meet, and thus it is that men who imagine that they march at the
head of the human race and lead the civilization of the age, are
really in principle retrograding to the barbarism of the past, or
taking their place with nations on whom the light of civilization
has never yet dawned. All is not gold that glisters.

The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a
private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization
is, that it makes it a public trust. Barbarism knows only
persons; civilization asserts and maintains the state. With
barbarians the authority of the patriarch is developed simply by
way of explication; in civilized states it is developed by way of
transformation. Keeping in mind this distinction, it may be
maintained that all systems of government, as a simple historical
fact, have been developed from the patriarchal. The patriarchal
has preceded them all, and it is with the patriarchal that the
human race has begun its career. The family or household is not
a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and,
historically considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well
as the initial or inchoate nation. But its simple direct
development gives us barbarism, or what is called Oriental
despotism, and which nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom.
It is found only in pagan and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in
the secular order is republican, and continues and completes the
work of Greece and Rome. It meets with little permanent success
in any patriarchal or despotic nation, and must either find or
create civilization, which has been developed from the patriarchal
system by way of transformation.

But, though the patriarchal system is the earliest form of