those about him--let him
search himself, and I am much mistaken if he does not arrive, without
my guidance, and by other paths, at the point to which I have sought
to lead him. He will perceive that for the last half-century,
centralization has everywhere been growing up in a thousand different
ways. Wars, revolutions, conquests, have served to promote it: all men
have labored to increase it. In the course of the same period, during
which men have succeeded each other with singular rapidity at the head
of affairs, their notions, interests, and passions have been infinitely
diversified; but all have by some means or other sought to centralize.
This instinctive centralization has been the only settled point amidst
the extreme mutability of their lives and of their thoughts.

If the reader, after having investigated these details of human affairs,
will seek to survey the wide prospect as a whole, he will be struck
by the result. On the one hand the most settled dynasties shaken or
overthrown--the people everywhere escaping by violence from the sway
of their laws--abolishing or limiting the authority of their rulers or
their princes--the nations, which are not in open revolution, restless
at least, and excited--all of them animated by the same spirit of
revolt: and on the other hand, at this very period of anarchy, and
amongst these untractable nations, the incessant increase of the
prerogative of the supreme government, becoming more centralized, more
adventurous, more absolute, more extensive--the people perpetually
falling under the control of the public administration--led
insensibly to surrender to it some further portion of their individual
independence, till the very men, who from time to time upset a throne
and trample on a race of kings, bend more and more obsequiously to the
slightest dictate of a clerk. Thus two contrary revolutions appear
in our days to be going on; the one continually weakening the supreme
power, the other as continually strengthening it: at no other period
in our history has it appeared so weak or so strong. But upon a more
attentive examination of the state of the world, it appears that these
two revolutions are intimately connected together, that they originate
in the same source, and that after having followed a separate course,
they lead men at last to the same result. I may venture once more to
repeat what I have already said or implied in several parts of this
book: great care must be ta