tyranny had converted him from insignificance into a man of importance.
He then proceeded to comment on France[*] as follows:--I hope that the
great French nation will soon succeed to establish a true republic. But
I have come to the conviction, that for freedom there is no duration in
CENTRALIZATION, which is a legacy of ambitious men. To be conquerors,
power must be centralized; but to be a free nation, self-government must
reign in families, villages, cities, counties, states. As power now is
lodged in France, the government has in its hand an army of half a
million of men, under that iron discipline which is needed in a standing
army. It has under its control a budget of more than a thousand million
francs. It can dispose of every public office in France; it has a civil
army of more than 500,000 men: the mayor of the least village derives
his appointment from the government. All the police, all the _gens
d'armes_, are in its hands. Now, gentlemen, is it not clear
that--with such authority and force,--not to become dangerous to
liberty, every President needs to be a Washington. And Washingtons are
not so thickly strewn around. Woe to the country, whose institutions are
such, that their freedom depends on the personal character of one man.
Be he the best man in the world, he will not overcome the essential
repugnance of his position to freedom. When France abandons this
_centralization_, and carries out her own principles of "Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity," by _local self-government_, she will be the
great basis of European republics. As to sovereignty of the people, I
take it that the right to cast a vote for the election of a President
once in four years does not exhaust the sovereign rights of a nation. A
people deciding about its own matters, must be everywhere master of its
own fate, in village communes as much as in electing its chief officer.

[Footnote *: The news of the _coup d'état_ had not yet reached him.]