he State alone appears to be endowed with strength
and durability. *c Thus the sovereign does not confine himself to
the management of the public treasury; he interferes in private money
matters; he is the superior, and often the master, of all the members
of the community; and, in addition to this, he assumes the part of their
steward and paymaster.

[Footnote c: On the one hand the taste for worldly welfare is
perpetually increasing, and on the other the government gets more and
more complete possession of the sources of that welfare. Thus men are
following two separate roads to servitude: the taste for their own
welfare withholds them from taking a part in the government, and their
love of that welfare places them in closer dependence upon those who
govern.]

The central power not only fulfils of itself the whole of the duties
formerly discharged by various authorities--extending those duties, and
surpassing those authorities--but it performs them with more alertness,
strength, and independence than it displayed before. All the governments
of Europe have in our time singularly improved the science of
administration: they do more things, and they do everything with more
order, more celerity, and at less expense; they seem to be constantly
enriched by all the experience of which they have stripped private
persons. From day to day the princes of Europe hold their subordinate
officers under stricter control, and they invent new methods for guiding
them more closely, and inspecting them with less trouble. Not content
with managing everything by their agents, they undertake to manage the
conduct of their agents in everything; so that the public administration
not only depends upon one and the same power, but it is more and more
confined to one spot and concentrated in the same hands. The government
centralizes its agency whilst it increases its prerogative--hence a
twofold increase of strength.

In examining the ancient constitution of the judicial power, amongst
most European nations, two things strike the mind--the independence of
that power, and the extent of its functions. Not only did the courts of
justice decide almost all differences between private persons, but in
very many cases they acted as arbiters between private persons and the
State. I do not here allude to the political and administrative offices
which courts of judicature had in some countries usurped, but the
judicial office common to them all. In most