But why does primitive man desire to abandon his original state and set out upon an arduous never-ending journey? Why does he wish to change his mild paternal government, to relinquish his title to lands as broad as his arm can defend, with all therein contained, the common property of his people? Why does he wish to give up his wild freedom, his native independence, and place upon his limbs the fetters of a social and political despotism? He does not. The savage hates civilization as he hates his deadliest foe; its choicest benefits he hates more than the direst ills of his own unfettered life. He is driven to it; driven to it by extraneous influences, without his knowledge and against his will; he is driven to it by this Soul of Progress. It is here that this progressional phenomenon again appears outside of man and in direct opposition to the will of man; it is here that the principle of evil again comes in and stirs men up to the accomplishment of a higher destiny. By it Adam, the first of recorded savages, was driven from Eden, where otherwise he would have remained forever, and remained uncivilized. By it our ancestors were impelled to abandon their simple state, and organize more heterogeneous complex forms of social life. And it is a problem for each nation to work out for itself. Millions of money are expended for merely proselyting purposes, when if the first principles of civilization were well understood, a more liberal manner of teaching would prevail.
Every civilization has its peculiarities, its idiosyncrasies. Two individuals attempting the same thing differ in the performance; so civilization evolving under incidental and extraneous causes takes an individuality in every instance. This is why civilizations will not coalesce; this is why the Spaniards could make the Aztecs accept their civilization only at the point of the sword. Development engendered by one set of phenomena will not suit the developments of other circumstances. The government, religion, and customs of one people will not fit another people any more than the coat of one person will suit the form of another. Thought runs in different channels; the happiness of one is not the happiness of another; development springs from inherent necessity, and one species cannot be engrafted on another.
Let us now examine the phenomena of government and religion in their application to the evolution of societies, and we shall better understand how the wheels of progress are first set in motion,—and by religion I do not mean creed or credulity, but that natural cultus inherent 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 the 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.
GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION.
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 migratory skirmishes; these and the like are deemed barbarous, while every nation of the civilized world maintains a standing army, applies all the arts and inventions of civilization to the science of killing, and upon sufficient provocation, as a disputed boundary or a fancied insult, no greater nor more important than 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 difficulty. War, like other evils which have proved instruments 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 simplest principles 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 difficulties 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 inseparable 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 not until a moral inherent strength arises sufficient to burst the fetters of despotism, is a people fit for a better or milder form of government; for not until this inherent power is manifest is there sufficient cohesive force in society to hold it together without being hooped by some such band as despotism. Besides thus cementing society, war generates many virtues, such as courage, discipline, obedience, chivalrous bearing, noble thought; and the virtues of war, as well as its vices, help to mould national character.
Slavery to the present day has its defenders, and from the first it has been a preventive of a worse evil,—slaughter. Savages make slaves of their prisoners of war, and if they do not preserve them for slaves they kill them. The origin of the word, servus, from servare, to preserve, denotes humane thought rather than cruelty. Discipline is always necessary to development, and slavery is another form of savage discipline. Then, by systems of slavery, great works were accomplished, which, in the absence of arts and inventions, would not have been possible without slavery. And again, in early societies where leisure is so necessary to mental cultivation and so difficult to obtain, slavery, by promoting leisure, aids elevation and refinement. Slaves constitute a distinct class, devoted wholly to labor, thereby enabling another class to live without labor, or to labor with the intellect rather than with the hands.
Primordially, society was an aggregation of nomadic families, every head of a family having equal rights, and every individual such power and influence as he could acquire and maintain. In all the ordinary avocations of savage life this was sufficient; there was room for all, and the widest liberty was possessed by each. And in this happy state does mankind ever remain until forced out of it. In unity and coöperation alone can great things be accomplished; but men will not unite until forced to it. Now in times of war—and with savages war is the rule and not the exception—some closer union is necessary to avoid extinction; for other things being equal, the people who are most firmly united and most strongly ruled are sure to prevail in war. The idea of unity in order to be effectual must be embodied in a unit; some one must be made chief, and the others must obey, as in a band of wild beasts that follow the one most conspicuous for its prowess and cunning. But the military principle alone would never lay the foundation of a strong government, for with every cessation from hostilities there would be a corresponding relaxation of government.
GOVERNMENT FORCED UPON MAN.
Another necessity for government here arises, but which likewise is not the cause of government, for government springs from force and not from utility. These men do not want government, they do not want culture; how then is an arm to be found sufficiently strong to bridle their wild passions? In reason they are children, in passion men; to restrain the strong passions of strong non-reasoning men requires a power; whence is this power to come? It is in the earlier stage of government that despotism assumes its most intense forms. The more passionate, and lawless, and cruel the people, the more completely do they submit to a passionate, lawless, and cruel prince; the more ungovernable their nature, the more slavish are they in their submission to government; the stronger the element to be governed, the stronger must be the government.