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BEST TITLE TO THE CROWN.

-and it is a far nobler as well as safer title than any hereditary pretensions could confer. Had Francis Joseph pursued a different course he might probably have become the object of the election of the people of Hungary. And his advisers must have minds and feelings as ignoble as they are treacherous and bloodthirsty, if they can think the prospect of a throne gained by conquest is to be placed for a moment in competition with that of a throne gained by the free election of a free people. Safe a throne so gained can never be; and the only hope which Francis Joseph, if permitted to hold the crown of Hungary, can have of ruling otherwise than by the continual exhibition of bloodshed and the sword, will lie in his sacredly respecting and maintaining the fundamental laws and institutions which Hungary has inherited, and which all her lawful kings have solemnly sworn to observe and to defend *.

* There is good reason to hope that Lord Palmerston is anxious to use every effort to maintain the integrity and laws and liberties of Hungary. It is his and this country's misfortune that he has been, and is, shackled by the bureaucratic government with which he is connected; and which has been so long zealously pursuing the faithless and pernicious system which has blighted Austria and France, and been endeavouring, and is endeavouring, by every means to crush and depress all the institutions and independence and enterprise of England under the debasing yoke of Centralization. The people of England should emphatically express their determination to support Lord Palmerston in his efforts to secure Hungary from falling a prey, as is now threatened, to this fatal system. It is with this view that a Memorial has been prepared, and has been already cordially adopted in several places, urging on Lord Palmerston prompt and vigorous action,-which may still be most effectively exerted. The prayer of that Memorial is, that Lord Palmerston do use such prompt means as shall seem the most effectual to cause the entire weight and influence of the British Government,-supported as it will be by the strong and generous sympathies of the entire British nation,-to be exercised for the purpose of obtaining the full security of the inhabitants of Hungary, both generally and specially, from danger to their lives, properties, and personal liberty; and, further, for the purpose of ensuring that (under whatever arrangements may be made in consequence of the termination of the recent struggle) the integrity of Hungary shall be respected and preserved; that her ancient Constitution, and her Laws as amended by the Diet and solemnly assented to by the king of Hungary in April 1848, shall be left untouched; and, specifically and emphatically, that her ancient Institutions of Local Selfgovernment, the basis and only sure protection of her Liberties, shall remain unimpaired, and in no respect superseded by that blighting system of Centralization, the attempt to impose which upon the land has been the root of all the evils which Hungary has suffered for three centuries, and the immediate cause of the late disastrous struggle."

DEEP GROUNDS FOR ENGLISH SYMPATHY.

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If it is thus obvious that the special circumstances which led to the actual position in which Hungary found herself, when unwillingly compelled in 1848 to take up arms to defend her laws and liberties from destruction, were such as ought to have attracted the warmest interest and the cordial aid of England, that interest should but become the warmer, and that aid the more earnest, when the nature of the laws and institutions themselves which have been so threatened, and so manfully maintained, is understood. For it will be found that, not only were the special circumstances under which the attack was made and resisted identical with those which occurred 160 years ago in England, and on which alone the present occupancy of the crown of England is based, but the fundamental laws and institutions themselves which were endangered and maintained in the respective cases are almost the same. The parallel runs so close, that it is impossible for any man to examine it without feeling his confidence in fundamental laws and institutions, as the only safe and sure foundations of a free state, strengthened and increased; and without feeling that those fundamental laws and institutions which Englishmen and Hungarians, though so widely separated and so unrelated, have alike maintained for so many ages, must have their sure basis planted in human nature, and that they are not, either at home or abroad,—to be permitted to be trampled on or overridden.

It will be impossible in the present sketch to enter at the length which a full exposition would require, into even the briefest statement of the bearing, in all their directions, of the fundamental laws and institutions of England. Attention shall be fixed upon such particular points in those fundamental laws and institutions as are of prominent importance and constant application. The essential characteristics of each, and its importance, having been pointed out, it shall be shown, with as much brevity as possible, how it exists in England, and what dangers it has here incurred, and is incurring; and this shall be followed by showing what parallels the fundamental laws and institutions of Hungary have to offer.

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LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT.

The basis, and only possible solid foundation, of free institutions in any country must always be Local Self-Government. The name of free institutions may exist; a national representative assembly may exist; a theoretical constitution, full of liberal pretensions, may exist; a free press may exist; nay, universal suffrage may exist, and even annual parliaments: but, unless there be general and active and unshackled local self-government, free institutions can have no reality; law and liberty and property can have no assured securities; and the government will be merely a despotism more or less oppressive, and more or less artfully disguised. This all-important truth has not been sufficiently seen and felt by those who, of late years, have taken the part of leaders in what is called "liberal policy" in this country. The consequence has been that disappointment only has followed, and always will follow, from their measures. And yet it does not need any very profound consideration to perceive, and thoroughly to understand, that full, free, and unshackled local self-government is, of necessity, the alpha and the omega of free institutions.

The difference between free institutions and despotic governments is precisely the difference between men taking care of their own affairs, and submitting to have their affairs taken care of for them by others. Between a bureaucracy and an individual despotism there is no shade of difference in principle. Each is equally fatal to liberty and human progress, and to the development of every generous and elevated aspiration and effort; but a bureaucracy is the more really dangerous to human freedom, because it may be disguised under the "libertatis aliquam quasi larvam," the forms of a free constitution, and so the more insidiously do its work;-and because, also, it is far more difficult to be eradicated when once its hideousness is seen.

Let it be granted that even a Representative Assembly exists to manage all national affairs, it will yet be self-evident that it is not by instinct that men are able to form a proper judgement as to the qualifications or acts of their representatives. Such judgement, and the experience necessary to it, can never be got in any other way than by habitual and free discussion on similar classes of subjects among those who feel that they have an

PLAUSIBLE PRETENCES OF CENTRALIZERS.

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immediate interest in the result. It is by the habit and experience of understanding, and helping to manage, their own affairs and the affairs of their own district, that men can alone have their minds so trained as to be able to judge of the mode in which their representatives in Parliament ought to, and do, manage the affairs of the nation. It is by the independence of thought and conduct to be only acquired by the habit of being continually called upon to express an opinion on, and to take an active part in, the management of the affairs of their own district, that men can alone ever be really fit to elect representatives to Parliament, or to form sound and respect-worthy opinions of the conduct of such representatives.

Presumptuous pretenders, anxious to impose their own crude schemes upon their countrymen, will always glorify the system of Centralization and Bureaucratic Rule. They will never be without "flattering preambles" to palm off their "mischievous Acts" upon the public. Now it is the Police, now it is Poor Law, now it is the Public Health*. Utterly ignorant of, and

* These are, of course, only given as illustrations of devices the name of which is Legion. I do not wish now to dwell particularly on any one of these. In my work on Government by Commissions illegal and pernicious,' I have examined this system in detail, and proved its illegality, and pointed out its mischief, as well as the dishonest means by which it is being fastened on the land. I most earnestly request the readers' attention to the facts and reasoning contained in that work. I have already, in a previous note, called attention to the gross violations of the fundamental laws of England contained in the (so-called) Public Health Act. No one can doubt that the fatal effects of the cholera have been in reality aggravated by the success of the presumptuous pretenders who have got their schemes of centralization carried out in a Public Health Board and a Metropolitan Commission of Sewers. This has happened, directly, by their empirical and ill-advised measures, where they have attempted anything, and by their utter incapacity for originating or doing anything good or useful; indirectly, by encouraging (as always will be the case) apathy and neglect of their duties in those who are taught, by the existence and pretensions of such Boards, that self-reliance and selfexertion are not to be put forth, but that the salvation of the State and men's health of soul and body are to be managed for them by a Central Board with a great red seal. At the time when the above work was published almost the whole public press supported the centralizing schemes of the present Bureaucratic government. At the present hour there is a marked change, and most of the leading journals have adopted several of the opinions—often, though unacknowledged, the arguments and illustrations-put forth in that work. There has not been one point in which the predictions made in that work have had the opportunity of being tested, that they have not been verified to the

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DEBASING EFFECTS OF CENTRALIZATION.

wishing to ignore, the fundamental laws and institutions of the land, and the laws specially provided to meet the several cases, they would crush all independence of thought and action, all individual energy, all self-reliance, and bring down the whole country into a debasing subjection to a Central Commission or a General Board; making groveling subserviency the only course which can open a career of public service. It were too painful to dwell on all the repression which this foul system necessarily gives to the development of everything high and generous and noble in human nature; the direct encouragement which it necessarily gives to the development and practice of everything mean, sordid, base, and groveling.

It is a truth, of which the mere statement carries its own demonstration, that his own affairs must always naturally be best known to every man himself; that his own interest in their good management is the strongest; and that he must himself the soonest learn those lessons of good management which success and failure alone can teach. It is necessarily the same, by an ascending step, as to every special district. Every shackle placed on entire self-reliance and self-control is a direct repression of intelligence and forethought, a direct premium on incapacity and neglect. But for any government, or any individuals, after using every effort to fix those shackles*, and after the existence of those shackles has itself prevented the free development of local energies, to make that very circumstance the excuse for drawing those shackles still closer, and, by an ingenious machinery of manufactured evidence, to go through the form of obtaining the assent of Parliament to schemes of Centralization and ramified Bureaucracy which put Austria and France almost to the blush, are facts of history which-existing, and producing their deep mischief, at this moment in England-one is desirous to ascribe rather to the feebleness or ignorance of those whom accident has put in places of power, than to a deliberate intention to overturn (as they are most fatally doing) the institutions of their country, and all those characteristics which have made it great, and enterprising, and respectable, and free.

closest letter. The next session of Parliament must see the struggle between Bureaucracy and Local Self-government renewed in England still more definitively and unmistakeably than it ever yet has been.

* See G. C. (J. T. S.), p. 336, &c. as to the miserable mockery of the (socalled) Municipal Corporations' Reform Act,