s, therefore, though there is little authority in the
magistrate, there is often great power lodged, or rather left, in the
father: for, as among the Gauls, so among the Britons, he had the power
of life and death in his own family, over his children and his servants.

But among freemen and heads of families, causes of all sorts seem to
have been decided by the Druids: they summoned and dissolved all the
public assemblies; they alone had the power of capital punishments, and
indeed seem to have had the sole execution and interpretation of
whatever laws subsisted among this people. In this respect the Celtic
nations did not greatly differ from others, except that we view them in
an earlier stage of society. Justice was in all countries originally
administered by the priesthood: nor, indeed, could laws in their first
feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to
relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come
down to them enforced by beings of more than human power. The first
openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion. Amongst the
Romans, the custody and interpretation of the laws continued solely in
the college of the pontiffs for above a century.[7]

The time in which the Druid priesthood was instituted is unknown. It
probably rose, like other institutions of that kind, from low and
obscure beginnings, and acquired from time, and the labors of able men,
a form by which it extended itself so far, and attained at length so
mighty an influence over the minds of a fierce and otherwise
ungovernable people. Of the place where it arose there is somewhat less
doubt: Caesar mentions it as the common opinion that this institution
began in Britain, that there it always remained in the highest
perfection, and that from thence it diffused itself into Gaul. I own I
find it not easy to assign any tolerable cause why an order of so much
authority and a discipline so exact should have passed from the more
barbarous people to the more civilized, from the younger to the older,
from the colony to the mother country: but it is not wonderful that the
early extinction of this order, and that general contempt in which the
Romans held all the barbarous nations, should have left these matters
obscure and full of difficulty.

The Druids were kept entirely distinct from the body of the people; and
they were exempted from all the inferior and burdensome offices of
society, that they mi