The chapter on the Legislator is in the same region.  We are again referred to Lycurgus; and to the circumstance that Greek towns usually confided to a stranger the sacred task of drawing up their laws.  His experience in Venice and the history of his native town supplemented the examples of Greece.  Geneva summoned a stranger to legislate for her, and “those who only look on Calvin as a theologian have a scanty idea of the extent of his genius; the preparation of our wise edicts, in which he had so large a part, do him as much honour as his Institutes."[195] Rousseau’s vision was too narrow to let him see the growth of government and laws as a co-ordinate process, flowing from the growth of all the other parts and organs of society, and advancing in more or less equal step along with them.  He could begin with nothing short of an absolute legislator, who should impose a system from without by a single act, a structure hit upon once for all by his individual wisdom, not slowly wrought out by many minds, with popular assent and co-operation, at the suggestion of changing social circumstances and need.[196]

All this would be of very trifling importance in the history of political literature, but for the extraordinary influence which circumstances ultimately bestowed upon it.  The Social Contract was the gospel of the Jacobins, and much of the action of the supreme party in France during the first months of the year 1794 is only fully intelligible when we look upon it as the result and practical application of Rousseau’s teaching.  The conception of the situation entertained by Robespierre and Saint Just was entirely moulded on all this talk about the legislators of Greece and Geneva.  “The transition of an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which nature rose from nothingness to existence.  You must entirely refashion a people whom you wish to make free—­destroy its prejudices, alter its habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.  The state therefore must lay hold on every human being at his birth, and direct his education with powerful hand.  Solon’s weak confidence threw Athens into fresh slavery, while Lycurgus’s severity founded the republic of Sparta on an immovable basis."[197] These words, which come from a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, might well be taken for an excerpt from the Social Contract.  The fragments of the institutions by which Saint Just intended to regenerate his country, reveal a man with the example of Lycurgus before his eyes in every line he wrote.[198] When on the eve of the Thermidorian revolution which overthrew him and his party, he insisted on the necessity of a dictatorship, he was only thinking of the means by which he should at length obtain the necessary power for forcing his regenerating projects on the country; for he knew that Robespierre, whom he named as the man for the dictatorship, accepted his projects, and would lend the full force of the temporal arm