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Date: 1865-11-24
By: True Witness
Citation: “Centralisation and Protestantism”, True Witness (24 November, 1865)
Other formats: TBA
CENTRALISATION AND PROTESTANTISM.
— The name of M. de Tocqueville will be familiar to many of our readers as the author of many valuable political treatises. An edition of his works is being published in Paris by M. Gustave de Beaumont, who has obtained access to some letters of the deceased, never yet made public. From these we make some extracts, as a protest from a great man against the monster political evil of the day “centralisation.” Writing from London M. Tocqueville says:—
“M — said to me yesterday, England is the country of decentralisation. We have a central government, but we have not a central administration. . . :
“The great cause of the material progress of England is its non centralization. You will never obtain from any Government decentralization. Centralization is too tempting to the passions of rulers, and even those who prescribe decentralization will always give up their doctrine the moment they attain power. (The truth of this is strikingly exemplified in Canada.)
“The greater part of those who in France speak against centralization do not wish to put an end to it completely; some because they are in power; others because they hope to attain it. . . . Decentralization, like liberty, is a thing which the leaders of the people promise, but which they never give. To obtain it, and to preserve it, the people should count only on their own efforts; and if the people have no taste for it the evil is without a remedy.”
In these remarks there is so much applicable to our own condition, as well as to that of France, and to our more immediate neighbours, that we make no apology for laying them before our readers. In fact the whole battle betwixt Liberalism and Conservatism, in so far as its purely secular aspect is concerned, may be summed up as the battle betwixt “centralisation” and “de-centralisation,” and this is a truth which cannot be too often repeated or too strongly insisted upon. Wherever we see a movement towards “centralisation” in the State, there we may be sure that the leaven of “Liberalism” is at work; so that at once, and without parley, the Conservative, if faithful to his principles, will assume an attitude if not hostile, at all events suspicious, as towards that movement ; but, if it is a movement originating not from the rulers, but from the people, he will without more ado put it down as a symptom of national decadence, and as a sign of the approaching extinction of all national liberties. Thus it is to-day in the neighboring Republic. The late President originated nothing; he did but carry out, to the best of his abilities, and of the light within him, the policy which the Northern people imposed upon him; and that people, intent only upon crushing the South, because the South was the champion of State-Rights, did not then see, perhaps do not yet see clearly, that by destroying the local liberties of the Southerners, and by the triumph of their “centralising” policy they have given the death blow to their own liberties; and have laid themselves open to the most intolerable of despotisms.
As a general rule, however, the centralising movement originates with the rulers. It was a Richelieu, the greatest, at all events the most astute statesman and ruler of the age, who established “centralisation” in France, and who by so doing made the despotism of Louis XIV and his successors possible, and the Revolution with its horrors inevitable. The men of the Constituent Assembly, the Jacobins with their “republique une et indivisible,” were but the continuators of the policy of Richebeu, and the inheritors of his ideas of government. It was from a few astute statesmen like Cavour, and a handful of ambitious demagogues, not from the Italian people themselves, that the Italian centralising movement, or agitation for Italian Union took its rise; and certainly in Canada the cry for Union, and a strong central government, was not in the first instance the free spontaneous utterance of the French Canadian people.
And yet, sad as is the spectacle to all friends of liberty, the tendency of the age is towards “centralisation,” which is in short the last word, the consummate flower or ultimate product of despotism, whether monarchical or democratic. Nor is this tendency confined within the secular order, for the State seeks to centralise or concentrate in its own hands not only all civil, but all ecclesiastical and spiritual power. This is what is implied by the Cavourian formula, which Liberals delight to repeat—“A free Church in a free State;” that is to say a Church dependent upon and subordinate to the civil magistrate. This is the last phase, and the legitimate development of Protestantism. It is no longer dogmatic, no longer does it pretend to have any religious side, or character whatsoever. It recks no more of faith, whether with, or without good works. Antinomianism and Pelagianism have had their day, and like dogs of every degree have passed away into oblivion; all manners of false doctrine, and heresies relating only to the Godhead, to the person and office of Christ, and the mysteries of Christianity, modern Protestantism is most tolerant of; to them it is liberal or rather indifferent; but upon one point it is most intolerant, and that is the independence of the Church of the civil magistrate, and her claims to be an autonomous or self-governing body, owing no account of her actions or her principles to the State.
It is this assertion of her own autonomy, not her peculiar mystical doctrines that places the Church in an attitude of irreconcilable antagonism with the Liberalism of the age. As it is the object of the Liberal statesman to concentrate all power in the hands of the State so he can brook no opposition to his plans of centralisation. He would tolerate a Church, nay, indeed he would favor, and richly endow a Church which would acknowledge herself to be his creature, subject to his behests, holding from him, teaching in the name of the State, and administering the Sacraments at his bidding. It is not, we say, the dogmas of the Church, but the moral power of the Church, a power exercised independently of Jack-in-Office, of which the Liberal is jealous, and which he seeks to suppress. We have here in Canada, even amongst our so-called Catholics, Liberals of this stamp, to whom the moral power wielded by the Church in the Confessional seems an abuse, and an encroachment upon the secular authority. Priests may absolve their penitents, but they must take care what counsels they give the latter; but they have no right to make the administration to them of the Sacraments dependent upon conditions unknown to, or not approved of by, the law of the land. With these restrictions and qualifications, the most Liberal of statesmen would consent to tolerate and even foster the Church, who, however, will not consent to be so fostered and tolerated. And this is her crime, this the very head and front of her offending.
The sects arouse not the jealousy of the State or civil magistrate, because they have no moral power or influence over their members. They may assert their autonomy if they please, for that pretended autonomy is but a farce, and in its assertion there is opposed no real limit to the power of the secular arm. But the Catholic Church is a power which says to the State “hitherto shalt thou come but no farther,” and which divides with the civil magistrate the allegiance and affections of her children. The Centralizing process, the concentration of all power—of power in the spiritual as well as in the secular order—in the hands of the State, can, therefore, never be complete until the Catholic Church be humbled, and brought under subjection to the State, which will then be all in all.
Naturally, therefore, we should expect to find all Catholics the active opponents of “centralization” and of all political changes tending to consolidate or centralize power in the hands of “ONE.” Whether that “ONE” be an absolute King, or an irresponsible Congress, Cæsar, or a Federal Parliament, matters not one straw, for in either case the principle at issue is precisely the same; and warned by experience, the examples of history, and the admonitions of their most illustrious Pastors, Catholics should recoil from “centralization” under whatsoever guise or pretence it may present itself, as the accursed thing, as the destroyer of all liberty civil and religious.
It is, therefore, with no small pleasure that we find, from time to time, in our influential contemporary the Courrier du Canada denunciations of, and warnings against, this monster evil, which alas! is not without its advocates even in Lower Canada; and which, of course, is powerfully supported, and enthusiastically promoted by the Clear-Grits, Liberals, Reformers, or Protestant democrats of the Upper Province, who also, as a body, warmly sympathised with the North in its aggressions upon the “State Rights” of the South. The Courrier du Canada is alive to the danger which menaces us in this Province from the insidious progress of “centralization” and in a late issue thus warns its readers against it. Amongst the evils of the day, and the dangers which menace Society, our contemporary justly remarks:—
“The general tendency towards despotic unity, small States absorbed by great, and with them liberty. This is what but lately wrung from a profound thinker the cry of alarm ‘Everywhere I perceive a symptom which alarms me for the liberty of nations, and of the Church; Centralisation increases, and increases always. Should the development of this tendency continue, some day the people perchance who fancied themselves swimming prosperous and happy in the deep waters of freedom, shall awake to find themselves caught as in a net, and awaking they will cry—whare are our liberties”—(Discourse of P. Felix at the Congress of Malines, 1864.—Courrier du Canada, 6th Sept., 1865.
We rejoice, we say, to see that our French Canadian contemporaries, so powerful for good amongst their fellow-countrymen, are awake to the dangers by which we, in Canada, as well as in France, in America as well as in Europe, are menaced from the steady, constant progress of the tendency towards centralization, to despotic unity, to the fusion of several small States into one great State, and the consequent inevitable extinction of liberty. This progress is unfortunatuly the tendency of the age, for the natural tendency of democracy is towards the suppression of “State Rights,” and local liberties of all kinds, and despotism is the logical terminus to which it leads us. Still it is the duty of the honest Catholic journalist to oppose this tendency by preaching up the saving truth of the political gospel in which alone lies the last chance for the freedom of man; the gospel to wit of “Decentralisation and State-Rights.”