d peoples. Mr. Lewis H.
Morgan, in his _Ancient Society_, asserts that civilization began with
the phonetic alphabet, and that all human activity prior to this could
be classified as savagery or barbarism. But there is a broader
conception of civilization which recognizes all phases of human
achievement, from the making of a stone axe to the construction of the
airplane; from the rude hut to the magnificent palace; from crude moral
and religious conditions to the more refined conditions of human
association. If we consider that civilization involves the whole
process of human achievement, it must admit of a great variety of
qualities and degrees of development, hence it appears to be a relative
term applied to the variation of human life. Thus, the Japanese are
highly civilized along special lines of hand work, hand industry, and
hand art, as well as being superior in some phases of family
relationships. So we might say of the Chinese, the East Indians, and
the American Indians, that they each have well-established customs,
habits of thought, and standards of life, differing from other nations,
expressing different types of civilization.

When a member of a primitive tribe invented the bow-and-arrow, or began
to chip a flint nodule in order to make a stone {5} axe, civilization
began. As soon as people began to co-operate with one another in
obtaining food, building houses, or for protection against wild animals
and wild men, that is, when they began to treat each other civilly,
they were becoming civilized. We may say then in reality that
civilization has been a continuous process from the first beginning of
man's conquest of himself and nature to the modern complexities of
social life with its multitude of products of industry and cultural
arts.

It is very common for one group or race to assume to be highly
civilized and call the others barbarians or savages. Thus the Hebrews
assumed superiority when they called other people Gentiles, and the
Greeks when they called others barbarians. Indeed, it is only within
recent years that we are beginning to recognize that the civilizations
of China, Japan, and India have qualities worth studying and that they
may have something worth while in life that the Western civilization
has not. Also there has been a tendency to confuse the terms Christian
and heathen with civilized and uncivilized. This idea arose in
England, where, in the early history of Christianity, th