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.
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