Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/422

406 same time—there arise large bodies of ecclesiastical officials. Not for these reasons alone, however, does the ceremonial organization fail to grow as the other organizations do: their development causes its decay. Though, during early stages of social integration, local rulers have their local courts with appropriate officers of ceremony, the process of consolidation and increasing subordination to a central government, results in decreasing dignity of the local rulers, and disappearance of the official upholders of their dignities. Among ourselves in past times, "dukes, marquises, and earls, were allowed a herald and pursuivant; viscounts, and barons, and others not ennobled, even knights bannerets, might retain one of the latter;" but, as the regal power grew, "the practice gradually ceased; there were none so late as Elizabeth's reign." Yet further, the structure carrying on ceremonial control slowly falls away, because its functions are gradually encroached upon. Political and ecclesiastical regulations, though at first insisting mainly on conduct expressing obedience to rulers, divine and human, develop more and more in the directions of equitable restraints on conduct between individuals, and ethical precepts for the guidance of such conduct; and in doing this they trench more and more on the sphere of the ceremonial organization. In France, besides having the semi-priestly functions we have noted, the heralds were "judges of the crimes committed by the nobility;" and they were empowered to degrade a transgressing noble, confiscate his goods, raze his dwellings, lay waste his lands, and strip him of his arms. In England, too, certain civil duties were discharged by these officers of ceremony. Till 1688, the provincial kings-at-arms had "visited their divisions, receiving commissions for that purpose from the sovereign, by which means the funeral certificates, the descents, and alliances of the nobility and gentry, had been properly registered in this college" (of heralds). "These became records in all the courts at law." Evidently the assumption of functions of these kinds by ecclesiastical and political agents has joined in reducing the ceremonial structures to those rudiments which now remain, in the almost forgotten Heralds' College, and in the court officials who regulate intercourse with the sovereign.

Before passing to a detailed account of ceremonial government under its various aspects, it will be well to sum up the results of this preliminary survey. They are these:

That control of conduct which we distinguish as ceremony precedes the civil and ecclesiastical controls. It begins with sub-human types of creatures; it occurs among otherwise ungoverned savages; it often becomes highly developed where the other kinds of rule are little developed; it is ever being spontaneously generated afresh between individuals in all societies; and it envelops the more definite restraints which state and church exercise. The primitiveness of ceremonial government is further shown by the fact that, at first,