Now, in political affairs something similar happens: the caprice of despotic rulers becomes intolerable; and, in some countries, submission to their tyranny has amounted to a sort of national insanity. Elsewhere devices have been adopted to limit the power of rulers. Avoiding assassination or revolution, it has been found possible to impose upon a king restraints derived from his own sanctity and divine power. One such device has been to surround him with innumerable taboos which, at length, prevent him from doing anything. It is true that the ostensive reason for this was not the limitation of his power, but the preservation of his vitality, upon which hung the welfare of the whole world; and probably this was, at first, the conscious purpose; but one effect of it was to limit his power, and the utility of this was its natural sanction. There are many cases in human life in which a great advantage has been gained for the race by means which were intended by the conscious agents to have an entirely different result.[329] In several countries, where the king has been bound by taboos, another man has by some pretext usurped his power; so that this way of restraining despotism is not a good one. But in Japan, where it had been adopted by a political people, the Tycoon, who succeeded to the power of the taboo-burdened Mikado, himself fell at last under equivalent restrictions, whilst affairs were directed by his ministers. Such is the natural tendency of this device amongst positivists, like the Japanese; elsewhere it may transfer the regal power to warriors or to priests.[330] Another way of restraining the king is to establish the principle that he rules by the laws, and that laws, though made by himself, cannot be altered. And this may have been the purpose of the unchangeableness of the laws of the Medes and Persians; and according to the _Book of Daniel_[331] it was used in this way; though, certainly, the older authority of Herodotus[332] shows that, in some cases, the king’s advisers could find a way out for their master. Our own forefathers were no doubt the wisest people that ever lived; and their plan was to acknowledge fully the divinity that doth hedge a king, to declare that, in fact, he could do no wrong, and then to visit all the iniquities of government upon his ministers.