THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 467 



earliest stages of civilization. The conquering chief, feared, marvelled 

 at, for his strength or sagacity, distinguished from others by a quality 

 thought of as supernatural (when the antithesis of this with natural 

 becomes thinkable), ever excites a disproportionate faith and expecta- 

 tion. Having done or seen things beyond the power or insight of in- 

 feriors, there is no knowing what other such things he may not do or 

 see. After death, his deeds become magnified by tradition ; and his 

 successor, inheriting his authority, executing his commands, and keep- 

 ing up secret communication with him, acquires either thus, or by his 

 own superiority, or by both, a like credit for powers that transcend 

 the ordinary human powers. So there accumulates an awe of the 

 ruler, with its correlative faith. As we trace the genealogy of the 

 governing power, thus beginning as god, and descendant of the gods, 

 and having titles and a worship in common with the gods, we see there 

 clings to it, through all its successive metamorphoses, more or less of 

 this same ascribed character, exciting this same sentiment. " Divinely 

 descended" becomes presently "divinely appointed," "the Lord's 

 anointed," " ruler by divine right," " king by the grace of God," etc. 

 And then as fast as declining monarchical power brings with it de- 

 creasing belief in the supernaturalness of the monarch (which, how- 

 ever, long lingers in faint forms, as instance the supposed cure of 

 kind's evil), the growing powers of the bodies that assume his func- 

 tions bring to them a share of the still-surviving sentiment. The 

 " divinity that doth hedge a king " becomes, in considerable measure, 

 the divinity that doth hedge a Parliament. The superstitious rever- 

 ence once felt toward the one is transferred, in a modified form, to the 

 other, taking with it a tacit belief in an ability to achieve any end 

 that may be wished, and a tacit belief in an authority to which no 

 limits may be set. 



This sentiment, inherited and cultivated in men from childhood 

 upward, sways their convictions in spite of them. It generates an 

 irrational confidence in all the paraphernalia and appliances and forms 

 of State-action. In the very aspect of a law-deed, written in an archaic 

 hand on dingy parchment, there is something which raises a concep- 

 tion of validity not raised by ordinary writing on paper. Around a 

 Government-stamp there is a certain glamour which makes us feel as 

 though the piece of paper bearing it was more than a mere mass of 

 dry pulp with some indented marks. To any legal form of words 

 there seems to attach an authority far greater than that which would 

 be felt were the language free from legal involutions and legal techni- 

 calities. And so is it with all the symbols of authority, from royal 

 pageants downward. That the judge's wig gives to his decisions a 

 weight and sacredness they would not have were he bareheaded, is a 

 fact familiar to every one. And, when we descend to the lowest agents 

 of the executive organization, we find the same thing. A man in 

 blue coat and white-metal buttons, which carry with them the thought 



