They may, like the citizens of an ancient community,
or those of an Asiatic village, have had considerable practice in
exercising their faculties on village or town interests, and have even
realised a tolerably effective popular government on that restricted
scale, and may yet have but slender sympathies with anything beyond,
and no habit or capacity of dealing with interests common to many such
communities.
I am not aware that history furnishes any example in which a
number of these political atoms or corpuscles have coalesced into a
body, and learnt to feel themselves one people, except through
previous subjection to a central authority common to all.* It is
through the habit of deferring to that authority, entering into its
plans and subserving its purposes, that a people such as we have
supposed receive into their minds the conception of large interests,
common to a considerable geographical extent. Such interests, on the
contrary, are necessarily the predominant consideration in the mind of
the central ruler; and through the relations, more or less intimate,
which he progressively establishes with the localities, they become
familiar to the general mind. The most favourable concurrence of
circumstances under which this step in improvement could be made,
would be one which should raise up representative institutions without
representative government; a representative body, or bodies, drawn
from the localities, making itself the auxiliary and instrument of the
central power, but seldom attempting to thwart or control it.
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