practically the same in all cases. We are justified therefore in calling Civilisation a historical stage, whose commencement dates roughly from the division of society into classes founded on property and the adoption of class-government. Lewis Morgan in his _Ancient Society_ adds the invention of writing and the consequent adoption of written History and written Law; Engels in his _Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats_ points out the importance of the appearance of the Merchant, even in his most primitive form, as a mark of the civilisation-period; while the French writers of the last century made a good point in inventing the term _nations policées_ (policemanised nations) as a substitute for civilised nations; for perhaps there is no better or more universal mark of the period we are considering, and of its social degradation, than the appearance of the crawling phenomenon in question. [Imagine the rage of any decent North American Indians if they had been told they required _policemen_ to keep them in order!] If we take this historical definition of Civilisation, we shall see that our English Civilisation began hardly more than a thousand years ago, and even so the remains of the more primitive society lasted long after that. In the case of Rome--if we reckon from the later times of the early kings down to the fall of Rome--we have again about a thousand years. The Jewish civilisation from David and Solomon downwards lasted--with breaks--somewhat over a thousand years; the Greek civilisation less; the series of Egyptian civilisations which we can now distinguish lasted altogether very much longer; but the important points to see are, first, that the process has been quite similar in character in these various (and numerous other) cases,[2] quite as similar in fact as the course of the same disease in various persons; and secondly that in no case, as said before, has any nation come _through_ and passed beyond this stage; but that in most cases it has succumbed soon after the main symptoms had been developed.