of people. Not until the horse and chariot came into use was
there any great improvement in methods of warfare. Bronze weapons and,
later, iron were used in most of these wars. It was merely barbarism
going to war with barbarism in order to increase barbaric splendor.

_Religious Belief Was an Important Factor in Despotic Government_.--In
the beginning we shall find that animism, or the belief in spirits, was
common to all nations and tribes. There was in the early religious
life of people a wild, unorganized superstition, which brought them in
subjection to the control of the spirits of the world. In the slow
development of the masses, these ideas always remained prominent, and
however highly developed religious life became, however pure the system
of religious philosophy and religious worship, as represented by the
most intelligent and farthest advanced of the {172} people, it yet
remains true that the masses of the people were mastered and ruled by a
gross superstition; and possibly this answers the question to a large
extent as to why the religion of the Orient could, on the one hand,
reach such heights of purity of spirit and worship and, on the other,
such a degradation in thought, conception, and practice. It could
reach to the skies with one arm and into the grossest phases of
nature-worship with the other.

It appears the time came when, as a matter of self-defense, man must
manipulate and control spirits to save himself from destruction, and
there were persons particularly adapted to this process, who formed the
germs of the great system of priesthood. They stood between the masses
and the spirits, and as the system developed and the number of priests
increased, they became the ones who ruled the masses in place of the
spirits. The priesthood, then, wherever it has developed a great
system, has exercised an almost superhuman power over the ignorant, the
debased, and the superstitious. It was the policy of kings to
cultivate and protect this priesthood, and it was largely this which
enabled them to have power over the masses. Having once obtained this
power, and the military spirit having arisen in opposition to foreign
tribes, the priests were at the head of the military, religious, and
civil systems of the nation. Indeed, the early king was the high
priest of the tribe, and he inherited through long generations the
particular function of leader of religious worship.

It will be easy to conceive t