These Sumerians, in the fourth millennium B.C., lived on tells heaped up above flood-level, each tell a city-state with its separate government and gods, for centralisation was the one thing needful to the country which the Sumerians did not achieve.

She has, however, attained a unity, a strength and a centralisation which the Holy Roman Empire never succeeded in acquiring.

Still more noteworthy, though much less often spoken of than the change in matériel, has been the progress of the navy towards centralisation.

It might be summarised in the admonitions: abolish over-centralisation; give proper scope to individual capacity and initiative; avoid professional self-sufficiency.

Centralisation, you say, top-heavy imperialism, dilettante pessimism, the love of luxury.

"Despotism has the advantage over us, the advantage of the concentration of power, and it is this same centralisation which you should oppose to your enemies.

It is unnecessary to point out how this system of perpetual petty warfare tended to reduce the power of centralisation, and how royalty itself was weakened towards the end of the second dynasty.

Perfectly efficient administration, I need not tell the House, has a tendency to lead to over-centralisation.

But I have determined, after consulting with the Viceroy, that considerable advantage might be gained by a Royal Commission to examine, with the experience we have gained over many years, into this great mischieffor all the people in India who have any responsibility know that it is a great mischiefof over-centralisation.

Now, when two men, singularly unlike in temperament and training, agreed as to the evil of centralisation on this large scale, it compels reflection.

I will not undertake at the present time to refer to the Commission the large questions that were spoken of by Maine and Bright, but I think that much might be gained by an inquiry on the spot into the working of centralisation of government in India, and how in the opinions of trained men here and in India, the mischief might be alleviated.

The question of the control of Indian administration by the Secretary of State, mixed up as it is with the old difficulties of centralisation, we may very possibly look at from different points of view.

Ministers were "gluttons for centralisation," and would, he prophesied, incur the usual fate of gluttons, acute indigestion.

This comes of their realised ideas, and centralisations, and organisations, till a monk cannot wink in chapel without being blinded with the lantern, or fall sick on Fridays, for fear of the rod.

The constitution is an immense and complicated barrier to effectual centralisation.

They did their best to render centralisation or any coalescence of States

A very large tribe falls to pieces through its own unwieldiness, because, by the nature of things, it must be either deficient in centralisation or straitened in food, or both.

Before this tendency to centralisation which military necessity sets up much that gives colour and charm to European life is disappearing.

A kind of French centralisation in the world of fashion has been established, which has over-ridden and obliterated all the dress boundaries of civilised nations.

If French models point in any one direction rather than another, it is away from disintegration and straight towards centralisation.

The centralisation of food distribution is greater here than in the better-class districts, with the result that many small shopkeepers have been driven out of business.

Centralisation may no doubt go too far, but in the other extreme may lie the gravest danger, and rushing thitherward the South was blind to the risk.