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Then, on my going to him 'I feel that I shall not last long, he said; 'but I am willing to die when I think how comfortably I have arranged your future. He was talking of death, and anything but grief at that moment was doubtless impious and monstrous; but there came into my heart for the first time a throbbing sense of being over-governed.
Seeing, then, that the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe were almost barren of great formative movements such as had ennobled the previous decades, we may well leave that over-governed, over-drilled continent weltering in its riches and discontent, its militarism and moral weakness, in order to survey events further afield which carried on the State-building process to lands as yet chaotic or ill-organised.
Germany has organized herself into an organization, and is the most over-governed country in the world. What every democracy of free men wants is not as much, but as little, organization as possible compatible with economical administration of industry, the army, the navy, and the affairs of the state.
It puts strange thoughts into one's head about the mountain-load of government under which people exist in Europe, and suggests the idea that we may be over-governed. Think of the hundred Acts of Parliament annually enacted to prevent us, the people of England, from cutting each other's throats, or from doing to our neighbour as we would not be done by.
The popular apprehension of being over-governed, and, I am afraid, more emphatically the fear of being over-taxed, has had much to do with the general abandonment of certain governmental duties by the ruling powers of most modern states.
Thus does this great ruler furnish another instance of the familiar but everneeded lesson, that countries may be over-governed.
They hurl themselves upon him in a pitiless pursuit, and wherever he flees, the pervading corruptions, the ingrained cowardices of over-governed mankind beset his feet like gins and pitfalls. It was a hereditary nightmare, and with a less pedestrian imagination, his daughter, Mary Shelley, used the same theme of a remorseless pursuit in Frankenstein.
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