Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/212

. They required not so much remodelling, as to be placed on an entirely new footing. The finances of every Crown in Europe still bore the character of the budget of a feudal superior, and were struggling to get free from the restraints of that system—if system it could be called. In all these matters centralisation was as much the necessity of those times, in order that the State should live, as a decentralisation is the need of the present day. Different minds, according as they were constituted, saw—some the dangers of the existing disorder, others the perils of change, more clearly. Ministers like Strafford and Richelieu only recognised in ancient customs the shield of innumerable abuses, and a fixed obstacle to the material development of their country at home and to a consistent foreign policy abroad. In England the privileges of the aristocracy and corporate towns fortunately found defenders capable of comprehending that, in order to survive, they must prove themselves something more than the bulwarks of a dead past, and that a reformed and properly organised central administration was necessary for the benefit of the nation as a whole.

Notwithstanding his undoubted leaning to the monarchical element of the Constitution, Hobbes is not to be identified with the vulgar adherents of mere personal absolutism. The enemy he combated was the notion of any shape of imperium in imperio, whether lay or ecclesiastical, which could stand in the way of the legitimate development of the State. Following up the ideas which Bodin was the first to enunciate clearly, he defended the cause of a strong and powerful administration on determinate lines, able to assert itself against privilege within and foreign attack and intrigue without. He may be regarded as the founder of the doctrine of the ultimate