SAVAGISM AND CIVILIZATION. 335 



Let us now examine the phenomena of government and religion in 

 their application to the evolution of societies, and we shall better un- 

 derstand how the wheels of progress are first set in motion and by- 

 religion I do not mean creed or credulity, but that natural cultiis in- 

 herent in humanity, which is a very different thing. Government is 

 early felt to be a need of society ; the enforcement of laws which shall 

 bring order out of social chaos ; laws which shall restrain tlie vicious, 

 protect the innocent, and punish the guilty; which shall act as a 

 shield to inherent budding morality. But, before government, there 

 must arise some influence which will band men together. An early 

 evil to which civilization is indebted is war ; the propensity of man 

 unhappily not yet entirely overcome for killing his fellow-man. 



The human race has not yet attained that state of homogeneous 

 felicity which we sometimes imagine ; upon the surface, we yet bear 

 many of the relics of barbarism ; under cover of manners, we hide still 

 more. War is a barbarism which civilization only intensifies, as indeed 

 civilization intensifies every barbarism which it does not eradicate 

 or cover up. The right of every individual to act as his own avenger; 

 trial by combat ; justice dependent upon the passion or caprice of the 

 judge or ruler, and not upon fixed law; hereditary feuds and migra- 

 tory skirmishes ; these and the like are that which moved our savage 

 ancestors to like conduct, falls to, and, after a respectable civilized 

 butchery of fifty or a hundred thousand men, ceases fighting, and 

 returns, perhaps, to right and reason as a basis for the settlement of 

 the difiiculty. War, like other evils which have proved instrunents 

 of good, should by this time have had its day, should have served its 

 purpose. Standing armies, whose formation was one of the first and 

 most important steps in association and partition of labor, are but the 

 manifestation of a lingering necessity for the use of brute force in place 

 of moral force in the settlement of national disputes. Surely, rational 

 beings who retain the most irrational practices concerning the sim- 

 plest pi-inciples of social life cannot boast of a very high order of what 

 we are pleased to call civilization. Morality, commerce, literature, 

 and industry, all that tends toward elevation of intellect, is directly 

 opposed to the warlike spirit. As intellectual activity increases, the 

 taste for war decreases, for an appeal to war in the settlement of difii- 

 culties is an appeal from the intellectual to the physical, from reason 

 to brute force. 



Despotism is an evil, but despotism is as essential to progress as 

 any good. In some form despotism is an insei^arable adjunct of war. 

 An individual or an idea may be the despot ; but, without cohesion, 

 without a strong central power, real or imaginary, there can be no 

 unity, and without unity no protracted warfare. In the first stages 

 of government, despotism is as essential as in the last it is noxious. 

 It holds society together when nothing else' would hold it, and at a 

 time when its very existence depends upon its being so held. And 



