Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/69

 ("Early History of Institutions," p. 135.) In Africa, in the same way, as Bosnian, the old traveller, says, "As to what difference there is between one negro and another, the richest man is the most honored," yet the most honored man has the same magical power as the poor angatuks of the Eskimo. The king of Loango, according to Abbe Proyart, "has credit to make rain fall on earth." Among the Zulus, the chief is lord of the air, and has power to make fair or foul weather, as in early Ireland. "It happens among black men," according to one of Canon Callaway's converts, "that when the chief has called out an army, and has collected all his bands, he addresses them, and then they sing a song which excites their passions, that their hearts burn with the desire of seeing the enemy; and though the heaven is clear it becomes clouded by the great wind which arises. . . . Therefore it was affirmed among the great chiefs that the heaven is the chief's." No doubt these examples might be largely increased. In New Zealand, for example, private property almost looks like an extension of the superstitious respect paid to certain men of the privileged class. Whatever the chief has touched is tapu, and no one else may lay hands on it without running serious risk of supernatural punishment. All rangatiras, or men of noble birth, possess this power of securing their goods, and few natives, according to the lively author of "Old New Zealand," "can resist the shadowy terror of the tapu." Thus it is just possible that the sacred element in rank was not only prior to, but even produced, or helped to produce, the element of wealth, which later became the more powerful and the really essential element in aristocracy. It only needs a moment's reflection to show that the right of property in a superfluous stick or a handy sharp stone is not a very simple idea, especially before the invention of pockets. The moment the owner lays down his chattel the community absorbs it. Even if the proprietor is a strong man, he cannot protect his fishing-rod when it is out of his sight; and the extension of his own personal sacredness to his goods and chattels was thus an extremely important step in the history of society, and a step, if we may judge by the Fuegians and the Eskimo, which was resisted by the democratic instincts of the community.

It would not be difficult to multiply instances of the connection between personal powers of divination or magic and right over property. Mr. E. W. Robertson has noticed how, in early Scotland and in Sweden, divination and property in land went together; and Schoolcraft remarks that in some of the American tribes "priests and jugglers are the persons that make war and have a voice in the sale of land." It would also be possible, perhaps, to show how the original influence gained by magical pretensions was differentiated as the influence obtained by property and by distinction in war increased. Thus we have seen that the diviner in Eskimo tribes becomes a kind of civil magistrate, with an unintelligible jargon of his own, and with the knowledge of certain magical devices by which he contrives to detect the guilty. It. appears from a passage in "Senchus Mor" that the Irish Brehons at a very early date used magical modes of discovering guilt — afterwards condemned as heathen — and employed a hopeless sort of slang in the delivery of their judgments. The chiefs, who had advanced on the secular line of accumulating wealth, although still credited with power over the weather, ceased to comprehend the members of the sacred caste who had confined themselves to the development of their more ancient divining functions. "The Brehons," said the chiefs, "have their judgment and their knowledge to themselves. We do not in the first place understand what they say." ("Sen. Mor." iii. xxxi.) The chiefs then demanded a reform in legal terminology, which was reluctantly granted by the more conservative Brehons.

Supposing the kings of northern European nations to have sprung from the successful chiefs of earlier tribal associations, it is easy to see that they would inherit the powers of their distant predecessors. Their divinity is drawn, among other sources, from the ancient beliefs in divination and human power over the weather, and other attributes of the medicine-man. This religious sentiment, in a less high degree, had attached to the person of inferior chiefs. At the same time the divine descent of the Greek heroes, and of the northern rulers who trace their line to Woden, has been perhaps too hastily explained by Mr. Spencer, and by the author of the pedigrees of Æthelwulf in the "Chronicles." It would need a very large amount of evidence to convince us that Odin was a man, or "manifestly a medicine-man." There is far more in the greater myths of the race than can be accounted for by facts selected from the lowest conditions of human belief. But, just as many aristocracies have been 