Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. The New Conception of the State in Relation to National and Local Budgets. The impulse given to the politico-administrative machine was only kept within bounds by financial exigencies—The State — Trinity: central, provincial, and municipal power—The armed peace is not the sole cause of the financial embarrassments of modern States—Enormous development of non-military services—The expenses of local authorities have increased quite as much as those of the central power, witness England— Witness also Italy, France, and the United States —The different points of view from which the extension of State prerogatives may be regarded with favour—The State still remains the sole Divinity of the modern world. While in the ordered progress of ideas a great number of writers were learning to abandon the old conception of the State as reduced to a few very simple prerogatives, all the countries of Europe, Great Britain as well as the nations of the Continent, were beginning to plunge the State into a host of tasks and services from which it had hitherto abstained. It is especially within the last fifteen years that this impulse has been given to the politico-administrative machine. We may even say that it has received its sole check from the pressure of financial limitations. Everywhere the ill-considered development of State prerogatives in thetrinity of its forces, central, provincial, and municipal, has been quite as much as military armaments the cause of financial distress and economic collapse among the nations of Europe. Were it not for the fact that all the public services which the State undertakes require a pecuniary endowment, and that the finances of a country are not susceptible of. unlimited extension, we should see most of the States on the Conti...