Moreover, bureaucratic pressure upon private life is intensified by the mode in which self-government works in practice and encroaches more sharply than before on the rural parishes. Formerly the provincial president, who stood in as close relations with the people as with the State, formed the lowest step in the State bureaucracy. Below him were local authorities, who were no doubt subject to control, but not in the same measure as nowadays to the disciplinary powers of the district, or the ministerial, bureaucracy. The rural population enjoys today, by virtue of the measure of self-government conceded to it, an autonomy, not perhaps similar to that which the towns had long ago; but it has received, in the shape of the official commissioner, a chief who is kept in disciplinary check by superior instructions proceeding from the provincial resident, under the threat of penalties, and compelled to burden his fellow-citizens in his district with lists, notifications, and inquisitions as the political hierarchy thinks good. The governed _contribuens plebs_ no longer possess, in the court of the provincial president, that guarantee against blundering encroachment which, at an earlier period was to be found in the circumstance that people resident in the district who became provincial presidents as a rule resolved to remain so in their own districts all their life long, and sympathized with the joys and sorrows of the district. Today the post of provincial president is the lowest step in the ladder of the higher administration, sought after by young "assessors" who have a justifiable ambition to make a career. To obtain it they have more need of ministerial favor than of the goodwill of the local population, and they attempt to win this favor by conspicuous zeal, and by "taking it out of" the official commissioners of the so-called local administration, or by carrying out valueless bureaucratic experiments. Therein lies for the most part the inducement to overburden their subordinates in the local self-government system. Thus self-government means the aggravation of bureaucracy, increase in the number of officials, and of their powers and interference in private life.