...., city]
people. Every people that has a real civil order, or a fully
developed state or polity, is a republican people; and hence the
church and her great doctors when they speak of the state as
distinguished from the church, call it the republic, as may be
seen by consulting even a late Encyclical of Pius IX., which some
have interpreted wrongly in an anti-republican sense.
All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system remains,
or is developed without transformation, are barbaric, and really
so regarded by all Christendom. In civilized nations the
patriarchal authority is transformed into that of the city or
state, that is, of the republic; but in all barbarous nations it
retains its Private and personal character. The nation is only
the family or tribe, and is called by the name of its ancestor,
founder, or chief, not by a geographical denomination. Race has
not been supplanted by country; they are a people, not a state.
They are not fixed to the soil, and though we may find in them
ardent love of family, the tribe, or the chief, we never find
among them that pure love of country or patriotism which so
distinguished the Greeks and Romans, and is no less marked among
modern Christian nations. They have a family, a race, a chief or
king, but no patria, or country. The barbarians who overthrew
the Roman Empire, whether of the West or the East, were nations,
or confederacies of nations, but not states.
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