a police, tribunals, highways, schools, in short, the major instruments of public safety and utility, at the same time withholding the remainder of local, general, spiritual and material services in favor of private initiative and of spontaneous associations that may arise as occasion or necessity calls for them.  Our State is not to be a simple utilitarian machine, a convenient, handy implement, of which the workman avails himself without abandoning the free use of his hand, or the simultaneous use of other implements.  Being elder born, the only son and sole representative of Reason it must, to ensure its sway, leave nothing beyond its grasp. — In this respect the old régime paves the way for the new one, while the established system inclines minds beforehand to the budding theory.  Through administrative centralization the State already, for a long time, has its hands everywhere.[19]

“You must know,” says Law to the Marquis d’Argenson, “that the kingdom of France is governed by thirty intendants.  You have neither parliaments, assemblies or governors, simply thirty masters of requests, provincial clerks, on whom depends the happiness or misery, the fruitfulness or sterility of these provinces.”

The king, in fact, sovereign, father, and universal guardian, manages local affairs through his delegates, and intervenes in private affairs through his favors or lettres-de-cachet(royal orders of imprisonment).  Such an example and such a course followed for fifty years excites the imagination.  No other instrument is more useful for carrying large reforms out at one time.  Hence, far from restricting the central power the economists are desirous of extending its action.  Instead of setting up new dikes against it they interest themselves only in destroying what is left of the old dikes still interfering with it.  “The system of counter-forces in a government,” says Quesnay and his disciples, “is a fatal idea . . .  The speculations on which the system of counter-balance is founded are chimerical . . . .  Let the government have a full comprehension of its duties and be left free. . .  The State must govern according to the essential laws of order, and in this case unlimited power is requisite.”  On the approach of the Revolution the same doctrine reappears, except in the substitution of one term for another term.  In the place of the sovereignty of the king the “Contrat social” substitutes the sovereignty of the people.  The latter, however, is much more absolute than the former, and, in the democratic convent which Rousseau constructs, on Spartan and Roman model, the individual is nothing and the State everything.