to the propagation of ideas which they had acquired together from Jean Jacques, and from the Greeks to whom Jean Jacques had sent them for example and instruction.[199] No doubt the condition of France after 1792 must naturally have struck any one too deeply imbued with the spirit of the Social Contract to look beneath the surface of the society with which the Convention had to deal, as urgently inviting a lawgiver of the ancient stamp.  The old order in church and state had been swept away, no organs for the performance of the functions of national life were visible, the moral ideas which had bound the social elements together in the extinct monarchy seemed to be permanently sapped.  A politician who had for years been dreaming about Minos and Lycurgus and Calvin, especially if he lived in a state with such a tradition of centralisation as ruled in France, was sure to suppose that here was the scene and the moment for a splendid repetition on an immense scale of those immortal achievements.  The futility of the attempt was the practical and ever memorable illustration of the defect of Rousseau’s geometrical method.  It was one thing to make laws for the handful of people who lived in Geneva in the sixteenth century, united in religious faith, and accepting the same form and conception of the common good.  It was a very different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-five millions of a heterogeneously composed nation, abounding in variations of temperament, faith, laws, and habits and weltering in unfathomable distractions.  The French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sent stranger from Corsica to make laws for them, but not until he had set his foot upon their neck; and even Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun life like the rest of his generation by writing Rousseauite essays, made a swift return to the historic method in the equivocal shape of the Concordat.

Not only were Rousseau’s schemes of polity conceived from the point of view of a small territory with a limited population.  “You must not,” he says in one place, “make the abuses of great states an objection to a writer who would fain have none but small ones."[200] Again, when he said that in a truly free state the citizens performed all their services to the community with their arms and none by money, and that he looked upon the corvee (or compulsory labour on the public roads) as less hostile to freedom than taxes,[201] he showed that he was thinking of a state not greatly passing the dimensions of a parish.  This was not the only defect of his schemes.  They assumed a sort of state of nature in the minds of the people with whom the lawgiver had to deal.  Saint Just made the same assumption afterwards, and trusted to his military school to erect on these bare plots whatever superstructure he might think fit to appoint.  A society that had for so many centuries been organised and moulded by a powerful and energetic church, armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the same moral tendencies in a long series of successive