42 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
compulsion any real share in them to lesser bodies, local or otherwise.
All the republics controlled by reflective liberalism (we thus exclude the nawe liberalism of the United States) are highly cen- tralized bureaucracies ; it is sufficient to name France, Italy, and Mexico. Liberalism imposed on Switzerland at the beginning of this century a much more centralized form of government than that which she inherited from the Middle Ages, and the ill-fated Sonderbimd was a revolt of the Catholic cantons for the defense of their ancestral liberties. Even in the United States we have witnessed a tendency toward a gradual breaking down of the admirable federative system which we owe to a fortunate necessity at the beginning of our national life. In France the Catholic party demands the restoration of the traditional liberties to the provinces — Brittany, Normandy, Burgundy, Provence, etc. — which were wiped out by the revolutionary government a century ago. In Italy its program includes the restoration of local self-government to the old political divisions, many of which have so glorious a place in history. In Austro-Hungary it is struggling in behalf of the fullest liberty for each of the races and lands that make up that heterogeneous empire. In Switzerland, as we have seen, it stands for the rights of the can- tons, against the aggressions of the federal government.
In Spain the holy see opposes the revolutionary plans of the Carlists on the general principle that every de facto govern- ment, so long as it succeeds in preserving a fair degree of order, and is not guilty of any very gross outrages on the rights of the people, is presumed to be legitimate, as well as on the other general principle that domestic tranquillity is a blessing than which none that can result from a civil war is likely to be greater. Nevertheless the Carlist party is by far the most Catholic politi- cal body on the Iberian peninsula, and the most prominent fea- ture of its announced program is the restoration of the local liberties that have been infringed or altogether wiped out under the liberal regime, and the granting of new ones, so as to make each town, village, and province in the kingdom thoroughly self- governing.
