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.
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
