no case presented any great difficulty: the land was voluntarily
either given up or redefined. Nowhere was property in land able to assert
itself along with labour organised according to our principles.

CHAPTER XI

The meeting of the International Free Society at the Hague had, as the
reader will remember, conferred full executive power upon the committee for
the period of two years. This period expired on the 20th of October, when
the Society would have to give itself a new and definitive constitution,
and the powers hitherto exercised by the committee would have to be taken
over by an administrative body freely elected by the people of Freeland. On
the 15th of September, therefore, the committee called together a
constituent assembly; and, as the inhabitants were too numerous all to meet
together for consultation, they divided the country into 500 sections,
according to the number of the inhabitants, and directed each section to
elect a deputy. The committee declared this representative assembly to be
the provisional source of sovereign authority, and required it to make
arrangements for the future, leaving it to decide whether it would empower
the committee to continue to exercise its executive functions until a
constitution had been agreed upon, or would at once entrust the
administration of Freeland to some new authority. After a short debate, the
assembly not only decided unanimously to adopt the former course, but also
charged the committee with the task of preparing a draft constitution. As
such a draft had already been prepared in view of contingencies, the
committee at once accepted the duty imposed upon it. Dr. Strahl, in the
name of the committee, laid the draft constitution 'upon the table of the
House.' The assembly ordered it to be printed, and three days after
proceeded to discuss it. As the proposed fundamental law and detailed
regulations were extremely simple, the debate was not very long-winded;
and, on the 2nd of October, the laws and regulations were declared to be
unanimously approved, and the new constitution was put in force.

The fundamental laws were thus expressed:

1. Every inhabitant of Freeland has an equal and inalienable claim upon the
whole of the land, and upon the means of production accumulated by the
community.

2. Women, children, old men, and men incapable of work, have a right to a
competent maintenance, fairly proportionate to the level of the average
wealth of the community.

3. No one can be hindered from the active exercise of his own free
individual will, so long as he does not infringe upon the rights of others.

4. Public affairs are to be administered as shall be determined by all the
adult (above twenty years of age) inhabitants of Freeland, without
distinction of sex, who shall all possess an equal active and passive right
of vote and of election in all matters that affect the commonwealth.

5. Both the legislative and the executive authority shall be divided into
departments, and in such a manner that the whole of the electors shall
choose special representatives for the principal public departments, who
shall give their decisions apart and watch over the action of the
administrative boards of the respective departments.

In these five points is contained the whole substance of the public law of
Freeland; everything else is merely the natural consequence or the more
detailed expression of these points. Thus the principles upon which the
associations were based--the right of the worker to the profit, the
division of the profit in proportion to the amount of work contributed, and
freedom of contract in view of special efficiency of labour--are naturally
and necessarily implied in the first and third fundamental laws. As the
whole of the means of labour were accessible to everyone, no one could be
compelled to forego the profit of his own labour; and as no one could be
forced to place his higher capabilities at the disposal of others, these
higher capabilities--so far as they were needed in the guidance and
direction of production--must find adequate recompense in the way of
freedom of contract.

With reference to the right of maintenance given to women, children, old
men, and men incapable of working, by the second section, it may be
remarked that this was regarded, in the spirit of our principles, as a
corollary from the truth that the wealth of the civilised man is not the
product of his own individual capabilities, but is the result of the
intellectual labour of numberless previous generations, _whose bequest
belongs as much to the weak and helpless as to the strong and capable_. All
that we enjoy we owe in an infinitely small degree to our own intelligence
and strength; thrown upon these as our only resources, we should be poor
savages vegetating in the deepest, most brutish misery; it is to the rich
inheritance received from our ancestors that we owe ninety-nine per cent.
of our enjoyments. If this is so--and no sane person has ever questioned
it--then all our brothers and sisters have a right to share in the common
heritage. That this heritage would be unproductive without the labour of us
who are strong is true, and it would be unfair--nay, foolish and
impracticable--for our weaker brethren to claim an _equal_ share. But they
have a right to claim a fraternal participation--not merely a charitable
one, but one based upon their right of inheritance--in the rich profits won
from the common heritage, even though it be by _our_ labour solely. They
stand towards us in the relation, not of medicant strangers, but of
co-heirs and members of our family. And of us, the stronger inheritors of a
clearly proved title, every member of the common family demands the
unreserved recognition of this good title. For we cannot prosper if we
dishonour and condemn to want and shame those who are our equals. A healthy
egoism forbids us to allow misery and its offspring--the vices--to harbour
anywhere among our fellows. Free, and 'of noble birth,' a king and lord of
this planet, must everyone be whose mother is a daughter of man, else will
his want grow to be a spreading ulcer which will consume even us--the
strong ones.

So much as to the right of maintenance in general. As to the provision for
women in particular, it was considered that woman was unfitted by her
physical and psychical characteristics for an active struggle for
existence; but was destined, on the one hand, to the function of
propagating the human race, and, on the other hand, to that of beautifying
and refining life. So long as we all, or at least the immense majority of
us, were painfully engaged in the unceasing and miserable struggle to
obtain the barest necessities of animal life, no regard could be paid to
the weakness and nobility of woman; her weakness, like that of every other
weak one, could not become a title to tender care, but became inevitably an
incitement to tyranny; the nobility of woman was dishonoured, as was all
purely human and genuine nobility. For unnumbered centuries woman was a
slave and a purchasable instrument of lust, and the much-vaunted
civilisation of the last few centuries has brought no real improvement.
Even among the so-called cultured nations of the present day, woman
remained without legal rights, and, what is worse, she was left, in order
to obtain subsistence, to sell herself to the first man she met who would
undertake to provide and 'care for' her for the sake of her attractions.
This prostitution, sanctioned by law and custom, is in its effects more
disastrous than that other, which stands forth undisguised and is
distinguished from the former only in the fact that here the shameful
bargain is made not for life, but only for years, weeks, hours. It is
common to both that the sweetest, most sacred treasure of humanity, woman's
heart, is made the subject of vulgar huckstering, a means of buying a
livelihood; and worse than the prostitution of the streets is that of the
marriage for a livelihood sanctioned by law and custom, because under its
pestilential poison-breath not only the dignity and happiness of the
living, but the sap and strength of future generations are blasted and
destroyed. As love, that sacred instinct which should lead the wife into
the arms of the husband, united with whom she might bequeath to the next
generation its worthiest members, had become the only means of gain within
her reach woman was compelled to dishonour herself, and in herself to
dishonour the future of the race.

Happiness and dignity, as well as the future salvation of humanity, equally
demanded that woman should be delivered from the dishonourable necessity of
seeing in her husband a provider, in marriage the only refuge from material
need. But neither should woman be consigned to common labour. This would be
in equal measure prejudicial both to the happiness of the living and to the
character and vigour of future generations. It is as useless as it is
injurious to wish to establish the equality of woman by allowing her to
compete with man in earning her bread--useless, because such a permission,
of which advantage could be taken only in exceptional cases, would afford
no help to the female sex as a whole; injurious, because woman cannot
compete with man and yet be true to her nobler and tenderer duties. And
those duties do not lie in the kitchen and the wardrobe, but in the
cultivation of the beautiful in the adult generation on the one hand, and
of the intellectual and physical development of the young on the other.
Therefore, in the interests not only of herself, but also of man, and in
particular of the future race, woman must be altogether withdrawn from the
struggle for the necessaries of life; she must be no wheel in the
bread-earning machinery, she must be a jewel in the heart of humanity. Only
one kind of 'work' is appropriate to woman--that of the education of
children and, at most, the care of the sick and infirm. In the school and
by the sick-bed can womanly tenderness and care find a suitable
apprenticeship for the duties of the future home, and in such work may the
single woman earn wages so far as she wishes to do so. At the same time,
our principles secured perfect liberty to woman. She was not forbidden to
engage in any occupation, and isolated instances have occurred of women
doing so, particularly in intellectual callings, but public opinion in
Freeland approved of this only in exceptional cases--that is, when special
gifts justified such action; and it was our women chiefly who upheld this
public opinion.

The fact that the maintenance allowance for women was fixed at one-fourth
less than that for men--and the constituent assembly confirmed not only the
principle, but the proposed ratio of the different maintenance
allowances--was not the expression of any lower estimate of the _claim_ of
woman, but was due simply to the consideration that the _requirements_ of
woman are less than those of man. We acted upon the calculation that a
woman with her thirty per cent. of the average labour-earnings of a
Freeland producer was as well provided for as a maintenance-receiving man
with his forty per cent.; and experience fully verified this calculation.

Not only had the single woman or the widow a right to a maintenance, but
the married woman also had a similar right, though only to one-half the
amount. This right was based upon the principle that even the wife ought
not to be thrown upon the husband for maintenance and made dependent upon
him. As in housekeeping the woman's activity is partly called forth by her
own personal needs, it was right that some of the burden of maintenance
should be taken from the husband, and only a part of it left as a common
charge to both. With the birth of children, the family burden is afresh
increased, and, as this is specially connected with the wife, we increase
her maintenance allowance until it reaches again the full allowance of a
single woman--that is, thirty per cent. The allowances would be as follows:

A childless family 15 per cent.
A family with one child 20 "
" " two children 25 "
" " three or more children 30 "
A working widow with a child 5 "
" " " two children 10 "
" " " three or more children 15 "
An independent woman 30 "
" " " with a child 35 "
" " " with two children 40 "
" " " with three or more children 45 "

Just as the women's and children's maintenance-claims accumulated according
to circumstances, so was it with those claims and the claims of men unable
to work, and old men. The maximum that could be drawn for maintenance was
not less than seventy per cent. of the average income, and this happened in
the cases--which were certainly rare--in which a married man who had a
claim had three or more children under age.

The fourth fundamental principle--the extension of the franchise to adult
women--calls for no special comment. It need only be remarked that this law
included the negroes residing in Freeland. This was conditioned, of course,
by the exclusion from the exercise of political rights of all who were
unable to read and write--an exclusion which was automatically secured by
requiring all votes to be given in the voter's own handwriting. We took
considerable pains not only to teach our negroes reading and writing, but
also to give them other kinds of knowledge; and as our efforts were in
general followed by good results, our black brethren gradually participated
in all our rights.

A more detailed explanation is, however, required by the fifth section of
the fundamental laws, according to which the community exercised their
control over all public affairs not through _one_, but through several
co-ordinated administrative boards, elected separately by the community. To
this regulation the administrative authorities of Freeland owed their
astonishing special knowledge of details, and the public life of Freeland
its equally unexampled quiet and the absence of any deeply felt, angry
party passions. In the States of Europe and America, only the executive
consists of men who are chosen--or are supposed to be thus chosen--on
account of their special knowledge and qualification for the branches of
the public service at the head of which they respectively stand. Even this
is subject to very important limitations; in fact, with respect to the
parliamentary constitutions of Europe and America, it can be truthfully
asserted that those who are placed at the head of the different branches of
the administration only too often know very little about the weighty
affairs which they have to superintend. The assemblies from which and by
whose choice parliamentary ministers are placed in office are, as a rule,
altogether incapable of choosing qualified men, for the reason that
frequently there are none such in their midst. It does not follow from this
that parliamentary orators and politicians by profession do not generally
understand the duties of their office better than those favourites of power
and of blind fortune who hold the helm in non-parliamentary countries; but
experts they are not, and cannot be. Yet, as has been said, the organs of
the executive at least _ought_, to be such, and by a current fiction they
are held to be such; and a man who specially distinguishes himself in any
department thereby earns a claim--though a subordinate one--to receive
further employment in that department of the public service. For the
legislative bodies outside of Freeland, on the other hand, special
knowledge is not even theoretically a qualification. The men who make laws
and control the administration of them, need, in theory, to have not the
least knowledge of the matters to which these laws refer. The support of
the electors is usually quite independent of the amount of such knowledge
possessed by the representatives, who are chosen not as men of special
knowledge, but as men of 'sound understanding.'