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Local Administration not centralized in the United States; great general Centralisation of the Government. Some bad Consequences resulting to the United States from the local Administration. Administrative Advantages attending the Order of things. The Power which conducts the Government is less regular, less enlightened, less learned, but much greater than in Europe.
Men like Archbishop Whately, in the middle of the nineteenth century, whose ambition it was to see what they called the consolidation of Great Britain and Ireland effected, were strongly in favour of the proposal, and its rejection on so many occasions has been doubtless due to the fact that to mix and confound the administration of Ireland with that of Great Britain would necessitate the abandonment of the extreme centralisation of Irish Government, and those who were most anxious, as the phrase went, to make Cork like York were the very people who were most opposed to any abdication of Executive powers which an assimilation of methods of government would have inevitably brought in its train.
Other cities resemble all the birds and beasts and fishes whose appetites and digestions are normal. Paris alone is the analogical apotheosis of the octopus. Product of centralisation carried to an ad absurdum, it fairly represents the devil fish; and in no respects is the resemblance more curious than in the similarity of the digestive apparatus.
"Otherwise," said he, "there would be a cry at once, 'The cat is let out; we now see for what purpose an army was raised!" But individualistic spirits who were alarmed at this new distortion of the Government toward centralisation feared the results of using even the militia.
France must be saved from Paris, not by subterranean barracks and trains, the impotence of which we see to-day with a general in command of the military force, but by conceding to France its proportionate share of the power now monopolised by Paris. All this system of centralisation, equally tyrannical and corrupt, must be eradicated.
Indeed, I cannot conceive that a nation can enjoy a secure or prosperous existence without a powerful centralisation of government. But I am of opinion that a central administration enervates the nations in which it exists by incessantly diminishing their public spirit.
A greater centralisation of government had been the constant policy of the Burgundian and Habsburg rulers since the time of Philip the Good, a policy to be commended if carried out in a statesmanlike and moderate spirit without any sudden or violent infringement of traditional liberties.
The fundamental principles of such a government are imposed upon it by necessity. In the first place, progressive centralisation, and the substitution of a graduated hierarchy for popular government, came about as inevitably in the Catholic Church as in the Mediterranean Empire of the Caesars.
In other words, centralisation had gone forward rapidly, in accordance with the laws of life; and, with centralisation, freedom of method and expansion of power. It was a curious life, therefore, that Percy led. He had a couple of rooms assigned to him in Archbishop's House at Westminster, and was attached loosely to the Cathedral staff, although with considerable liberty.
The patriotisme du clocher, with which French provincials have been reproached, but which, in France, the system of centralisation has done so much to eradicate, the prejudice which narrows a man's sympathies to his own country or department, is extra-ordinarily conspicuous in Spaniards.
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