Appendix 



Periodical Distributions to Obviate Accumulations of 



Wealth 



From Kropotkin's Mutual Aid^ p. 97. (Heinemann, 

 1908.) 



" (The Eskimos) have an original means for obviating 

 the inconveniences arising from a personal accumulation 

 of wealth — which would soon destroy their tribal unity. 

 When a man has grown rich he convokes the folk of his 

 clan to a great festival, and after much eating, distributes 

 among them all his fortune. On the Yukon river Dall 

 saw an Aleoute family distributing in this way ten guns, 

 ten full fur dresses, two hundred strings of beads, numerous 

 blankets, ten wolf furs, two hundred beavers and five 

 hundred zibellines. After that they took off their festival 

 dresses, and putting on old ragged furs, addressed a few 

 words to their kinsfolk, saying that, though they are now 

 poorer than any one of them, they have won their friend- 

 ship. ^ Like distributions of wealth appear to be a regular 

 habit with the Eskimos, and to take place at a certain season, 

 after an exhibition of all that has been obtained during the 

 year. In my (Kropotkin) opinion, these distributions 

 reveal a very old institution, contemporaneous with the 

 first apparition of personal wealth ; they must have been 

 a means for re-establishing equality among the members 

 of the clan, after it had been disturbed by the enrichment 

 of the few. The periodical redistribution of land and the 

 periodical abandonment of all debts, which took place in 

 historical times with so many different races (Semites, 

 Aryans, etc.), must have been a survival of that old 

 custom." 



» Dall, Alaska and ils Resources, Cambridge, U.S., 1870. 

 285 



