Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/91

Rh celebrated by great historical events, or rendered sacred by being the scene of great religious events, and hence to them must be ascribed the origin of pilgrimages and all their concomitant adjuncts and ceremonies.

It is to this race, also, that we owe the existence of human sacrifices. Always fatalists, always and everywhere indifferent of life, and never fearing death, these sacrifices never were to them so terrible as they appear to more highly organized races. Thus a child, a relative, or a friend, was the most precious, and consequently the most acceptable offering a man coidd bring to appease the wrath or propitiate the favor of a god who had been human, and who was supposed to have retained all the feelings of humanity forever afterwards.

It is easy to trace their Tree and Serpent worship in every corner of the old world from Anuradhpura in Ceylon, to Upsala in Sweden. Their tombs and tumuli exist everywhere. Their ancestral worship is the foundation at the present day of half the popular creeds of the world, and the planets have hardly ceased to be worshipped at the present hour. Most of the more salient peculiarities of this faith were softened down by the great Buddhist reform in the sixth century B.C., and that refinement of their rude primitive belief has been adopted by most of the Turanian people of the modern world, and is now almost exclusively the appanage of people having Turanian blood in their veins. Even, however, through the gloss of their Buddhist refinements we can still discern most of the old forms of faith, and even its most devoted votaries are yet hardly more than half converted.

The only form of government ever adopted by any people of Turanian race was that of absolute despotism,—with a tribe, a chief,—in a kingdom, a despot. In highly civilized communities, like those of Egypt and China, their despotism was tempered by bureaucratic forms, but the chief was always as absolute as a Timour or an Attila, though not always strong enough to use his power as terribly as they did. Their laws were real or traditional edicts of their kings, seldom written, and never administered according to any fixed form of procedure.

As a consequence or a cause of this, the Turanian race are absolutely casteless; no hereditary nobility, no caste of priests ever existed among them; between the ruler and the people there could be nothing, and every one might aspire equally to all the honors of the State, or to the highest dignity of the priesthood. "La carrière ouverte aux talens," is essentially the motto of these races, or of those allied to them, and whether it was the slave of a Pharaoh, or the pipe-bearer of a Turkish sultan, every office except the throne is and always was