Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/349

Rh 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.

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 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