why people who have land and capital enslave those who have none, and we are told: because they have land and capital. But that is precisely what we want to know. The privation of the land and of the tools of labor is that very enslavement. The answer is like this: Facit dormire quia habet virtutem dormitivam. To simple people it is indubitable that the nearest cause of the enslavement of one class of men by another is money.1 They know that it is possible to cause more trouble with a ruble than with a club; it is only political economy that does not want to know it.82

These theories on money respecting production do not appear of such nature that they could be applied in other countries besides Russia. The Russian enlightened feudalism of the nineteenth century gave Tolstoy excellent material and a good reason to attack it with all his strength, and he was right. But his assault on political economy for its "omission" to treat the natural objects in production of wealth are not justifiable, and cannot be admitted. In the first place, any better political economy does not consider these objects at length, because nobody lays claims on them, as Tolstoy himself avowed this fact. The gifts of nature cannot be appropriated by anyone. They are inexhaustible and unlimited as compared with the wants of men. Therefore they never have a direct value to be taken as factors of production."

83

In modern industrial society the essential factors of production, among the others, are money and wealth. Wealth is usually regarded as the object of consumption, as an agent of production.84 The idea of wealth, however, is often confounded with the idea of money. John S. Mill has justly remarked that most people regard money as wealth, because by that means they provide almost all their necessities. In the same sense is the assertion of the French economist, Charles Gide, when he noted that in all times and in all places, except among savages, money has occupied an exceptional Op. cit., chap. xvii, p. 109.

81

88 Cf. W. Roscher, System der Volkswirtschaft, Bd. I (1918), Kap. i, sec. 31, pp. 86-87.

84 Cf. A. Marshall, Principles of Economics, Book IV (London, 1907), chap. vii, sec. 1, p. 220.

place in the thoughts and desires of men. People regard it, if not as the only wealth, at any rate as by far the most important form of wealth. They appear to measure the value of all other wealth by the quantity of money that can be obtained in exchange for it. Être riche, c'est avoir soit de l'argent, soit les moyens de s'en procurer.8

85

Tolstoy, of course, has no clear distinction, either of wealth or of money. He confused these notions, as did many authors before and after him. To define wealth exactly is verily a difficult task; and to dwell upon it impartially is perhaps still more difficult. There are two theories in "plutology" regarding the definition of wealth: first, that wealth is all exchangeable and valuable commodities; and second, that it is power. Representatives of the first theory are Henry Fawcet and John S. Mill; of the second, Hobbes and Carey. Tolstoy is nearer to those theorizers who teach that wealth is power than to those who define it as commodities. Yet, we should err gravely if we assumed that between Tolstoy's interpretation of wealth and that of other economists exists any conformity. For instance, Carey defines wealth as the power to command nature. Tolstoy defines it as the power to command other people who have neither wealth nor "the signs" of wealth. "Only in the Pentateuch wealth is the highest good and reward."88 In everyday life wealth is evil, deception, and cause of enslavement. To be honest and at the same time to work for Mammon is something quite impossible. This ethical principle may be true. But our theorist forgets that questions of what people ought to do, and questions of what it will profit men and nations to do, belong to different categories of science. He forgets that ethical ideas should not be read into the conceptions of wealth and money when they are employed in their everyday sense. Professor S. J. ChapmanR justly says, "If our aim is to vindicate what people ought to want

85

87

Cours d'Économie Politique (Paris, 1913), chap. iii, p. 340.

88

Cf. The Four Gospels, Harmonized and Translated (Wiener's ed., Vol. XIV, 1904), chap. ii, p. 109.

87 Ibid., p. 288.

88 Political Economy (London, 1912), chap. ii, p. 60.

instead of what they do want, we had better speak of ethical wealth and ethical value."

Tolstoy was very near to those reform writers who taught that political economy must be regarded as a part of moral philosophy. But he was not the first social reformer who has introduced the moral elements into the study of economic phenomena. As it is known, Aristotle's interpretations of money are in the Nichomachean Ethics. The political economy of Plato and Xenophon rests on moral bases.89 Medieval scholastics and theologians raised many problems which were in connection with the searching inquiry as to what constitutes a just price, and this inquiry belonged to the ethics of political economy."0 Adam Smith and John S. Mill adopted the double rôle, to be economists and at the same time ethical teachers. The French economists Rossi, De Laveley, and Le Play introduced the ethical principle into the science of wealth as well.

There are several such examples of "ethical interpretation" of economics among the most illustrious thinkers. They may be exculpated for their disagreements only on the ground that they lived in times when social science was in its infancy, when scientific ideas were not divided into definite spheres. Good, gentle Tolstoy may also be pardoned for his "blunders of expression" because he made them in his fanatic love of truth, and "truth, although it is truth, does not always seem true," says a French proverb. To treat the delicate and intricate complexity of money and wealth, and never mislead, one should be a higher-man, a superman. But supermen are not yet born in this pitiful world of moans, as Nietzsche once fitly objected.o1

8 Cf. J. A. Blanqui, Histoire de l'Economie Politique en Europe, chap. iii. Cf. also Henri J. L. Baudrillart, Des Rapports de l'Economie Politique et de la Morale, Lec. II (Paris, 1883).

"See J. N. Keynes, The Scope and Method of Political Economy (3d ed., London, 1904), chap. ii, sec. 5.

91 For a comparative study of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, as two opposite poles of nineteenth-century thought, see the brilliant article of Professor F. H. Giddings, "The Gospel of Non-Resistance," Democracy and Empire (New York, 1912), chap. xx, pp. 341-57.

[To be concluded]

THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE SAXONS AS A FIELD FOR THE STUDY OF GERMAN SOCIAL ORIGINS

JAMES WESTFALL THOMPSON
University of Chicago

ABSTRACT

The Saxons were the latest of all the German tribes to enter the orbit of medieval civilization. They were neither Christian nor civilized before 800. But in spite of these two great transformations, the Saxons still tenaciously clung to many ancient barbaric and pagan ways and customs. The difference between the Saxons and the other Germanic peoples, even in the Middle Ages, was observed by historical writers. This article is largely compiled from such contemporary comment. It aims to show that a somewhat neglected field for the study of social origins is to be found in the early history of the Saxons. Compared with the study of the Germans of the fifth century, a study which has grown stale from much exploitation, that of the Saxons of the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth century has remarkable freshness.

The history, institutions, and culture of the Germans of the fifth century have for three generations been a hunting-ground for the student of social origins. Almost nothing new may be found there. It is threshing old straw to study them.

But there was a great German tribe living in late Roman times where their descendants live to this day, namely, the Saxons of Lower Germany, who did not come in contact with Roman civilization or Christianity, as the other Germans had done, in the fifth century, and knew nothing of the Romano-Christian-German culture of early medieval Europe until the end of the eighth century. Accordingly, a study of early Saxon history when this people, still in a state of barbarism, first came in contact with medieval civilization, has a freshness that is denied to the earlier period. For, compared with the study of the social origins and practices of the early Germans, that of the Saxons has been neglected by the sociologist.

In superficial area Saxony was the greatest of the German tribal duchies. It included the entire territory between the lower Elbe and Saale rivers almost to the Rhine. Between the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser it bordered upon the North Sea. The only part of the territory which lay across the Elbe were the little coun

ties of Holstein and Ditmarsch. Adam of Bremen, writing in the eleventh century, compared the shape of Saxony (including Thuringia) to a triangle, and estimated that from angle to angle the distance was eight days' journey. Roughly speaking, Old Saxony was an equilateral triangle measuring approximately two hundred miles on each side.

For the most part, the land was a huge plain, save on the south where it rose into hills and the low mountainous country of the Harz and Hesse, where are the sources of the Weser, the Ems, the Lippe, and the Ruhr rivers. This low divide was all that separated the country of the Saxons from their ancient enemies and ultimate conquerors, the Franks. The lack of clear physical definition along this border, from time immemorial, had been the cause of incessant tribal conflict between the Saxon and the Frank.1

Along the Frisian border and in the bottom lands of the Ems and the Weser the soil was very marshy until drained by Dutch and Flemish colonists in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But, as a whole, Saxony was a rich alluvial plain of alternating prairie and forest, the fertility of which was highly praised in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by Adam of Bremen and Helmold, the ablest North German chroniclers of the feudal period."

As a people the Saxons were divided into four kindred groups: the Angrians, along the right bank of the Weser; the Westphalians, along the Ems and the Lippe; the Eastphalians, on the left bank of the Weser; and the Nordalbingians, in modern SchleswigHolstein. But not even with these four tribal groups was the term of tribal division reached. For the Saxon, "nation" was really a loose congeries of clans of kindred stock. For example, the

....

History can add little to or take little from Einhard's brief statement in Vita Karoli, chap. vii: ". . . . Termini videlicet nostri et illorum paene ubique in plano contigui, praeter pauca loca, in quibus vel silvae majores vel montium juga interjecta utrorumque agros certo limite disterminant, in quibus caedes et rapinae et incendia vicissim fieri non cessabant."

'Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, I, 1, 2; Helmold, Chronicon, I, 12, 88.

The Chauci and the Chauci minores of Tacitus may be the earliest recorded division between the Eastphalians and the Westphalians.

*"Sed variis divisa modis plebs omnis habebat. Quot pagos tot pene duces," Poetae Latini, MGH.SS., IV, 8.