The great German historian Niebuhr also, “before whose eyes the annals and institutions of almost every State, ancient or modern, were made to shed light on the annals and institutions of the rest,”—who was a man of practice and action, had spent part of his manhood in England, and had been employed in arduous undertakings for his own government, in a book on the _Internal Administration of Great Britain_,—edited in order, if possible, to induce his own government to reorganize their State on better principles, maintains that “British liberty depends at least as much on the local self-appliances of local governments, as it does upon Parliament.” “The self-governing spirit of our English system of internal polity,” says Bowyer,[78] “explains that remarkable willingness to obey and even assist the law, which has sometimes excited the admiration of foreigners in this country.” M. Le Cour, the Chef-Administratif of the medical Police, who are employed in Paris for carrying out the laws in that city which are similar to the Contagious Diseases Acts, gives it as his opinion that “such Acts will work admirably in England, and will succeed there better than in Paris, owing to the habits of obedience to the law which are so universally diffused among the people of England,” oblivious that the very system he wishes to graft upon this spirit of obedience, is that which contains in itself the seeds of the ruin of that spirit of obedience, and which strikes at the foundation of that very habit of local self-government to which this spirit of obedience is so universally referred. Such is the political blindness of those who legislate for the necessity of prostitution. In a treatise by the French statesman Count Montalembert, “On the Political Future of England,” he forcibly exposes the evils which must ensue if there is any increase of administrative centralization, of what he terms “bureaucratie,” in this country; especially he shows its debasing influence on a nation in another matter, and warns us to reflect on the fact that the multiplication of salaried functionaries creates a population of place-hunters. “An universal thirst,” says he, “after salaried public employments is the worst of social maladies. It infects the whole body politic with a venal and servile humour, which by no means excludes, even amongst those who may be the best paid, the spirit of faction and anarchy. It creates a crowd of hungry suitors, capable of every excess to satisfy their longings, and fit instruments for every base purpose as soon as they are in place.”