To the colonists there was a very great difference between the ways of different people. The words they used showed it. Civil life began when men lived in a city, but this was not a large settlement of miscellaneous persons, but a permanent home of men who all worshiped the same gods, and obeyed the same laws and took responsibility. A man who did his part in the life of such a place was a “citizen,” and the life itself was “civilized,” the life of men who served one another and the whole community—men, women and children—looking out for its future as they would for the prosperity of their own family. In fact, such a body of people usually began with a group of relatives, as this one had. Without this dependence on one another to do the right thing, there could not be civilization.
A “company” was a group who were so far friends as to eat bread together. This in itself was a proof of a sort of friendship, for in eating a man had to lay down his weapons and be more or less off guard; when men ate together they were all off guard for the time. “Community” meant a group of families or persons bound together by kindred or friendship or common interest, and stronger for being bound together, as a bundle of sticks is stronger than separate sticks can be. “Religion” meant something stronger still, the binding together of people who felt the same sort of ties to the unseen world, who worshiped in the same way, and loved the same sweet, old, familiar prayers and chants, and believed in the same unseen rulers of life and death.
The various words for strangers outside these ties which bound them to their own people were just as expressive. Among farmers who lived on cleared land, within walls, the people who did not were “out of doors,” the forest people, the “foreigners.” Among a people who all spoke the same language, the thick-tongued country people, whose ideas were few, like their needs and their occupations, were the “barbarians,”—the babblers. And in a place like the settlement they were making now, a little island of orderly, intelligent life in a waste of almost uninhabited wilderness, the scattered hut dwellers were the “pagans,” the people of the waste. But almost every word that meant a civilized family or town had in it the idea of obligation. People must see that they could not be lawless and have any civil life at all. Civil life meant living together and living more or less by rules that were meant for the comfort and welfare of all.