icipal communities are broken up or
crushed out,

* all collective existences chilled or extinguished,

* local patriotism slowly worn away,

* an increasing diminution of individual initiative,

and, under the invasive interference, direction, and providence of the
State, one hundred millions of men become more and more passive and
separated from each other.[2331]

And as a result, in full enjoyment of peace and internal prosperity
under the appearances of union, force, and health, latent feebleness,
and, as in France on the approach of 1789, a coming dissolution.

There is next, as after 1789 in France, the total collapse, not from
below and among the people, but from above and through the army, a worse
collapse than in France, prolonged for fifty years of anarchy, civil
wars, local usurpations, ephemeral tyrannies, urban seditions, rural
jacqueries, brigandage, famines, and invasions along the whole frontier,
with such a ruin of agriculture and other useful activities, with such
a diminution of public and private capital, with such a destruction of
human lives that, in twenty years, the number of the population seems
to have diminished one half.[2332] There is, finally, as after 1799, in
France, the re-establishment of order brought about more slowly, but by
the same means, the army and a dictatorship, in the rude hands of three
or four great military parvenus, Pannonians or Dalmatians, Bonapartes
of Sirmium or of Scutari, they too, of a new race or of intact energy,
adventurers and children of their own deeds, the last Diocletian, like
Napoleon, a restorer and an innovator. Around them, as around
Napoleon, to aid them in their civil undertakings, is a crowd of expert
administrators and eminent jurisconsults, all practitioners, statesmen,
and businessmen, and yet men of culture, logicians, and philosophers.
They were imbued with the double governmental and humanitarian view,
which for three centuries Greek speculation and Roman practice had
introduced into minds and imaginations. This view, at once leveling and
authoritative, tending to exaggerate the attributes of the State and the
supreme power of the prince,[2333] was nevertheless inclined

* to put natural right in the place of positive law,[2334]

* to preferring equity and logic to antiquity and to custom,

* to reinstate the dignity of man among the qualities of mankind,

* to enhance the condition of the slave, of the provincial, of the
debtor, of