Assyrians and Persians or modern
Chinese, and have their geographical boundaries, they have still no
state, no country. The nation defines the boundaries, not the
boundaries the nation. The nation does not belong to the territory,
but the territory to the nation or its chief. The Irish and
Anglo-Saxons, in former times, held the land in gavelkind, and the
territory belonged to the tribe or sept; but if the tribe held it as
indivisible, they still held it as private property. The shah of
Persia holds the whole Persian territory as private property, and the
landholders among his subjects are held to be his tenants. They hold
it from him, not from the Persian state.

The public domain of the Greek empire is in theory the private domain
of the Ottoman emperor or Turkish sultan. There is in barbaric states
no republic, no commonwealth; authority is parental, without being
tempered by parental affection. The chief is a despot, and rules with
the united authority of the father and the harshness of the proprietor.
He owns the land and his subjects.

Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of the
Roman Empire, however modified by the Church and by reminiscences of
Graeco-Roman civilization retained by the conquered, was a barbaric
constitution. The feudal monarch, as far as he governed at all,
governed as proprietor or landholder, not as the representative of the
commonwealth. Under feudalism there are estates, but no state. The
king governs as an estate, the nobles hold their power as an estate,
and the commons are represented as an estate. The whole theory of
power is, that it is an estate; a private right, not a public trust.
It is not without reason, then that the common sense of civilized
nations terms the ages when it prevailed in Western Europe barbarous
ages.

It may seem a paradox to class democracy with the barbaric
constitutions, and yet as it is defended by many stanch democrats,
especially European democrats and revolutionists, and by French and
Germans settled in our own country, it is essentially barbaric and
anti-republican. The characteristic principle of barbarism is, that
power is a private or personal right, and when democrats assert that
the elective franchise is a natural right of man, or that it is held by
virtue of the fact that the elector is a man, they assert the
fundamental principle of barbarism and despotism. This says nothing in
favor of restricted suffrage, or