What resistance can be offered to
tyranny in a country where every private individual is impotent, and
where the citizens are united by no common tie? Those who dread the
license of the mob, and those who fear the rule of absolute power, ought
alike to desire the progressive growth of provincial liberties.

On the other hand, I am convinced that democratic nations are most
exposed to fall beneath the yoke of a central administration, for
several reasons, amongst which is the following. The constant tendency
of these nations is to concentrate all the strength of the Government
in the hands of the only power which directly represents the people,
because beyond the people nothing is to be perceived but a mass of equal
individuals confounded together. But when the same power is already
in possession of all the attributes of the Government, it can scarcely
refrain from penetrating into the details of the administration, and an
opportunity of doing so is sure to present itself in the end, as was
the case in France. In the French Revolution there were two impulses
in opposite directions, which must never be confounded--the one was
favorable to liberty, the other to despotism. Under the ancient monarchy
the King was the sole author of the laws, and below the power of the
sovereign certain vestiges of provincial institutions, half destroyed,
were still distinguishable. These provincial institutions were
incoherent, ill compacted, and frequently absurd; in the hands of
the aristocracy they had sometimes been converted into instruments of
oppression. The Revolution declared itself the enemy of royalty and of
provincial institutions at the same time; it confounded all that
had preceded it--despotic power and the checks to its abuses--in
indiscriminate hatred, and its tendency was at once to overthrow and
to centralize. This double character of the French Revolution is a fact
which has been adroitly handled by the friends of absolute power. Can
they be accused of laboring in the cause of despotism when they are
defending that central administration which was one of the great
innovations of the Revolution? *v In this manner popularity may be
conciliated with hostility to the rights of the people, and the secret
slave of tyranny may be the professed admirer of freedom.

[Footnote v: See Appendix K.]

I have visited the two nations in which the system of provincial liberty
has been most perfectly established, and I have listened to