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Updated: May 19, 2025
It is possible, for, instance, to indulge in philosophical dissertations on the advantages and disadvantages of centralisation; but when we see a people composed of very different races devote a thousand years of efforts to attaining to this centralisation; when we observe that a great revolution, having for object the destruction of all the institutions of the past, has been forced to respect this centralisation, and has even strengthened it; under these circumstances we should admit that it is the outcome of imperious needs, that it is a condition of the existence of the nation in question, and we should pity the poor mental range of politicians who talk of destroying it.
You and your descendants have to ascertain whether this great mass will hold together under the forms of a republic, and the despotic reality of universal suffrage; whether state rights will hold out against centralisation, without separation; whether centralisation will get the better, without actual or disguised monarchy; whether shifting corruption is better than a permanent bureaucracy; and as population thickens in your great cities, and the pressure of want is felt, the gaunt spectre of pauperism will stalk among you, and communism and socialism will claim to be heard.
The English roads had long been infamous, but neither was money wasted, as in France, on roads where there was no traffic. Thus we have the combination of an absolute centralisation of legislative power with an utter absence of administrative centralisation. The units meeting in parliament formed a supreme assembly; but they did not sink their own individuality.
These forms or categories are: division of labour, machinery, competition, monopoly, the State or centralisation, free exchange, credit, property, and partnership.
It is always distinguished by a marked tendency towards centralisation and by a leaning, more or less pronounced, in favour of a dictatorship. An English or an American crowd, on the contrary, sets no store on the State, and only appeals to private initiative. A French crowd lays particular weight on equality and an English crowd on liberty.
Once it was otherwise; once the people recognised a party in the state whose principles identified them with the rights and privileges of the multitude: but when they found the parochial constitution of the country sacrificed without a struggle, and a rude assault made on all local influences in order to establish a severely organised centralisation, a blow was given to the influence of the priest and of the gentleman, the ancient champions of the people against arbitrary courts and rapacious parliaments, from which they will find that it requires no ordinary courage and wisdom to recover.
All these, except the Parliament, were ineffective and as it were accidental in their action; all they did was to preserve in a manner the notion of liberty. The circumstances of England were exceptional. The Parliament did not govern; but it became a mode of government adopted in principle, and often indispensable in practice. Nothing, however, could arrest the march of centralisation.
The truncated Church, no longer 'universal, found itself obliged to continue the same policy of centralisation, and with such success that, under Innocent III, the triumph of the theocracy seemed complete. The Papacy dominated Europe de facto, and claimed to rule the world de jure.
While sympathising with every form of opposition to the Government, the men of the subject-nationalities reserve their special affection for the Socialists, because these not only proclaim, like the Liberals, the principles of extensive local self-government and universal equality before the law, but they also speak of replacing the existing system of coercive centralisation by a voluntary confederation of heterogeneous units.
They preferred to continue the Revolutionary custom of committees of correspondence to manage party affairs. All this herculean effort was felt by Jefferson to be necessary to win popular attention and support from the centralisation of Hamilton, which, to his myopic vision, was monarchism.
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