“A blow in the water will startle any one, if it is given unexpectedly,” said he, “and our present discomfiture is only of that nature!” he continued, with a peculiar movement of the hand, and in language whose obscure meaning they evidently understood. “Brethren, our labors in a small sphere are only discontinued that we may resume the work on a grander scale; for the trowel of the Freemasons shall yet build the arch that covers the grave of the greater as well as of the smaller!”
The other Freemasons bowed affirmatively to the words of the grandmaster, and followed him out of the salon.
[WHAT IS CIVILIZATION?]
The word civilization, adopted into almost every European language, is derived from the Latin of civitas, a city, and civis, a citizen. Webster thus defines civilization: “It consists in the progressive improvement of society considered as a whole, and of all the individual members of which it is composed.” And further: “A well-ordered state of society, culture, refinement.” Now, it is worth while to inquire into the tangible ideal of that people to whose language we are indebted for this comprehensive word. The Romans considered their empire the appointed head, by divine right, of the whole world. They could not take in the idea of their supremacy being disputed, much less resisted, and hence the proud motto, “Civis Romanus sum,” which was meant to express the ne plus ultra of human dignity. No greater honor could be bestowed upon a stranger, whether ally or conquered foe, than to make him a Roman citizen. It was a title more valuable than that of Cæsar; it had privileges attached to it which neither the blood of a Machabee nor an Alexander could claim; it compelled greater respect than the heroism of a Leonidas or the uprightness of a Socrates. Thus early had false notions of material civilization corrupted the genuine meaning of a word which should always stand, not for political supremacy, but for moral excellence. Rome, the heart of the dominant empire which had vanquished and absorbed at least two civilizations of higher degree than its own, the Hebrew and the Greek, has transmitted to the word civilization the spirit of its intensely local autonomy. Every kindred word derived from the same root has a like meaning, especially “civility,” a synonyme of “urbanity” (from urbs, a city), thereby conveying the insinuation that city customs alone have that grace and refinement necessary to pleasant social intercourse. Another meaning naturally flowed from this arbitrary assumption of perfection to imperial Rome. Civil came to mean national as opposed to foreign; as we say, for instance, civil, for intestine, war. More or less all nations of the world have adopted this way of looking upon civilization as a local thing; and, to the greater majority of mankind, there is a certain flavor of disparagement implied in the terms foreign and foreigner. We speak in a tone of half-concealed pity of men from far-off countries, as if they must needs be a little lower in the scale of creation than our enlightened selves. We have not forgotten that “barbarian” and “foreigner” were terms used interchangeably by the Greeks, and our local pride still unconsciously crops out in the most childish and laughable demonstrations. Nothing shows better how very arbitrary is the interpretation of the word civilization than our various estimates of its essence. The Chinese who wears yellow for mourning smiles compassionately at the European in his dusky garment of sorrow; and the European who is accustomed to eat his dinner with a knife and fork thinks that a nation can hardly be civilized which tolerates the use of chop-sticks. To come nearer home, we have known an Englishman of distinguished birth and position refuse the hand of his daughter to a French diplomat, a nobleman of the old stock, an accomplished gentleman, a rich land-owner, for the weighty reason that “he was a foreigner”!
The word “barbarian” (from the Greek βάρβαρος) is given in Webster’s Dictionary as meaning, in the first and literal sense, foreign. Barber or Barbar was originally the native name of a part of the coast of Africa. The Egyptians, fearing and hating its inhabitants, used their name as a term of contumely and dread, in which sense it passed to the Greeks and Romans. Thus the kindred words barbarous and barbarity have kept the meaning of “cruel and ferocious,” but the main stock of βάρβαρος generally signifies the two almost synonymous things, “foreigner” and “barbarian”! The imitative sound of barber was applied by the Greeks to the ruder tribes whose pronunciation was most harsh and whose grammar most defective. Dr. Campbell says that the Greeks were the first to brand a foreign term in any of their writers with the odious name of barbarism. This word with the Greeks had the additional general meaning of ignorance of art and want of learning, and as such has been used by Dryden. Barbaric remains to this day the synonyme of foreign and quaint, far-fetched, as Milton, following the Greeks, has used it:
“The gorgeous East with richest hand,
Showers on her kings barbaric gold and pearl.”
But Dryden has also put the more unusual word barbarous for the same thing:
“The trappings of his horse embossed with barbarous gold.”
The misapplication of all these terms, and more especially of “civilization,” is of daily recurrence. We cannot open a newspaper without seeing its self-eulogium expressed in the term “a journal of civilization”; we cannot read a leading article on the financial prosperity of the country without finding it confidently stated that such prosperity is an infallible sign of civilization; we hear of railroads “carrying civilization” among the wild tribes of Central Africa; and we see atheism and false science parading their unhappy progress as the “march of civilization.”