Proudhon gives a second example in judicial authority. "The judicial functions, by their different specialties, their hierarchy, [their permanent tenure of office,] their convergence under a single departmental head, show an unequivocal tendency to separation and centralization. But they are in no way dependent on those who are under their jurisdiction; they are all at the disposal of the executive power, which is appointed by the people once in four years with authority that cannot be diminished; they are subordinated not to the country by election, but to the government, president or prince, by appointment. It follows that those who are under the jurisdiction of a court are given over to their 'natural' judges just as are parishioners to their vicars; that the people belong to the magistrate like an inheritance; that the litigant is the judge's, not the judge the litigant's. Apply universal suffrage and graded election to the judicial as well as the ecclesiastical functions; suppress the permanent tenure of office, which is an alienation of the electoral right; take away from the State all action, all influence, on the judicial body; let this body, separately centralized in itself, no longer depend on any but the people,--and, in the first place, you will have deprived power of its mightiest instrument of tyranny; you will have made justice a principle of liberty as well as of order. And, unless you suppose that the people, from whom all powers should spring by universal suffrage, is in contradiction with itself,--that what it wants in religion it does not want in justice,--you are assured that the separation of powers can beget no conflict; you may boldly lay it down as a principle that _separation_ and _equilibrium_ are henceforth synonymous."[158] Then Proudhon goes on to the army, the customhouses, the public departments of agriculture and commerce, public works, public education, and finance; for each of these administrations he demands independence and centralization on the basis of general suffrage.[159] "That a nation may manifest itself in its unity, it must be centralized in its religion, centralized in its justice, centralized in its army, centralized in its agriculture, industry, and commerce, centralized in its finances,--in a word, centralized in all its functions and faculties; the centralization must work from the bottom to the top, from the circumference to the centre; all the functions must be independent and severally self-governing. "Would you then make this invisible unity perceptible by a special organ, preserve the image of the old government? Group these different administrations by their heads; you have your cabinet, your _executive_, which can then very well do without a Council of State.