. . .ot look on him as inviolable shows that they did look on him as sacred. Surely the reason why the King was sacrificed rather than any one else was because there was something about him which there was not about any one else, because no meaner victim would have been equally acceptable to the Gods. On the other hand—to stray for a moment beyond the range of Teutonic and even of Aryan precedent—we read that the ancient Egyptians forestalled the great device of constitutional monarchy, that their priests, in a yearly discourse, dutifully attributed all the good that was done in the land to the King personally and all the evil to his bad counsellors(31). These may seem two exactly opposite ways of treating a King; but the practice of sacrificing the King, and the practice of treating30 the King as one who can do no wrong, both start from the same principle, the principle that the King is, somehow or other, inherently different from everybody else. Our own Old. . . Read More