When or by what combination of events this transformation was effected, history does not inform us.The first-born of Adam, we are told, built a city, and called it after his son Enoch; but there is no evidence that it was constituted a municipality.The earliest traces of the civil order proper are found in the Greek and Italian republics, and its fullest and grandest developments are found in Rome, imperial as well as republican.It was no doubt preceded by the patriarchal system, and was historically developed from it, but by way of accretion rather than by simple explication.It has in it an element that, if it exists in the patriarchal constitution, exists there only in a different form, and the transformation marks the passage from the economical order to the political, from the barbaric to the civil constitution of society, or from barbarism to civilization.
The word civilization stands opposed to barbarism, and is derived from civitas--city or state.The Greeks and Romans call all tribes and nations in which authority is vested in the chief, as distinguished from the state, barbarians.The origin of the word barbarian, barbarus, or........, is unknown, and its primary sense can be only conjectured.Webster regards its primary sense as foreign, wild, fierce; but this could not have been its original sense; for the Greeks and Romans never termed all foreigners barbarians, and they applied the term to nations that had no inconsiderable culture and refinement of manners, and that had made respectable progress in art and sciences--the Indians, Persians, Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.They applied the term evidently in a political, not an ethical or an aesthetical sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in which the state was not developed, and in which the nation was personal, not territorial, and authority was held as a private right, not as a public trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or tribe, and not in the state; for they never term any others barbarians.
Republic is opposed not to monarchy, in the modern European sense, but to monarchy in the ancient or absolute sense.
Lacedaemon had kings; yet it was no less republican than Athens;and Rome was called and was a republic under the emperors no less than under the consuls.Republic, respublica, by the very force of the term, means the public wealth, or, in good English, the commonwealth; that is, government founded not on personal or private wealth, but on the public wealth, public territory, or domain, or a Government that vests authority in the nation, and attaches the nation to a certain definite territory.France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, even Great Britain in substance though not in form, are all, in the strictest sense of the word, republican states; for the king or emperor does not govern in his own private right, but solely as representative of the power and majesty of the state.The distinctive mark of republicanism is the substitution of the state for the personal chief, and public authority for personal or private right.
Republicanism is really civilization as opposed to barbarism, and all civility, in the old Sense of the word, or Civilian in Italian, is republican, and is applied in modern tiles to breeding or refinement of manners, simply because these are characteristics of a republican, or polished [from....., city]
people.Every people that has a real civil order, or a fully developed state or polity, is a republican people; and hence the church and her great doctors when they speak of the state as distinguished from the church, call it the republic, as may be seen by consulting even a late Encyclical of Pius IX., which some have interpreted wrongly in an anti-republican sense.
All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system remains, or is developed without transformation, are barbaric, and really so regarded by all Christendom.In civilized nations the patriarchal authority is transformed into that of the city or state, that is, of the republic; but in all barbarous nations it retains its Private and personal character.The nation is only the family or tribe, and is called by the name of its ancestor, founder, or chief, not by a geographical denomination.Race has not been supplanted by country; they are a people, not a state.
They are not fixed to the soil, and though we may find in them ardent love of family, the tribe, or the chief, we never find among them that pure love of country or patriotism which so distinguished the Greeks and Romans, and is no less marked among modern Christian nations.They have a family, a race, a chief or king, but no patria, or country.The barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire, whether of the West or the East, were nations, or confederacies of nations, but not states.The nation with them was personal, not territorial.Their country was wherever they fed their flocks and herds, pitched their tents, and encamped for the night.There were Germans, but no German state, and even to-day the German finds his "father-land" wherever the German speech is spoken.The Polish, Sclavonian, Hungarian, Illyrian, Italian, and other provinces held by German states, in which the German language is not the mother-tongue, are excluded from the Germanic Confederation.The Turks, or Osmanlis, are a race, not a state, and are encamped, not settled, on the site of the Eastern Roman or Greek Empire.
