The widening distance between the centers where decisions are taken and the places where the main work of the world is done has undermined the discipline of public opinion upon which all the earlier theorists relied.[36] A century ago the model of popular government was the self-sufficing township in which the voters’ opinions were formed and corrected by talk with their neighbors. They might entertain queer opinions about witches and spirits and foreign peoples and other worlds. But about the village itself the facts were not radically in dispute, and nothing was likely to happen that the elders could not with a little ingenuity bring under a well-known precedent of their common law. But under absentee government these checks upon opinion are lacking. The consequences are often so remote and long delayed that error is not promptly disclosed. The conditioning factors are distant; they do not count vividly in our judgments. The reality is inaccessible; the bounds of subjective opinion are wide. In the interdependent world, desire, rather than custom or objective law, tends to become the criterion of men’s conduct. They formulate their demands at large for “security” at the expense of every one else’s safety, for “morality” at the expense of other men’s tastes and comfort, for the fulfillment of a national destiny that consists in taking what you want when you want it. The lengthening of the interval between conduct and experience, between cause and effect, has nurtured a cult of self-expression in which each thinker thinks about his own thoughts and has subtle feelings about his feelings. That he does not in consequence deeply affect the course of affairs is not surprising. 2 The centralizing tendencies of the Great Society have not been accepted without protest, and the case against them has been stated again and again.[37] Without local institutions, said de Tocqueville, a nation may give itself a free government, but it does not possess the spirit of liberty. To concentrate power at one point is to facilitate the seizure of power. “What are you going to do?” Arthur Young asked some provincials at the time of the French Revolution. “We do not know,” they replied; “we must see what Paris is going to do.” Local interests handled from a distant central point are roughly handled by busy and inattentive men. And in the meantime the local training and the local winnowing of political talent are neglected. The overburdened central authority expands into a vast hierarchy of bureaucrats and clerks manipulating immense stacks of paper, always dealing with symbols on paper, rarely with things or with people. The genius of centralization reached its climax in the famous boast of a French minister of education, who said: It is three o’clock; all the pupils in the third grade throughout France are now composing a Latin verse.