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Under the iron and centralized government of Louis XIV. they were completely defenceless, like lambs before wolves; they had no hopes, they could make no defence; they were an obnoxious, slandered, unimportant, unfashionable people, and their light had gone out. They had no religious enthusiasm even; they were small farmers and tradesmen and servants, and worshipped God in dingy chapels.
Of course his astonishment indicates that he was not in the compartment where these maneuvers take place, for it is in the commander's turret that the whole apparatus is centralized for submersion, for steering to the right depth, and also for emersion.
The Burgundian dukes had endeavoured to convert Belgium into a modern centralized State, with common institutions, a permanent army, a loyal nobility and docile States General. This part of their work was crowned with success, and it is significant that the word "patrie" comes to be used by Belgian writers towards the middle of the sixteenth century.
Few princes were ever a greater curse to the people whom they were allowed to hold as property. He nearly succeeded in establishing a centralized despotism upon the ruins of the provincial institutions. His sudden death alone deferred the catastrophe.
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.
But, if the people did not lack public spirit, they had lost contact with the times and were unable to use their liberty when they had conquered it. Public opinion was uneducated and regionalism had blinded the people to the advantages which they might have derived from a more centralized régime.
Any one who knew Austria some years ago, would be surprised to see the "Examiner," and "Constitutionnel" lying on the tables of the Clubs. These provincial parliaments existed up to the time of the Emperor Joseph, who, with his rage for novelty, and his desire for despotic and centralized power, abolished them.
A single centralized government was created, and the divided currents of national life were gathered by it into one great stream. Notwithstanding many survivals of mediaeval conditions and later reversions to the earlier type, internal warfare and domestic disorder disappeared from the peninsula, and divergence of foreign policy no longer weakened its influence in Europe.
Hamilton, the greatest creative and constructive genius of his century, never so signally proved his far- sighted statesmanship as when he pleaded for an aristocratic republic with a strong centralized government.
And this is much easier, with our present German institutions, than it will ever be in France with the French character and the French centralized system of government. I believe, therefore, that, with German patience and benevolence, we shall succeed in winning the men of Alsace and Lorraine perhaps in a briefer space of time than people today expect.
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