farmer could thank his stars, if he was granted permission to live as a tenant on one-sixth of the product of his labor and to pay five-sixths to his new master in the form of rent. Worse still, if the sale of the lot did not bring sufficient returns to cover the debt, or if such a debt had been contracted without a lien, then the debtor had to sell his children into slavery abroad in order to satisfy the claim of the creditor. The sale of the children by the father—that was the first fruit of paternal law and monogamy! And if that did not satisfy the bloodsuckers, they could sell the debtor himself into slavery. Such was the pleasant dawn of civilization among the people of Attica.
Formerly, while the condition of the people was in keeping with gentile traditions, a similar downfall would have been impossible. But here it had come about, nobody knew how. Let us return for a moment to the Iroquois. The state of things that had imposed itself on the Athenians almost without their doing, so to say, and assuredly against their will, was inconceivable among the Indians. There the ever unchanging mode of production could at no time generate such conflicts as a distinction between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, caused by external conditions. The Iroquois were far from controlling the forces of nature, but within the limits drawn for them by nature they dominated their own production. Apart from a failure of the crops in their little gardens, the exhaustion of the fish supply in their lakes and rivers or of the game stock in their forests, they always knew what would be the outcome of their mode of gaining a living. A more or less abundant supply of food, that would come of it. But the outcome could never be any unpremeditated social upheavals, breaking of gentile bonds or division of the gentiles against one another by conflicting class interests. Production was carried on in the most limited manner; but—the producers controlled their own product. This immense advantage of barbarian production was lost in the transition to civilization. To win it back on the basis of man's present gigantic control of nature and of the free association rendered possible by it, that will be the task of the next generations.