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affairs. Most of these local authorities have already disappeared; all are speedily tending to disappear, or to fall into the most complete dependance. From one end of Europe to the other the privileges of the nobility, the liberties of cities, and the powers of provincial bodies, are either destroyed or upon the verge of destruction.
Europe has endured, in the course of the last half century, many revolutions and counter-revolutions which have agitated it in opposite directions: but all these perturbations resemble each other in one respect—they have all shaken or destroyed the secondary powers of government. The local privileges which the French did not abolish in the countries they conquered, have finally succumbed to the policy of the princes who conquered the French. Those princes rejected all the innovations of the French revolution except centralization: that is the only principle they consented to receive from such a source.
My object is to remark, that all these various rights, which have been successively wrested, in our time, from classes, corporations, and individuals, have not served to raise new secondary powers on a more democratic basis, but have uniformly been concentrated in the hands of the sovereign. Everywhere the State acquires more and more direct control over the humblest members of the community, and a more exclusive power of governing each of them in his smallest concerns.[1]
Almost all the charitable establishments of Europe were formerly in the hands of private persons or of corporations; they are
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This gradual weakening of individuals in relation to society at large
may be traced in a thousand ways. I shall select from among these examples
one derived from the law of wills.
In aristocracies it is common to profess the greatest reverence for the last testamentary dispositions of a man; this feeling sometimes even became superstitious among the elder nations of Europe: the power of the State, far from interfering with the caprices of a dying man, gave full force to the very least of them, and insured to him a perpetual power.
When all living men are enfeebled, the will of the dead is less respected: it is circumscribed within a narrow range, beyond which it is annulled or checked by the supreme power of the laws. In the middle ages, testamentary power had, so to speak, no limits: among the French at the present day, a man cannot distribute his fortune among his children without the interference of the State: after having domineered over a whole life, the law insists upon regulating the very last act of it.
