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We have seen how it crowded out the small farmers by means of the large farm system, reduced them to the rank of proletarians, and attracted them in part into the towns; how it further ruined the small bourgeoisie in great measure and reduced its members also to the ranks of the proletariat; how it centralised capital in the hands of the few, and population in the great towns.
Gradually there developed the idea of the king as the protector of public order and justice and of the common interest as the paramount magistrate the idea that changed Europe society from a series of classes into a group of centralised States. But the old order did not perish without efforts to perpetuate itself.
"Whenever I read in the papers about oppressed nationalities, I think of him." He relighted his cigar. "It was a maternal government, highly centralised, and there were no representative institutions." Henry Wimbush ceased speaking. In the silence that ensued Ivor's whispered commentary on the spirit sketches once more became audible. Priscilla, who had been dozing, suddenly woke up.
As a matter of fact, no real group, not even a centralised society, is a homogeneous whole. For a great part of human activity language, art, science, religion, economic interests the group is constantly fluctuating. What are we to understand by the group of those who speak Greek, the Christian group, the group of modern science?
But, unhappily, things were not worked in that way; the great majority of Catholics gave nothing whatever, while the rich ones sent large sums from motives of political passion; and a particular objection was that the gifts were centralised in the hands of certain bishops and religious orders, so that these became ostensibly the benefactors of the papacy, the indispensable cashiers from whom it drew the sinews of life.
The nation was not a centralised one, with a single recognised capital, like Judaea, or Samaria, or Syria, or Assyria, or Babylonia. It was, like Greece, a congeries of homogeneous tribes, who had never been amalgamated into a single political entity, and who clung fondly to the idea of separate independence.
There were brief periods, notably at the commencement and in the final stages, when the desired centralised organisation was approached, but there were also periods when there was a complete split between research and supply with feeble and unsatisfactory liaison between the two.
Every possible act of every official seems to have been foreseen, and every possible outlet from the narrow path of honesty seems to have been carefully walled up. As the English reader has probably no conception of formal procedure in a highly centralised bureaucracy, let me give, by way of illustration, an instance which accidentally came to my knowledge.
The country over which the young king was called to rule was the most populous and the most brilliant nation of that day. Louis came to the throne when Mazarin and Richelieu, the two great Cardinals, had just hammered the ancient French Kingdom into the most strongly centralised state of the seventeenth century. He was himself a man of extraordinary ability.
French organisation for supply provides another example of their national characteristic of logical thinking and love of symmetry. As early as September, 1915, the French centralised their research organisation, the Inspection des Etudes et Experience Chimiques, and their supply organisation, the Direction du Materiel Chimique de Guerre, in their Service Chimique de Guerre under General Ozil.
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