Often is the question asked, What is civilization? and the answer comes, The act of civilizing; the state of being civilized. What is the act of civilizing? To reclaim from a savage or barbarous state; to educate; to refine. What is a savage or barbarous state? A wild uncultivated state; a state of nature. Thus far the dictionaries. The term civilization, then, popularly implies both the transition from a natural to an artificial state, and the artificial condition attained. The derivation of the word civilization, from _civis_, citizen, _civitas_, city, and originally from _coetus_, union, seems to indicate that culture which, in feudal times, distinguished the occupants of cities from the ill-mannered boors of the country. The word savage, on the other hand, from _silva_, a wood, points to man primeval; _silvestres homines_, men of the forest, not necessarily ferocious or brutal, but children of nature. From these simple beginnings both words have gradually acquired a broader significance, until by one is understood a state of comfort, intelligence, and refinement; and by the other, humanity wild and bestial. Guizot defines civilization as an "improved condition of man resulting from the establishment of social order in place of the individual independence and lawlessness of the savage or barbarous life;" Buckle as "the triumph of mind over external agents;" Virey as "the development more or less absolute of the moral and intellectual faculties of man united in society;" Burke as the exponent of two principles, "the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion." "Whatever be the characteristics of what we call savage life," says John Stuart Mill, "the contrary of these, or the qualities which society puts on as it throws off these, constitute civilization;" and, remarks Emerson, "a nation that has no clothing, no iron, no alphabet, no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract thought, we call barbarous." Men talk of civilization and call it liberty, religion, government, morality. Now liberty is no more a sign of civilization than tyranny; for the lowest savages are the least governed of all people. Civilized liberty, it is true, marks a more advanced stage than savage liberty, but between these two extremes of liberty there is a necessary age of tyranny, no less significant of an advance on primitive liberty than is constitutional liberty an advance on tyranny. Nor is religion civilization, except in so far as the form and machinery of sacerdotal rites, and the abandonment of fetichism for monotheism become significant of intenser thought and expansion of intellect. No nation ever practiced grosser immorality, or what we of the present day hold to be immorality, than Greece during the height of her intellectual refinement. Peace is no more civilization than war, virtue than vice, good than evil. All these are the incidents, not the essence, of civilization.