COMPLEX VARIETIES OF GOVERNMENT. Thus far the government of States has been dealt with as though each were a unit, animated by a single po litical principle. But the matter of civil gov ernment is far too complex to be covered by a single formula. Each State is the theatre of different, and often conflicting, political experi ments. There is always a central government, sometimes strong, and sometimes so weak that it can scarcely hold together; and in either case there is usually a considerable organization of local governments—of towns, parishes, boroughs, communes, and the like—largely independent of the central government, and often organized on diametrically different principles. We are not surprised to find a considerable development of local self-government in the towns and parishes of England and the United States; but that a democratic system of local self-government should exist throughout the Russian autocracy, and that the communal governments of the French Re public should be strictly supervised and con trolled from Paris, would hardly be expected from the nature of the central government in either case. The inconsistency is explained by the fact that the local governments, which touch the average citizen most nearly and by which all of the ordinary affairs of life are regulated, are seldom created by the central government, but in most instances had been fully developed before the latter came into being, and not only is the hamlet or village government usually much older than the general government of the State, much older, indeed, than the State itself, but it is also much more enduring, much more tenacious of life, and, upon the whole, much more important to the State than the central government. The latter may be a usurpation, or the accidental result of a war; it may change with the death of a ruler or the end of a dynasty, without affecting the internal structure of the State or the organ ization of society. But the local government is
the slow growth of time, interwoven with the habits and compounded of the customs of the community; it is never foreign, never alien; while it lasts the State endures, and when it is dissolved the social foundations of the State are disintegrated.
Other elements of complexity result from the union of different States in one political organ ization, or under one sovereign, or from the ad ministration by one State of a variety of colonies or dependencies. The first of these is the fed eration, or federal State, of which the United States of America, the Dominion of Canada, the Australian Commonwealth, and the German Em pire are the leading examples. Akin to this is the union of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the Kingdom of Great Britain. The union of two or more States under a common ruler, but without becoming one nation, is illustrated by the ephemeral political leagues of ancient Greece, by the German Confederation of 1867, and by the modern kingdoms of Austria-Hungary and Scandinavia. The British Empire affords the most striking illustration of the union of a great variety of governmental forms under one central authority. 'rhe government of Great Britain is a score of different governments rolled into one. Di England and the self-governing colonies, it is a democratic kingdom; in Ireland. a parliament ary autocracy limited by constitutional forms; in India. an empire wholly autocratic; in Egypt, a satrapy; and everywhere, in the villages of India, in the commonwealths of Canada and Aus tralia, and in the counties of England, it shelters a variety of local governments which perform their ancient functions under the central author ity of the Empire. See FEDERAL GOVERNMENT;