The Golden Bough - The Original Classic Edition. Frazer Sir

play on his superstition for their own advantage. Not that the sorcerer is always a knave and impostor; he is often sincerely convinced that he really possesses those wonderful powers which the credulity of his fellows ascribes to him. But the more sagacious he is,

       the more likely he is to see through the fallacies which impose on duller wits. Thus the ablest members of the profession must tend to be more or less conscious deceivers; and it is just these men who in virtue of their superior ability will generally come to the top and win for themselves positions of the highest dignity and the most commanding authority. The pitfalls which beset the path of

       the professional sorcerer are many, and as a rule only the man of coolest head and sharpest wit will be able to steer his way through them safely. For it must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false; not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious. Accordingly the sorcerer who sincerely believes

       in his own extravagant pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more likely to be cut short in his career than the deliberate impostor. The honest wizard always expects that his charms and incantations will produce their supposed effect; and when they fail, not only really, as they always do, but conspicuously and disastrously, as they often do, he is taken aback: he is not, like his knavish colleague, ready with a plausible excuse to account for the failure, and before he can find one he may be knocked on the head by his

       disappointed and angry employers.

       The general result is that at this stage of social evolution the supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character. If we could balance the harm they do by their knavery against the benefits they confer by their superior sagacity, it might well be found that the good greatly outweighed the evil. For more mischief has probably been wrought in the world by honest fools in high places than by intelligent rascals. Once your shrewd rogue has attained the height of his ambition, and has no longer any selfish end to further, he may, and often does, turn his talents, his experience, his resources, to the service of the public. Many men who have been least scrupulous in the acquisition of power have been most beneficent in the use

       of it, whether the power they aimed at and won was that of wealth, political authority, or what not. In the field of politics the wily intriguer, the ruthless victor, may end by being a wise and magnanimous ruler, blessed in his lifetime, lamented at his death, admired and applauded by posterity. Such men, to take two of the most conspicuous instances, were Julius Caesar and Augustus. But once

       a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard.

       Thus, so far as the public profession of magic affected the constitution of savage society, it tended to place the control of affairs in

       the hands of the ablest man: it shifted the balance of power from the many to the one: it substituted a monarchy for a democracy,

       or rather for an oligarchy of old men; for in general the savage community is ruled, not by the whole body of adult males, but by a

       council of elders. The change, by whatever causes produced, and whatever the character of the early rulers, was on the whole very

       beneficial. For the rise of monarchy appears to be an essential condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery. No human

       being is so hidebound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage; in no state of society consequently is progress so slow

       and difficult. The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible

       master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of

       iron. What they did is the pattern of right, the unwritten law to which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience. The least pos-

       sible scope is thus afforded to superior talent to change old customs for the better. The ablest man is dragged down by the weakest

       and dullest, who necessarily sets the standard, since he cannot rise, while the other can fall. The surface of such a society presents

       a uniform dead level, so far as it is humanly possible to reduce the natural inequalities, the immeasurable real differences of inborn

       capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality. From this low and stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues

       and dreamers in later times have lauded as the ideal state, the Golden Age, of humanity, everything that helps to raise society by

       opening a career to talent and proportioning the degrees of authority to men's natural abilities, deserves to be welcomed by all who

       have the real good of their fellows at heart. Once these elevating influences have begun to operate--and they cannot be for ever

       suppressed--the progress of civilisation becomes comparatively rapid. The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry

       through changes in a single lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect; and if, as will often hap-

       pen, he is a man of intellect and energy above the common, he will readily avail himself of the opportunity. Even the whims and

       caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which lies so heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe

       ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided counsels of the elders, and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind,

       it becomes formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly

       favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress. For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary

       submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the per-

       petual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge

       which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.

       Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art and science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be dissoci-

       ated from industrial or economic progress, and that in its turn receives an immense impulse from conquest and empire. It is no mere

       accident that the most vehement outbursts of activity of the human mind have followed close on the heels of victory, and that the

       great conquering races of the world have commonly done most to advance and spread civilisation, thus healing in peace the wounds

       they inflicted in war. The Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs are our witnesses in the past: we may yet live to see a

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       similar outburst in Japan. Nor, to remount the stream of history to its sources, is it an accident that all the first great strides towards civilisation have been made under despotic and theocratic governments, like those of Egypt, Babylon, and Peru, where the supreme

       ruler claimed and received the servile allegiance of his subjects in the double character of a king and a god. It is hardly too much to say that at this early epoch despotism is the best friend of humanity and, paradoxical as it may sound, of liberty. For after all there is

       more liberty in the best sense--liberty to think our own thoughts and to fashion our own destinies--under the most absolute des-

       potism, the most grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom of savage life, where the individual's lot is cast from the cradle

       to the grave in the iron mould of hereditary custom.

       So far, therefore, as the public profession of magic has