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If we do not hold the line where the line can be held, we give up the cause altogether; and it will be only a question of time when we shall have drifted into complete subjection to a centralized government, and State boundaries will have no more serious significance than county boundaries have now.
Had Greece united under the leadership of Sparta or Athens, her foreign conquests might have been considerable, and her power, centralized and formidable, might have been a match even for the Romans. But in the anxiety of each State to secure its independence, there were perpetual and unworthy jealousies of each rising State, when it had reached a certain point of prosperity and glory.
This latter point, the national unity, though really highly centralized at Berlin, especially on the military side, was softened in its rigour by a number of very wise provisions.
It marches abreast of the other learned professions, which have long had their extensive and valuable centralized libraries; abreast of them, but not promising to be content with that position. What glorifies a town like a cathedral? What dignifies a province like a university? What illuminates a country like its scholarship, and what is the nest that hatches scholars but a library?
The British Expeditionary Force having been saved during the Retreat, Paris having been saved at the Marne, the great German army having made a retirement, a lengthy war of position having become obvious, confidence in the air service, both within and without, having been established, the centralized system necessarily adopted up to that time could be relaxed, and we were able to send home officers and men with greatly increased experience to help build up the many new squadrons which would be required to co-operate with the new armies.
The princely privileges of the landed proprietors and cities were transformed into so many at-tributes of the Executive power; the feudal dignitaries into paid office-holders; and the confusing design of conflicting medieval seigniories, into the well regulated plan of a government, work is subdivided and centralized as in the factory.
Already in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Friesland was a republic, except in name; Holland, Flanders, Brabant, had acquired a large share of self-government. The powerful commonwealth, at a later period to be evolved out of the great combat between centralized tyranny and the spirit of civil and religious liberty, was already foreshadowed.
While building up a centralized State such as the legists of the Renaissance conceived it, a State independent of local institutions and possessing a distinct life apart from the people and above them, he endeavoured, as much as possible, to respect local privileges, superimposing modern institutions on mediæval ones and preserving, if not wholly, at least formally, the rights of each province and town.
Between the various peoples who were thus brought under the Habsburg sway, the bond was of loosest description. They spoke a dozen different languages and presented an even greater diversity of interests. They did not constitute a compact, strongly centralized, national state like France.
The great effect of the last invasion was to accelerate the breaking up of political unity, and the introduction of feudal organization, or the preponderance of local rule as opposed to centralized power. Later than the events narrated above, there were two great achievements of the Northmen, which it is most convenient to describe here, although they occurred in the eleventh century.
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