Even when the barbaric nations have ceased to be nomadic, pastoral, or predatory nations, as the ancient Assyrians and Persians or modern Chinese, and have their geographical boundaries, they have still no state, no country.The nation defines the boundaries, not the boundaries the nation.The nation does not belong to the territory, but the territory to the nation or its chief.The Irish and Anglo-Saxons, in former times, held the land in gavelkind, and the territory belonged to the tribe or sept; but if the tribe held it as indivisible, they still held it as private property.The shah of Persia holds the whole Persian territory as private property, and the landholders among his subjects are held to be his tenants.They hold it from him, not from the Persian state.
The public domain of the Greek empire is in theory the private domain of the Ottoman emperor or Turkish sultan.There is in barbaric states no republic, no commonwealth; authority is parental, without being tempered by parental affection.The chief is a despot, and rules with the united authority of the father and the harshness of the proprietor.He owns the land and his subjects.
Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of the Roman Empire, however modified by the Church and by reminiscences of Graeco-Roman civilization retained by the conquered, was a barbaric constitution.The feudal monarch, as far as he governed at all, governed as proprietor or landholder, not as the representative of the commonwealth.Under feudalism there are estates, but no state.The king governs as an estate, the nobles hold their power as an estate, and the commons are represented as an estate.The whole theory of power is, that it is an estate; a private right, not a public trust.It is not without reason, then that the common sense of civilized nations terms the ages when it prevailed in Western Europe barbarous ages.
It may seem a paradox to class democracy with the barbaric constitutions, and yet as it is defended by many stanch democrats, especially European democrats and revolutionists, and by French and Germans settled in our own country, it is essentially barbaric and anti-republican.The characteristic principle of barbarism is, that power is a private or personal right, and when democrats assert that the elective franchise is a natural right of man, or that it is held by virtue of the fact that the elector is a man, they assert the fundamental principle of barbarism and despotism.This says nothing in favor of restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal suffrage.
To restrict suffrage to property-holders helps nothing, theoretically or practically.Property has of itself advantages enough, without clothing its holders with exclusive political rights and privileges, and the laboring classes any day are as trustworthy as the business classes.The wise statesman will never restrict suffrage, or exclude the poorer and more numerous classes from all voice in the government of their country.
General suffrage is wise, and if Louis Philippe had had the sense to adopt it, and thus rally the whole nation to the support of his government, he would never have had to encounter the revolution of .The barbarism, the despotism, is not in universal suffrage, but in defending the elective franchise as a private or personal right.It is not a private, but a political right, and, like all political rights, a public trust.Extremes 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.
