2208 ([return])
[ The essays of Herbert Spencer furnish examples for England under the title of "Over-legislation and Representative government." Examples for France may be found in "Liberté du Travail," by Charles Dunoyer (1845). This work anticipates most of the ideas of Herbert Spencer, lacking only the physiological "illustrations.">[
CHAPTER III. THE NEW GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION.
I. Precedents of the new organization.
Precedents of the new organization.—In practical
operation.—Anterior usurpations of the public power.
—Spontaneous bodies under the Ancient Regime and during the
Revolution.—Ruin and discredit of their supports.—The
central power their sole surviving dependence.
Unfortunately, in France at the end of the eighteenth century the bent was taken and the wrong bent. For three centuries and more the public power had increasingly violated and discredited spontaneous bodies:
Sometimes it had mutilated them and decapitated them; for example, it had suppressed provincial governments (états) over three-quarters of the territory, in all the electoral districts; nothing remained of the old province but its name and an administrative circumscription.
Sometimes, without mutilating the corporate body it had upset and deformed it, or dislocated and disjointed it.—So that in the towns, through changes made in old democratic constitutions, through restrictions put upon electoral rights and repeated sales of municipal offices,[2301] it had handed over municipal authority to a narrow oligarchy of bourgeois families, privileged at the expense of the taxpayer, half separated from the main body of the public, disliked by the lower classes, and no longer supported by the confidence or deference of the community. And in the parish and in the rural canton, it had taken away from the noble his office of resident protector and hereditary patron, reducing him to the odious position of a mere creditor, and, if he were a man of the court, to the yet worse position of an absentee creditor.[2302]—So that in the parish and in the rural canton, it had taken away from the noble his office of resident protector and hereditary patron, reducing him to the odious position of a mere creditor, and, if he were a man of the court, to the yet worse position of an absentee creditor.[2303] Thus, as to the clergy, it had almost separated the head from the trunk by superposing (through the concordat) a staff of gentleman prelates, rich, ostentatious, unemployed, and skeptical, upon an army of plain, poor, laborious, and believing curates.[2304]