Our fathers then came into Britain, bringing with them the three elements of the primitive constitution which we find described by Tacitus; but as I am inclined to think, the circumstances of the Conquest did something, for a while at least, to strengthen the powers both of the supreme chief and of the general body of the people at the expense of the intermediate class of _Eorlas_ or nobles. Let us first trace the origin and growth of the power of the supreme leader, in other words, the monarchic element, the kingly power. What then is a King? The question is much more easily asked than answered. The name of King has meant very different things in different times and places; the amount of authority attached to the title has varied greatly in different times and places. Still a kind of common idea seems to run through all its different uses; if we cannot always define a King, we at least commonly know a King when we see him. The King has, in popular sentiment at least, a vague greatness and sanctity attaching to him which does not attach to any mere magistrate, however high in rank and authority. I am not talking of the reason of the thing, but of what, as a matter of fact, has at all times been the popular feeling. Among the heathen Swedes, it is said that, when public affairs went wrong,—that is, in the state of things when we should now turn a Minister out of office and when our forefathers some generations back would have cut off his head,—they despised any such secondary victims, and offered the King himself in sacrifice to the Gods(30). Such a practice certainly implies that our Scandinavian kinsfolk had not reached that constitutional subtlety according to which the responsibility of all the acts of the Sovereign is transferred to some one else. They clearly did not, like modern constitution-makers, look on the person of the King as inviolable and sacred. But I suspect that the very practice which shows that they did not 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 treating 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-English Kings,