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Updated: May 3, 2025
Personal, sometimes even paltry, jealousy; love of power, of money, of place; rivalry between civil and military ambition for predominance in a free state; struggles between Church and State to control and oppress each other; conflict between the cautious and healthy, but provincial and centrifugal, spirit on the one side, and the ardent centralizing, imperial, but dangerous, instinct on the other, for ascendancy in a federation; mortal combat between aristocracy disguised in the plebeian form of trading and political corporations and democracy sheltering itself under a famous sword and an ancient and illustrious name; all these principles and passions will be found hotly at work in the melancholy five years with which we are now to be occupied, as they have entered, and will always enter, into every political combination in the great tragi-comedy which we call human history.
The "Great Dukes of the West" did for Belgium, in the fifteenth century, what Louis XI did for France, and what Henry VIII did for England, half a century later. They succeeded in centralizing public institutions and in suppressing, to a great extent, local jealousies and internal strife which weakened the nation and wasted her resources.
After the centralizing and invading State has taken hold of local societies there is nothing left for it but to cast its net over moral societies , and this second haul is more important than the first one; for, if local societies are based on the proximity of physical bodies and habitations, the latter are formed out of the accord which exists between minds and souls; in possessing these, the hold is no longer on the outside but on the inside of man, his thought, his will; the incentive within is laid hold of, and this directly; then only can he be fully mastered, and disposed of at discretion.
Schemes and projects of national aggrandizement by internal improvements, protection to home industries, large military expenditures, and measures of a centralizing tendency which were popular in that era of no parties, gave him éclat as Secretary of War.
Amid all this conflict of testimony there is the undoubted fact that out of the Roman municipal institutions had risen the establishment of separate sovereignties, as Procopius relates. Britain, according to St. Jerome, was "a province fertile in tyrants." The Roman municipal government was kept compact and uniform under a great centralizing power.
Not only were they characteristic of Spain, but analogous institutions were established as a Spanish population grew up and was organized in the Indies, where there was a strong tendency to revert to practical self-government and thus to defeat the centralizing policy of the monarchy.
Without the Town-Meeting, or its equivalent in some form or other, the Federal Union would become ipso facto converted into a centralizing imperial government.
The Tariff Law, the Excise, the National Bank, the National Funding Bill, all centralizing measures, were his. Washington approved them all, and we may believe that he talked them over with Hamilton and gave them his approval before they came under public discussion. Thus, as Hamilton gained, Jefferson plainly lost. But Washington did not abandon his sound position as a neutral between the two.
The Pepins had already succeeded in making the office of Maire du Palais hereditary in their family, and in the year A.D. 732, Charles, son and successor of Pepin the Younger, made himself forever the hero not of France alone, but of Christendom, by driving the Saracen invasion back over the Pyrenees, and was in turn succeeded by his son, Pepin the Short, who seized the Merovingian crown itself; this remarkable family, the appointed channel for the centralizing forces, reaching its climax in his son Charlemagne; creator of a Holy Roman Empire.
The emperor John had added greatly to the efficiency of the Byzantine military force by improving and centralizing its administration, and he left Manuel an excellent army, which rendered the Eastern Empire the most powerful state in Europe. But Manuel, from motives of economy, abandoned his father's system.
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