children to school, and relying on the schoolmaster or the circulating library for all their knowledge and ideas,—a population, too, which, by its artistic occupations, requires continually fresh instruction at a pace proportionate to the progress of scientific discoveries, then nothing needs further to be done but for the central power to appoint all the schoolmasters, to license all the books, and despotism is enthroned not merely on the bodies, but on the minds of the people.

This is why every free Englishman recoils involuntarily from the state-education of Prussia, of France, of China, and though he may find the average Prussian, or the average Chinaman, or the average Italian a far more cultivated, ingenious, versatile, inventive man than the average Englishman, he dreads and hates those state-systems of the Continent, which, adapting the military organisation to the mental culture, establish all over the country government barracks for training the national mind. And taught by the saddest lessons of history, he sees the error of statesmen who, like Quesnay* and Turgot, believed that national education was a preventive of despotism. It is not. The intellect of despotism is one of its main supports.

Each promising youth who leaves the state establishment, with a mind developed in the tracks laid down for him by the central despotism, when he feels within him a power of being something better than the cultivator of the paternal patch of land, or the chief manipulator in the paternal smithy, looks about into society for a worthy object of ambition. He is told that at certain periods of the year severe examinations are held by the officers of the central government, that all citizens alike are allowed to enter into that competition, and that those who succeed in it pass from the governed into the governors, and may rise by well-earned gradations to all but the highest

Quesnay said, "Le despotisme est impossible si la nation est éclairée."

posts in the state. One thing only is required, implicit obedience to the central head, obedience to all who by the system of the state, may be higher in the functionary scale, and a total abnegation of independent action. Is it wonderful that thus the whole ambition of the community is directed to public office? Is it wonderful that to meet this ambition, and to spread still wider the influence of government, the central power extends to the utmost taxpaying limits the number of public functionaries? Is it wonderful that each educated youth, well trained in the mind-barrack and animated by the hope of rising in a settled gradation, subsides into his place with perfect ease and with a subordination of mind and body not excelled by the most perfect military discipline? This is the reason why the functionary despotic system obtains in the stage of equal civilisation such excellent materials to work with. How is it that it finds in the social condition of the nation subject matter so well suited to its operation?

First, there are no independent country gentlemen. All the work performed in a constitutional country by lordslieutenant, sheriffs, justices of the peace, country police, juries, and the whole parochial body, is committed in France and other centralised countries to the prefects and their subordinates, each prefect being directly responsible, and receiving his whole inspiration from the central minister. Secondly, for the reasons mentioned in this and the last chapter, the great bulk of the population have abandoned even the wish to govern themselves. Thirdly, the state education has produced a substantial equality, not only in rank but in intellectual accomplishments, among the populace, who therefore own no eminence or distinction but such as follow wealth and governmental rank; and the school learning of the state teachers, while it has taught them many accomplishments has carefully outrooted plain common-sense, and independent action. Fourthly, a more active and inquisitive system

of government than could be easily formed by a selfgoverning people in its best days is rendered necessary by the minute complexity of society.

A peasant population which either lives upon the full produce of their own lands, or cultivating another person's, after deducting what suffices for their existence, pays him the surplus in kind, have little need of the minute interference of government. A few simple rules of civil and criminal law, and a few fiscal regulations, suffice for the ordering of such a population. When wants and the arts of ministering to wants increase, new regulations continually require to be framed by the power in the state which is able to enforce them. Population increases, towns grow, a large class of people cease to cultivate the ground, and not having rents to live upon, turn to handicrafts and other more subtle ways of gaining their daily bread. When every man is his own butcher, baker, bootmaker, clothier, lawyer, ballad-singer, or keeps one of each craft on his own private establishment, no laws or government inspectors are required to regulate his dealings with himself in his different capacities, or with the members of his family and household who assist him in them, but as labour becomes infinitely divided and society is split into an infinity of trades and professions, a new nerve of government is ever permeating into some new fissure. Thus in highly artificial societies, such as many of those now on the Continent, a fresh opening for a new functionary is continually occurring, and is as continually filled with avidity by the central government. Whether it be in the inspection of factories, an employment ever

The government of Paris anxious to outroot the influence of the provincial powers, decreed, with a ridiculous minuteness, the terms upon which artisans should hire themselves out, and the mode in which they should manufacture certain articles; and to enforce these, not only the regular intendants were in state of constant activity, but general inspectors of industry pervaded the country for that purpose. De Tocq. L'Anc. Rég. p. 62.

increasing as manufactures increase; whether it be in the administration of the roads of gravel or of iron, means in the hands of despots of making the central power felt to the last league of their territory; whether it be in licensing the press, which in countries of artificial culture is almost the only way of communicating with effect any new thought or feeling; whether it be in the ever increasing litigation of provincial districts, populous with peasant proprietors, who find provided for the settlement of their quarrels not an independent, hereditary local potentate, but an emissary of the central minister, prepared to adjudicate by no local custom or usages, but by some Code Napoléon; whether it be in restraining the increasing wiles of men who, driven from their last device, are ever inventing some fresh and unprohibited doctrine of ill-doing; whether it be in the increased duties of police, and the necessity of an organised central body who should meet the profession of thieves in their increased science, with devices as ingenious, as well concerted as their own; whether it be in providing shows and food for an impatient and idle populace, wrought up to a state of morbid sensibility; whether it be in wresting from private hands and making part of the governmental duty the education of the people and the management of the charities of the empire, so that to the government the outcast, the maimed, the superannuated should look for the only helping hand, the only hospitable roof*; all these things and many more akin to them demand of government, or at least admit it to exercise in the later stages of society, a degree of activity, a minuteness and constancy of interference which could hardly be provided if government were not the sole duty of a special class. On comparing these different effects of simplicity

"Tous les membres de tous les bureaux de bienfaisance de la France entière sont nommés et révoqués par les préfets."- Montalembert, L'Avenir pol. de l'Angl. p. 258.

and complexity of life, we cannot help being struck with the great foresight of the ancient legislators, who consulted their own ease as well as their country's good, when they inculcated public morality and frugality; for a simple honest population with few wants and few business transactions with their neighbours is the easiest of any to govern, provided the form of government can be reconciled with their ideas of liberty and self-action.

When, therefore, the stage of appropriate despotism has arrived, the constant intermeddling of the government (an intermeddling to which all despots, whether appropriate or not, are prone) in matters even of extreme minuteness, is not without some reasonable pretence; nor can such an enormous change in the frame and scheme of government fail to have striking effects upon the character of those who are its subjects.

The English traveller in France, in Belgium, in Prussia, in Austria, even in Denmark, is struck by an amazing difference between these countries and his own. There government pretends to do everything for the people, nothing by the people. Here each section, each isolated class of the people, fights its own battle, manages its own cause, administers its own rules, and strikes in for as much power in the general state as the conflicting interests of other classes will allow to it. These nations of the Continent wait, like good children, upon the fostering care of their "paternal" government. They see-the Prussians and the French in particular-a constant anxiety on the part of this government to encourage whatever tends to their pleasure and gratification. Are they pleased with the fine arts? are they fond of learning? do they like music and operas, and the thunder of military bands ?. all these are anxiously provided for them by their paternal government. Famine is ever kept from them; disease and its preventions are the especial care of the government. They have but to intimate a new craving, and if it can be responded to their government responds. One