Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/363

 The ReligioiLS Basis of Social Union.

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But we have all read of the dismal failure of this early Liberal Kingship. From the early Homeric days down to 1689 the Whig Oligarchy have been the obstinate and successful foe of the kingly prerogative. The same scene is re-enacted in Greece and Rome, as later in Poland, Denmark, Sweden and even medieval Germany — bringing the terrible Nemesis to-day of a belated autocracy in the last tragic act of the drama. The Divine Monarch, who had ventured forth into public life from his sanctuary, is politely but firmly conducted thither again and begged to confine his attention to his sacred and formal duties. Once more the path of expansion — I do not say ' of progress ' — is checked and choked by the union of vested interests against all change and liberal expansion.

6. Hence, in the break-up of tribal kinship and affinities, the decay of those narrow hearth-cults of the household and group, the increasing crowd of hungry, kin-shattered men who must find a master who will feed them, — there appears a new phenomenon : the classical Tyrant and the Robber Band, — a frankly unscrupulous wielder of force against privilege become obsolete and a spokesman of the disinherited, — an equally frank predaceous group, whose aim is booty and whose method is trained militarism. This is the victory of youth with a vengeance : the old men no longer terrorize the young by hard tests of initiation or by mystery-bugbears. The Whig Oligarchy is over- thrown — no doubt, like feudalism, to rise up (in a new form) again and again in subtle disguise, and perhaps as a secret Trade-Union of Capitalism, to prove invincible in the end. With it vanishes — possibly for ever — one of the old religious sanctions of Society. There could be no common ground for patrician and foreigner in the matter of religion : how the Roman noble ridiculed the notion that a plebeian could have gods, altars, prayers, legitimate marriage ! he fought (unlike interested classes to-day) for no private end, but for the very existence of the Society as he conceived

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