Page:Studies in constitutional law Fr-En-US (1891).pdf/153

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composed of an immense number of small human atoms. The new groups cut out of this mass could be nothing at first but bodies arbitrarily created for the convenience of the government: they were not organic wholes made by the slow action of long common life. They have all, except the feeble commune, lasted for less than a century; they are all hampered by narrow regulations. Hence they do not, even to-day, possess that individual life, I might almost say that consciousness of personality, which local institutions derive, and derive only, from long years of existence, and from the moderation or the neglect, much more than from the favour or the gifts, of their rulers. They possess, as I said, no individual life. It is the national life which runs through them, it is the consciousness of the national spirit, which sustains and directs their officials. That this is so appears from the law itself, and is shown by this fact — that until 1838 the Départment had no corporate existence, and that even now such corporate existence is denied to the arrondissements. The highest authorities in the state have not, any more than the local authorities, a sense of independent existence, and have not ever become real “persons.” Born yesterday, they are still bound by a close and visible tie to the constitution which created them; they have not had time to create ways of thinking and feeling for themselves, and to find in these habits a stable basis outside the law. The strongest reason for existence and self-reliance in the case of a collective body, that which proceeds from the fact of length of days, could not enter into their being and develop the instinct for personal rights independent of statutes and