compact and regular social relations. Then the barbaric nation arises, where the patriarch of one united family grows into the king or monarch of many united families. The savage horde, before merged into the patriarchal clan, is further consolidated into the barbaric nation. The rude and arbitrary regulations of the previous state are converted into settled laws and a constitutional polity. The adjustment of the power of the government, and the relations of different classes of the people to each other, become more compact, and at the same time more complex. Men are brought into more intimate connections, get more and more mutually dependent, have broader interests in common, and act more frequently in concert. In a word, they are more highly organized. But, after a time, the people rise into greater power as an element of government, which assumes a more definite and responsible shape; industry and wealth, which serve to bind distant nations, are prodigiously developed; men unite more closely, not merely for purposes of Avar, but to cultivate the innumerable arts of peace; laws are digested into complete systems; the industrial and social relations and interests of various classes are consolidated; all the arrangements of society grow more intimate and complex. The universal life of man has more aims in common; all the members of the state feel more closely bound to each other, and act more often and more in concert for comprehensive ends. This state of society is the one in which we live, and is denominated Civilization. It is the last term to which society has yet attained.
Now, who will deny that there is a vast interval between the rude social condition of the savage in his hut, to that of the merchant-prince of England or the United States? Who will deny, that the passage from one to the other denotes a great progress? Yet we have seen, that each step is marked and demonstrated by nearer approaches to a high organization. The change has been a change in organic development. Civilization is better than barbarism, barbarism than patriarchalism, patriarchalism better than savageness,—simply because they are respectively better organized. The degree of organization marks the degree of excellence. This
