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Since in order to have spontaneous self-government, you had to have a simple self-contained community, they took it for granted that one man was as competent as the next to manage these simple and self-contained affairs. Where the wish is father to the thought such logic is convincing. Moreover, the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen is for most practical purposes true in the rural township.
By the men who founded the government public office was regarded as a species of property, not lightly to be disturbed, and it was undoubtedly their hope that the offices would remain in the hands of their social class. But the democratic theory had as one of its main principles the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen.
But when the universality of the Church has once been established in point of extension, it begins to be also asserted in point of intensity. Once ubiquitous, the papacy seeks to be omnicompetent.
Catholicity had broken down in the state with the decline of the empire, and was fast breaking down in the church; nationalism had triumphed in the state, and was now to triumph in the church. In this respect the Reformation was the greatest achievement of the national state, which emerged from the struggle with no rival for its omnicompetent authority.
Under conditions such as these with the plurality of States unrecognized by theory, even if it existed in practice, and with distinction between State and Church unknown and unenforced we may truly say with a German writer, whose name I should like to mention honoris causa, Professor Tröltsch, that 'there was no feeling for the State; no common and uniform dependence on a central power; no omnicompetent sovereignty; no equal pressure of a public civil law; no abstract basis of association in formal and legal rules or at any rate, so far as anything of the sort was present, it was a matter only for the Church, and in no wise for the State'. So far as social life was consciously articulated in a scheme, the achievement was that of the clergy, and the scheme was that of the Church.
It lies in social organization based on a system of analysis and record, and in all the corollaries of that principle; in the abandonment of the theory of the omnicompetent citizen, in the decentralization of decision, in the coordination of decision by comparable record and analysis.
Everybody in a village sooner or later tries his hand at everything the village does. There is rotation in office by men who are jacks of all trades. There was no serious trouble with the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen until the democratic stereotype was universally applied, so that men looked at a complicated civilization and saw an enclosed village.
Theoretically it is omnicompetent; parliament or, to use more technical phraseology, the Crown in Parliament can make anything law that it chooses; and no one has a legal right to resist, or authority to pronounce what parliament has done to be unconstitutional.
Unconsciously the theory sets up the single reader as theoretically omnicompetent, and puts upon the press the burden of accomplishing whatever representative government, industrial organization, and diplomacy have failed to accomplish.