Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/230

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given them. This University cannot allow the stigma which the absence of such teaching entails to rest on it even temporarily. The best illustration of the malignant results of the absence of such teaching is to be found in the misunderstandings which must arise when principles have not been mastered. No controversy should have arisen about local self-government if a clear understanding of its meaning had been the result of previous University teaching. I do not wish to give an essay on the subject, as I am not a candidate for the chair which will ere long I trust be created, but I may briefly point out what a lecture on the subject would contain. It would point out how you can have in the same country unity of legislation without unity of administration; self-government without autonomy, partial decentralisation; unity both of legislation and of administration; absence both of self-government and of autonomy, absolute centralisation ; variety of legislation with unity of administration or legislative decentralisation with administrative centralisation; variety of legislation and variety of administration—self-government combined with autonomy;absolute decentralisation. In England we have self-government without autonomy-Acts of Parliament rule and overrule every detail of the administration,  but the administration is not Carried out by a bureaucracy; it is left to a variety of local bodies to carry out the laws. These local bodies, however, have no legislative functions. In England, we have the maximum of legislative centralisation with the minimum of bureaucratic centralisation and of autonomy. The administration is carried on by the people themselves, but it is carried on without autonomy on lines laid down by the central legislature. There are no inferior legislative bodies with independent powers. A strong legislative centralisation is quite compatible with delegation of administrative powers to local bodies subject to carry out what the law prescribes, and unable to follow their own inclinations or to wander outside a strictly defined legal sphere. The results of this system are general respect for the law based on general understanding of the law, as all classes of the community are called upon to join in its execution, absence of conflict between the central law and the laws promulgated by other legislative units, absence of bureaucracy except for the highest Imperial concerns. In France we have neither self- government nor autonomy. "L'tat c'est moi" means that the lawgiver, whoever he is, not only legislates for the whole country but administers it. No self-government is tolerated; no inde-