The Evolution of Governments and Laws, Vol. 2

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Excerpt from The Evolution of Governments and Laws, Vol. 2: Exhibiting the Governmental Structures, of Ancient and Modern States, Their, Growth and Decay and the Leading, Principles of Their Laws Own revenues and powers. Injustice was the purpose of the lawmaker and continued to be for centuries, till an intricate system of most unjust laws was evolved and taught as divinely ordained and devised for the common good. In England, though there have been times when temporal and spiritual power were opposed, in the main the kingly oppressors have found their best and strongest support in the clergy, who have diligently taught obedience and submission to king and church. Education is the sure foundation of any system, whether of government or religion. The people must be taught to obey and to believe. In England the increasing armies of the petty kings became schools, in which free men were taught obedi ence to the commands of leaders. The churches became schools, in which the divine right of rulers was inculcated and the duty of submission and contribution to the treasury of the king and of the church was constantly proclaimed. In course of time the rights of kings to oppress and of high church offi cials to enjoy great revenues came to be the only rights dis cussed, and the fundamental moral principles affecting the just relations of man to man were often entirely lost sight of. Some good men there were in power in church and state at times, but the early rules of advanced and enlarged organiza tion of society were almost exclusively in the interest of the promoters of the organization. The laws of King Ethelbert, who ruled in Kent and the south at the advent of the mission of St. Augustine and was converted under his preaching, are not much but a classification of fines to be paid for murders and thefts committed, graded according to the rank of the party injured, and according the church and clergy protection, even greater than that afforded the king and his officers, that is, punishing offenses against them with even higher fines. The power of the church was rapidly extended, and the spiritual rulership of Rome became a substantial exercise of actual power through the medium of the officials of the church. It would be foreign to our plan to attempt to follow the details, more or less questionable, of the struggles of the kings of Sus sex, Wessex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria and Anglia with each other or with the Celtic population, or the schemes by. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.