n enormously encouraged, it is obviously far more difficult for
socialism to force an entrance into each little group. There are all
sorts of local conditions to be squared, vagaries of law and
administration to be reduced to order, connecting bridges to be thrown
from one portion of the nation to the next, so as to form of it one
single whole. Were the socialists of to-day to seize on the machinery of
government in Germany and Russia, they could attain their purposes
easily and smoothly, and little difference in constitutional forms would
be observed in these countries, for already the theory of State
ownership and State interference actually obtains. They would only have
to substitute a _bloc_ for a man. But in France and England, where the
centralisation is far less complete, the success of the socialistic
party and its achievement of supreme power would mean an almost entire
subversal of all established methods of administration, for all the
threads would have first to be gathered into a single hand.

Consequently feudalism, which turned the landowners into petty
sovereigns and insisted on local courts, &c., though seemingly
communistic or socialistic, was really, from its intense local
colouring, far less easy of capture by those who favoured State
interference. It was individualistic, based on private rights. But the
new royal prerogative led the way to the consideration of the evident
ease by which, once the machine was possessed, the rest of the system
could without difficulty be brought into harmony with the new theories.
To make use of comparison, it was Cardinal Wolsey's assumption of full
legatine power by permission of the Pope which first suggested to Henry
VIII that he could dispense with His Holiness altogether. He saw that
the Cardinal wielded both spiritual and temporal jurisdiction. He
coveted his minister's position, and eventually achieved it by ousting
both Clement and Wolsey, who had unwittingly shown him in which way more
power lay.

So, similarly, the royal despotism itself, by centralising all power
into the hands of a single prince, accustomed men to the idea of the
absolute supremacy of national law, drove out of the field every
defender of the rights of minorities, and thus paved the way for the
substitution of the people for itself. The French Revolution was the
logical conclusion to be drawn from the theories of Louis XIV. It needed
only the fire of Rousseau to burn out the adventitious o