uses with which the Americans are
unacquainted. It would seem as if every step they make towards equality
brings them nearer to despotism. And indeed if we do but cast our
looks around, we shall be convinced that such is the fact. During the
aristocratic ages which preceded the present time, the sovereigns of
Europe had been deprived of, or had relinquished, many of the rights
inherent in their power. Not a hundred years ago, amongst the greater
part of European nations, numerous private persons and corporations were
sufficiently independent to administer justice, to raise and maintain
troops, to levy taxes, and frequently even to make or interpret the
law. The State has everywhere resumed to itself alone these natural
attributes of sovereign power; in all matters of government the State
tolerates no intermediate agent between itself and the people, and in
general business it directs the people by its own immediate influence. I
am far from blaming this concentration of power, I simply point it out.

At the same period a great number of secondary powers existed in Europe,
which represented local interests and administered local affairs. Most
of these local authorities have already disappeared; all are speedily
tending to disappear, or to fall into the most complete dependence.
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