RESPONSIBILITY OF THE STATE IN ENGLAND 469 opment. The Council of State was willing to insist upon damages for an unduly delayed appointment of a retired soldier to the civil service; it held the state responsible for the faulty construction of a canal.^^^ Most remarkable of all was perhaps the Pluchard case in which a civilian obtained damages for a fall occasioned by an involuntary collision with a policeman in pursuit of a thief.^^ Nor has the evolution stopped there. It has become possible to overturn governmental ordinances — the analogue of the English provisional order; or, at least, to obtain special compensation where hardship in the application of the ordinance can be proved.^^* What practically has been estabHshed is governmental responsi- bility where the administrative act is in genuine relation to the oflScial's duty. It is only where, as in the Morizot case,^^ the official goes clearly outside his functions that the state repudiates liability. No one will claim for this French evolution that it has been the result of a conscious effort to overthrow the traditional theory of sovereignty; on the contrary, its slow and hesitating development suggests the difficulties that have been encountered. ^^^ But no French court will say again, as in the Blanco case,^^^ that prob- lems of state are to be ruled by special considerations ahen to the categories of private law. The real advantage, indeed, of the system is its refusal to recognize, within, at least, the existing limits of this evolution, any special privilege to the state. It judges the acts of authority by the recognized rules of ordinary justice. It asks, as it is surely right to ask, the same standard of conduct from a public official as would be expected from a private citizen. The method may have its disadvantages. There is undoubtedly a real benefit in the Anglo-American method of bringing the consequences of each act rigidly to bear upon the official responsible for it. Yet, as has been shown, this theory is far dififerent from the application of the rule in practice; it does ^ Cf. DuGUiT, op. cit., 261. ^ Recueil (1910), 1029. ^^ SiREY, 1908, III, I, and see the account of the Turpin case in DtJGUiT, op. cit., 266, for the application of responsibility to ministerial negligence of a special kind. "6 SiREY, 1908, III, 83. ^' The Ambrosini case, for example, Sirey, 191 2, III, 161, suggests a revulsion of sentiment. "^ Haukiou, PRfas DE Droit Administratif, 8 ed., 503, note i.
