from a time and from societies so remote, that the true conditions of their political system could not possibly be understood with any approach to reality, while there were, within a few leagues of his native place, communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sense was actually alive and flourishing and at work.  From them the full meaning of his theories might have been practically gathered, and whatever useful lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been made plain.  As it was, it came to pass singularly enough that the effect of the French Revolution was the suppression, happily only for a time, of the only governments in Europe where the doctrine of the favourite apostle of the Revolution was a reality.  The constitution of the Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a blow to the sovereignty of peoples in a true sense, as the old house of Austria or Charles of Burgundy could ever have dealt.  That constitution, moreover, was directly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what it called representative democracy, for representative democracy was just what Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion.

The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesman bold enough to take into his hands the reconstruction of France, undoubtedly pointed in the direction of confederation.  At one place, where he became sensible of the impotence which his assumption of a small state inflicted on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he would presently show how the good order of a small state might be united to the external power of a great people.  Though he never did this, he hints in a footnote that his plan belonged to the theory of confederations, of which the principles were still to be established.[240] When he gave advice for the renovation of the wretched constitution of Poland, he insisted above all things that they should apply themselves to extend and perfect the system of federate governments, “the only one that unites in itself all the advantages of great and small states."[241] A very few years after the appearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign states arose to point the political moral.  The French revolutionists missed the force alike of the practical example abroad, and of the theory of the book which they took for gospel at home.  How far they were driven to this by the urgent pressure of foreign war, or whether they would have followed the same course without that interference, merely in obedience to the catholic and monarchic absolutism which had sunk so much deeper into French character than people have been willing to admit, we cannot tell.  The fact remains that the Jacobins, Rousseau’s immediate disciples, at once took up the chain of centralised authority where it had been broken off by the ruin of the monarchy.  They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign people, and lost its spirit.  They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau’s scheme, namely, that for order and freedom and just administration