These general statements will commend themselves to the minds of most English readers. Let them then be fully awake to the dangers which are now undermining these cherished advantages of the system under which we have, up till this time, lived. It is strange that while a strong stand is being made at present for the freer exercise of local self-government, and a practical step in that direction has been taken in the extension of the municipal franchise, a step, and a most fatal step, has been taken in the opposite direction by the Government through the Acts which we condemn; and we have already had exhibited to us as its fruits a sight unwonted in England—the sight of an energetic Corporation completely set aside and overruled within the limits of its own jurisdiction by the creatures of imperial tyranny, the very lowest of the executive. This is the first-fruits in England of the great and fatal effort at centralization begun by these Acts. Are the people of England willing, not only that personal liberty should be interfered with, but that corporate freedom should be threatened with annihilation by these Acts of Parliament, which unless repealed will no doubt be followed by others equally aggressive in principle, against which we shall then have no argument,—a result which will, as we may learn from the words which we have just quoted, be little less than the destruction of the stability of English political life? And this centralization, which is so much to be deprecated, is introduced by these Acts with those very concomitants which render its effect most ruinous, namely, the establishment of a system of police espionage, a thing utterly foreign and abhorrent to all the instincts and convictions of Englishmen. On the subject of that constant and minute police interference which these laws have introduced so extensively into England, I may quote the weighty words of Lieber. “It is necessary,” says he, in his _Political Ethics_, “to have seen nations who have been forced for centuries to submit to constant and minute police interference, in order to have any conception of the degree to which manly action, self-dependence, resoluteness, and inventiveness of proper means can be eradicated from a whole community. On this account systematic interference weakens governments instead of strengthening them; for in times of danger, when popular energy is necessary, when every man must do his duty, or the State is lost, men having forgotten how to act, look listlessly to the Government, not to themselves. The victories of Napoleon over the many States east and south of France were in a great measure owing to this natural course of things.”