Frazer, in _The Golden Bough_, gathered all the evidence he could—most of it negligible, some of it doubtful, a little of it firm and good—upon human sacrifice as connected with harvest. All he could show was that some few sets of men have here and there, in places unconnected and wide apart in time, killed men in a ritual fashion from a superstition that such ritual murder would procure them a good harvest. There is no sort of proof that it was a general human custom; and what is worse, there is no distinction in Frazer between certain evidence, uncertain and worthless. I should have thought that by this time educated opinion was alive to that criticism: it is many years since Andrew Lang died; and Andrew Lang (in this country—it had little acceptance abroad) blew the theory sky-high—I mean the theory that human sacrifice was an original universal accompaniment of the sowing or the harvest. Human sacrifice being a violent because a horrible thing, has occasionally accompanied the desire for victory in war. It has accompanied mourning for the great. It has been the product of terror under defeat or pestilence. It has appeared in all sorts of forms, connected with pretty well any violent emotion of desire or dread. It has been particularly noticeable in very high civilizations; Carthage had it at the very height of her luxury and greatness. Mexico had it—most highly developed just when Mexico was, apparently, at the highest point of her material civilization. Some savages have had it also. You get it in the Moabite Stone; you get echoes of it in the Jewish folk-lore of the Old Testament. You get it in a totally different form among the Gauls, where it is commonly an act of vengeance on criminals and prisoners, and in no way an act of magic. You also get an abhorrence of it among societies which have not fallen to the degradation of practising it; and these societies (by the way) usually prove the masters and the betters of those who practise it. But of human sacrifice as an original and universal habit, there is not a sign. To believe _that_ you have to swallow whole the fourfold trick of Frazer’s _Golden Bough_, which is: (1) To gather all scraps of evidence indifferently, including a mass of vague hearsay and stuff at third hand, and vague analogies, and any custom, game, lark, or legend, however remote from killing, which can be guessed to be—or asserted to be—a memory of that perversion. (2) To leave out all counter evidence. (3) To put the thing cumulatively and (4) Then to present it as proved. In such fashion any theory, however wild, could be demonstrated to satisfaction. Mr. Chesterton has wittily shown how it can be used to prove that History (what with Calvus, Socrates, Cæsar, tonsured Priests, and Calvin) is dominated by bald heads. Such is Frazer’s “proof” of universal original ritual human sacrifice.