Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



through the female line, and turned the woman 

 into the property of the man ; it brought with 

 it private ownership of land, and so created a class 

 of landless aliens, and a whole system of rent, 

 mortgage, interest, etc. ; it introduced slavery, 

 serfdom and wage-labour, which are only various 

 forms of the dominance of one class over another ; 

 and to rivet these authorities it created the State 

 and the policeman. Every race that we know, 

 that has become what we call civilised, has passed 

 through these changes ; and though the details 

 may vary and have varied a little, the main order 

 of change has been practically the same in all cases. 

 We are justified therefore in calling Civilisation 

 a historical stage, whose commencement dates 

 roughly from the division of society into classes 

 founded on property and the adoption of class- 

 government. Lewis Morgan in his Ancient Society 

 adds the invention of writing and the consequent 

 adoption of written History and written Law ; 

 Engels in his Ursprung der Familie, des Privat- 

 eigenthums und des Staats points out the im- 

 portance of the appearance of the Merchant, 

 even in his most primitive form, as a mark 

 of the civilisation-period ; while the French 

 writers of the last century made a good point in 

 inventing the term nations policees (policemanised 

 nations) as a substitute for civilised nations ; for 

 perhaps there is no better or more universal 

 mark of the period we are considering, and of its 

 social degradation, than the appearance of the 

 crawling phenomenon in question. [Imagine the 



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