Sir Edward Creasy says,[76] “It has been our happiness in England to combine the system of local distribution of power in matters of local importance with the system of centralization of power in matters of imperial policy. The practice of our nation for centuries establishes the rule that except for matters clearly of direct, general, and imperial interest, centralization is unconstitutional. I dwell on this topic, because during the last few years the principle of local self-government has been menaced, if not impaired, and because hasty and unreflecting observers can hardly have appreciated its national importance.” “We shall find,” he continues,[77] “in local self-government infinitely more force than centralization ever could produce; we shall find that force to be far more general in its operation; and we shall find it far more enduring and certain, because it springs, not from the accidental idiosyncrasy of an individual ruler, but from the national spirit, and from the ancestral habits of a whole people. We ought to reflect also upon the pernicious indirect effects which centralization produces in a State, and on the advantages which we as a nation derive from being self-trained and locally practised in the discharge of political duties. We should listen to the testimony of intelligent foreigners, of men who have lived under a plausible administrative hierarchy, and who speak feelingly as to its effects.” The great French statesman De Tocqueville devotes a chapter to the distinction between centralization in matters of imperial government and centralization in administrative matters of local interest; and while he shows the necessity of the first, he demonstrates the pernicious effects of the second, notwithstanding its specious appearances. It is scarcely necessary to remark that the Contagious Diseases Acts belong distinctly to that class of interests the imperial control of which he so strongly reprobates. Professor Lieber, a German by birth, but an American by adoption, after describing the principles of the American Congress and the English Parliament as free institutions, expressly states, “Yet the self-government of our country, or of England, could be considered by us as little more than oil floating on the surface of the water, did it consist only in Congress and the State Legislatures with us (_i.e._, in America), or in Parliament in England. Self-government, to be of a penetrative character, requires the institutional self-government of the country or district; it requires that everything which, without general inconvenience, can be left to the circle to which it belongs, be thus left to its own management.”