On another occasion the Intendant himself wrote to the Comptroller-General with reference to a Government contractor, who had taken his materials in a field which did not belong to him. ‘I cannot sufficiently represent to you how injurious it would be to the interests of the Administration if the contractors were abandoned to the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, whose principles can never be reconciled to those of the Government.’ These lines were written precisely a hundred years ago, but it appears as if the administrators who wrote them were our own contemporaries. FOOTNOTES: [26] [_Que la justice administrative et la garantie des fonctionnaires sont des institutions de l’Ancien Régime._ The difficulty of rendering these terms into intelligible English arises from the fact that at no time in the last two centuries of the history of England has the executive administration assumed a peculiar jurisdiction to itself or removed its officers from the jurisdiction of the courts of common law in this country. It will be seen in this chapter that the ordinary jurisdictions of France have always been liable to be superseded by extraordinary judicial authorities when the interests of the Government or the responsibility of its agents were at stake. The arbitrary jurisdiction of all such irregular tribunals was, in fact, abolished in England in 1641 by the Act under which fell the Court of Star Chamber and the High Commission.] [27] See Note XXII. [28] See Note XXIII. [29] [The article referred to is the 75th article of the Constitution de l’An VIII., which provided that the agents of the executive government, other than the ministers, could only be prosecuted for their conduct in the discharge of their functions, in virtue of a decision of the Council of State.] CHAPTER V. SHOWING HOW CENTRALISATION HAD BEEN ABLE TO INTRODUCE ITSELF AMONG THE ANCIENT INSTITUTIONS OF FRANCE, AND TO SUPPLANT WITHOUT DESTROYING THEM. Let us now briefly recapitulate what has been said in the three preceding chapters. A single body or institution placed in the centre of the kingdom regulated the public administration of the whole country; the same Minister directed almost all the internal affairs of the kingdom; in each province a single Government agent managed all the details; no secondary administrative bodies existed, and none which could act until they had been set in motion by the authority of the State; courts of extraordinary jurisdiction judged the causes in which the administration was interested, and sheltered all its agents. What is this but the centralisation with which we are so well acquainted? Its forms were less marked than they are at present; its course was less regular, its existence more disturbed; but it is the same being. It has not been necessary to add or to withdraw any essential condition; the removal of all that once surrounded it at once exposed it in the shape that now meets our eyes.