A pregnant suggestion is offered as to the causes of that great migration of barbarians which resulted in the overthrow of the Roman empire. “It is desiccation, a quite recent desiccation continued still at a speed which we formerly were not prepared to admit. Against it man was powerless. When the inhabitants of North-West Mongolia and East Turkestan saw that water was abandoning them they had no course open to them but to move down the broad valleys leading to the lowlands, and to thrust westward the inhabitants of the plains.” And so the one great war recorded of the barbarians, was thrust upon them by absolute physical necessity. The barbarians had no social problem, for that private property in the means of life which constitutes the foundation of modern individualism, and from which the degradation and poverty of modern civilization results, was unknown among them. They were communists. The interest of one was the care of all. Nothing was owned privately until it reached the very point of consumption and not always then, as food was largely eaten at communal meals. This social form still survives especially in Russia, and Kropotkin says: “The sight of a Russian commune mowing a meadow--the men rivalling each other in their advance with the scythe, while the women turn the grass over and throw it up into heaps--is one of the most inspiring sights; it shows what human work might be and ought to be. The hay, in such case, is divided among the separate households, and it is evident that no one has the right of taking hay from a neighbor’s stack without his permission; but the limitation of this last rule among the Caucasian Ossetes is most noteworthy. When the cuckoo cries and announces that spring is coming, and that the meadows will soon be clothed again with grass, every one in need has the right of taking from a neighbor’s stack the hay he wants for his cattle. The old communal rights are thus reasserted, as if to prove how contrary unbridled individualism is to human nature.” When the early Christians “had all things in common,” they were not reaching forward to modern Socialism; they were harking back to this primitive communism which shed its joy and plenty on the sons and daughters of men for a thousand generations. These barbarian communists were thorough democrats, and their folkmotes, where everybody gathered and had their say, were the only semblance of government they possessed, and so thoroughly were its decisions respected that no officers were needed to enforce them. They were also our superiors not only in refusing to work their children, but also in scorning to beat them. They said: “The body of the child reddens from the stroke, but the face of him who strikes reddens from shame.”