against what is called universal
suffrage. To restrict suffrage to property-holders helps nothing,
theoretically or practically. Property has of itself advantages
enough, without clothing its holders with exclusive political rights
and privileges, and the laboring classes any day are as trustworthy as
the business classes. The wise statesman will never restrict suffrage,
or exclude the poorer and more numerous classes from all voice in the
government of their country. General suffrage is wise, and if Louis
Philippe had had the sense to adopt it, and thus rally the whole nation
to the support of his government, he would never have had to encounter
the revolution of 1848. The barbarism, the despotism, is not in
universal suffrage, but in defending the elective franchise as a
private or personal right. It is not a private, but a political right,
and, like all political rights, a public trust. Extremes meet, and
thus it is that men who imagine that they march at the head of the
human race and lead the civilization of the age, are really in
principle retrograding to the barbarism of the past, or taking their
place with nations on whom the light of civilization has never yet
dawned. All is not gold that glisters.

The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a
private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization is,
that it makes it a public trust. Barbarism knows only persons;
civilization asserts and maintains the state. With barbarians the
authority of the patriarch is developed simply by way of explication;
in civilized states it is developed by way of transformation. Keeping
in mind this distinction, it may be maintained that all systems of
government, as a simple historical fact, have been developed from the
patriarchal. The patriarchal has preceded them all, and it is with the
patriarchal that the human race has begun its career. The family or
household is not a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and,
historically considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well as
the initial or inchoate nation. But its simple direct development
gives us barbarism, or what is called Oriental despotism, and which
nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom. It is found only in pagan
and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in the secular order is
republican, and continues and completes the work of Greece and Rome.
It meets with little permanent success in any patriarchal or desp