It is not difficult to see the evils of such a system. The excessive centralisation of the Government and the vast scope of its powers threw upon the Comptroller-General and his agents a heavy burden of detail. Reports and documents multiplied. The waste of time and effort was profuse. 'The administrative formalities,' declared the Council in one of its minutes, 'lead to infinite delays.' Any little local matter--the building of a shelter for the poor, the repairing of a corner of the village church--must be considered by the Minister at Versailles. No action could be taken until the Sub-Delegate had reported to the Intendant, the Intendant had reported to the Comptroller-General, and that harassed official--combining in his single person all the duties and perplexities which in England are distributed between the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary, the Minister of Agriculture, the President of the Board of Trade, the President of the Local Government Board and the Chief Commissioner of Works--had personally attended to the matter, and had transmitted his decision through the Intendant to the Sub-Delegate again. Moreover, apart from its vexatious delays, the system was very liable to abuse. The power of the Government's agents was as extended as the power of the Government itself. Arrest and imprisonment were counted among their ordinary weapons. Armed with all the authority of the State, it was no wonder if they sometimes imitated its arbitrary ways, and failed to separate their private inclinations and their private grudges from the public needs. Yet the action of the central Government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems to have been often hesitating and rarely deliberately harsh. The letter of the law was often barbarous and rigid, where its administration was easy and lax. To criticism the Government was not indisposed to listen. Its intentions were amiable and were recognised as such. Any man above the rank of the lowest class could protest, if treated unjustly, and he could generally make his protest heard. The shadow of an older liberty had not quite departed from the face of France. It was only the lowest and most miserable class, which needed the means of resistance most, which had no means of resisting except by force. But beneficent as were the aims of the all-pervading State, its influence was blighting. Leaning always upon their Government, and taught to look to it for initiative, encouragement, protection in every department of life, the people of France forgot both the practices of public freedom and the value of private independence; and as the Bourbon despotism directly paved the way for revolution by levelling many of those inequalities which save a State, so it left the vast majority of Frenchmen devoid both of the political understanding and of the sense of personal responsibility, which the habit of self-government alone creates.