Page:Studies in constitutional law Fr-En-US (1891).pdf/158

150 unity in England existed at such an early date, and the feeling for this unity was so active, in those earliest times, that the state did not frown upon these secondary institutions, and even found it advantageous to respect their independent growth, and to recognize them as the complement of or supplement to its own somewhat imperfect organization. Thus it was that the consciousness of a distinct life, and a right independent of all positive grant, in the long run developed an immense number of great and small local and special authorities, such as universities, ecclesiastical corporations, boroughs, parish vestries, and chartered bodies. Created one by one, each body remained more or less independent of the others; not one of them was content to take rank passively in a co-ordinated whole, nor to feel itself strictly dependent on an organization, which was itself subject to the general welfare. Their past history is so ancient, their origin in some cases so near the date of the formation of the body politic itself, they have so completely lost the habit of considering their immemorial social functions as delegated, they look upon themselves so naturally and simply as partners and not agents of the state, that an English lawyer has to reflect seriously, and to philosophize more than is his wont, before he discovers that these institutions are really the servants of the state, and that their claims must give way to considerations of the public good.

My reader will now realize how different all this is from the state of things in France. In France the nation is a single mass; in England it is an aggregate. In France the superior powers have all been created by the