There is no need to labor the point. The more centralization the less can the people concerned be consulted and give conscious assent. The more extensive the rule laid down the less account it can take of fact and special circumstance. The more it conflicts with local experience, the more distant its source and wholesale its character, the less easily enforceable it is. General rules will tend to violate particular needs. Distantly imposed rules usually lack the sanction of consent. Being less suited to the needs of men, and more external to their minds, they rest on force rather than on custom and on reason. A centralized society dominated by the fiction that the governors are the spokesmen of a common will tends not only to degrade initiative in the individual but to reduce to insignificance the play of public opinion. For when the action of a whole people is concentrated, the public is so vast that even the crude objective judgments it might make on specific issues cease to be practicable. The tests indicated in preceding chapters by which a public might judge the workability of a rule or the soundness of a new proposal have little value when the public runs into millions and the issues are hopelessly entangled with each other. It is idle under such circumstances to talk about democracy, or about the refinement of public opinion. With such monstrous complications the public can do little more than at intervals to align itself heavily for or against the régime in power, and for the rest to bear with its works, obeying meekly or evading, as seems most convenient. For, in practice, the organic theory of society means a concentration of power; that is, the way the notion of one purpose is actually embodied in affairs. And this in turn means that men must either accept frustration of their own purposes or contrive somehow to frustrate that declared purpose of that central power which pretends it is the purpose of all. FOOTNOTES: [31] _Faust_, Part II, Act v, scene 3. [32] Dibblee, _The Laws of Supply and Demand_, cited by B. M. Anderson, Jr., _The Value of Money_, p. 259. [33] B. M. Anderson, Jr., _The Value of Money_, p. 251. [34] _Ibid._ [35] _Cf._ Werner Lombart, _The Quintessence of Capitalism_, Chapter VII. [36] _Cf._ my _Public Opinion_, Chapters XVI and XVII. [37] In a convenient form by J. Charles Brun, _Le Régionalisme_, pp. 13 _et seq._ _Cf._ also Walter Thompson, _Federal Centralization_, Chapter XIX. Chapter XVI THE REALMS OF DISORDER 1 Yet the practice of centralization and the philosophy which personifies society have acquired a great hold upon men. The dangers are well known. If, nevertheless, the practice and the theory persist, it cannot be merely because men have been led astray by false doctrine.