"I should also like to have the question brought out: 'What has been, historically, the Service performed by Monarchy and Centralization?' The answer is: 'It has formed nations into larger masses, and lessened or destroyed _border war_.' The inference is, that the great and peculiar function of the Central Government is, in fact, what the American Congress does, viz. to maintain peace at home between the several States, and make the country _One_ in resisting hostile attack. To do more than this, should be rather exceptive, and confined to subordinate matters, else Centralization becomes mischievous...." And again, later in the year, in answer to a letter from Mr. Toulmin Smith:-- "What I said of 'Democracy' was meant as _argumentum ad hominem_ to that side, not as intending to identify myself with it, but I see the danger you speak of. Query: Would 'popular government' do? Even Conservatives wish for a Commonwealth and for _Constitutional_ Government. No doubt _Unity_ is the true word, not Centralization; but I think this Unity without Centralization would never have been coveted by kings, so that in fact we have bought the advantage of Unity at the expense of submitting to (more or less of) Centralization." Twelve years later, John Ruskin put forth a method which cannot fail to commend itself to every reasonable mind; a method which, if treated from the decentralization point of view, seems to offer good solution to the crux of English pauperism, at any rate, if dealt with under the aegis of _Local_ government. That "_bona fide power of the most important kind to the localities" as Newman said, should be conceded; that the "Government schools" of which Ruskin speaks should, in each place, be directly under Local Control. The passage to which I am alluding is from _Unto this Last_:-- "Any man, or woman, or boy, or girl out of employment should be at once received at the nearest Government School" (training schools, at which trades, etc., should be taught) "and set to such work as it appeared, on trial, they were fit for, at a fixed rate of wages determinable every year; that being found incapable of work through ignorance, they should be taught; or being found incapable of work through sickness, should be tended; but that being found objecting to work, they should be set, under compulsion of the strictest nature, to the more painful and degrading (?) forms of necessary toil; especially to that in mines, and other places of danger (such danger being, however, diminished to the utmost by careful regulation and discipline), and the due wages of such work retained, cost of compulsion first abstracted, to be at the workman's command so soon as he has come to sounder mind respecting the laws of employment." LETTERS TO MRS. KINGSLEY "Weston-super-Mare, "_4th Nov._, 1877. "Dear Mrs. Kingsley,