Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen
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late and early. They have been good borrowers, having borrowed persistently, ubiquitously and well. The proof of their exceptional capacity as borrowers is the general run of the life-history of these populations and their culture. As a general proposition, they appear not to have suffered a disproportionate setback in population or in productive efficiency even at those epochs when the borrowing took on a wholesale character, as, e.g., on the transition to bronze, or later to iron, or later still in the sweeping shift from paganism to Christianity. In each of these instances, of course, something of a serious disturbance and impairment is traceable, at least in the two latter episodes; but even the shift to the Christian faith appears to have involved only a relatively transient decline, and in each case this cultural region comes out of the era of transition apparently stronger than before the intrusion of new cultural elements took place. As would be expected, the last named, the shift to Christianity, was the most demoralising of these adventures in cultural borrowing; since this was, in the main and immediately, a borrowing of immaterial, institutional elements, without any corresponding gain in technology; so that in this instance the shock to the cultural scheme came from factors which did not carry such an immediate and intrinsic compensation for the resulting derangement as did the technological change involved in the introduction of the metals. It is, of course, also possible to overstate both the magnitude and the abruptness of the change from the pagan to the Christian scheme in the Baltic region; indeed, it has not been unusual to do so. But when all is said the fact remains that through all their borrowing of expedients, information, institutions and ideals no collapse has overtaken this culture, such as either to reduce the population to virtual extinction - as has happened in analogous circumstances, e.g., in Tasmania, Australia, various parts of Polynesia and America, in a more or less sweeping fashion - or to substitute a substantially alien cultural scheme for what prevailed before the coming of the innovation in technology or in use and wont.
Not that there have been no serious, or even alarming, conjunctures in the cultural history of the Baltic peoples; it is only that they have come through without that degree of discontinuity that would involve a substitution of a new race (or racial mixture) or a new scheme of civilisation alien to what went before. There is at least one juncture in the bronze age when the derangement of the conditions of life in the Baltic country appears to have fallen into really precarious shape, - between the second and third periods of the bronze age in Montelius’s chronology, or between the “early” and the “late” bronze age as more commonly spoken of, - and there is suggestive evidence of something of a break at a later point in the sequence, before the com-ing of iron.11 Something of grave import, in the way of a difficult interval, may also be surmised in the earlier half of the iron age. What may have been the nature of these episodes that so have an untoward look is at the best a matter of surmise, with little chance of reaching anything like a secure conclusion in the present state of the archaeological evidence. There may have been something like hostile contact with alien peoples outside, or internal dissensions, or an epidemic disease, such, e.g., as the black death, or the plague that visited Athens in the fifth century; or it may conceivably have been nothing more serious than an interruption of trade relations with the Mediterranean and Black Sea, due to extensive raiding or to the shifting of peoples in the intervening territory.
Through it all, however, the continuity of the cultural sequence is visible, as is also the efficiency of this culture, in the biological sense that the population does not seriously or enduringly fall off. The latter test is perhaps the more conclusive. So much so that the Baltic region is known to antiquity as a “cradle of nations” even before anything much else is known of it by the civilised peoples of antiquity and their writers. That it deserved that name and continued to make it good is seen in the inexhaustible barbarian migrations that continued to run outward from the Baltic center.
The presumptive characteristics of this culture, then, as one gets an impression from a study of its antiquities and by inference from the conditions of life which the country offers and from the make-up of its population, may tentatively be set down. It would be a small-scale culture, in the sense that the local units would be of no great magnitude; although it may be conceived to have covered a relatively extensive area in the aggregate and to have covered this area with a fairly dense population; it habitually stood in fairly close communication with other peoples outside, even over relatively long distances, principally by way of trade; these peoples borrowed freely, both in technological and in other institutional matters,12 and made notably free and efficient use of all borrowed elements. The scheme of institutions, economic, civil, domestic and religious, that would fit these circumstances would be of a relatively slight fixity, flexible, loose-knit, and naive, in the sense that they would be kept in hand under discretionary control of neighborly common sense, - the continued borrowing and the facility with which borrowed elements are assimilated and turned to account goes far to enforce this conclusion.
Altogether its most impressive traits are a certain industrial efficiency, particularly efficiency in the mechanic arts, and ist conduciveness to the multiplication of its people; whereas its achievements in political organisation or in the domain of art and religion are relatively slight. It is a civilisation of workmanship and fecundity rather than of dynastic power, statecraft, priestcraft or artistic achievement.
III. The Pagan Anarchy
No contemporary, or nearly contemporary, record is to be had of the culture of the Baltic peoples prior to their conversion to Christianity and their consequent entrance into the history of Christendom. Consequently no direct evidence is at hand as to the institutions of that culture, except such as shows the state of things in retrospect, as seen by writers who had, in a good measure at least, left that culture behind and saw it as more or less an alien state of society. Any presentation of the state of the Baltic culture in prehistoric times, in any but the material respect, therefore, must be of the nature of a reconstruction on the basis of insufficient documents and circumstantial evidence. Yet such is the need of a perspicuous conception of this prehistoric state of society, for any endeavor to understand the long-term bent and hereditary genius of the English and German peoples, considered as an offshoot of the Baltic civilisation, that it seems necessary to accept the hazard of the adventure and make the most of the resources available to this end. At its best the material leaves much to be desired; but any inquiry into human institutions will in such a case have to fall back on the aphorism that “The best is always good enough,” and so make the most of what is to be had.
Looking back through the perspective given by the late-pagan culture of the Scandinavian countries, then, a re-construction of the prehistoric state of society on the Baltic seaboard may be attempted, in rough outline and in a provisional way, as seen against the background afforded by the archaeological material of this region. The purpose of such a tentative delineation is to present, as near as may be, the scheme of life and the state of the industrial arts to which the north-European peoples of today are, by hereditary temperament and capacity, presumably best suited; to which, in other words they are adapted by birth, and into which they would fall, if circumstances permitted, as their “state of nature”; and from which they have been diverted only by force of habituation under pressure of a later state of the industrial arts that requires a different manner of life, essentially alien to the north-European blond-hybrid population.13
In the civil organisation all power vests finally in the popular assembly, made up, in effect, though not by strict formal specification, of the freehold farmers; including under that designation the able-bodied male citizens of substantial standing, but not formally excluding any part of the free population, and perhaps not even with absolute rigor excluding all women.14 This deliberative assembly exercised the powers, such as were exercised, of legislation, executive (extremely slight), and judiciary. There is little, if any, police power, though there are established conventions of police regulations; and there is no conception of the “King’s peace,” outside the king’s farmyard; nor is there any conception of a “public peace” to be enforced by public authority of any kind, outside the precincts of the popular assembly.
What stands out all over this civil fabric is the evidence of its resting on the assumption of