the unit should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons concerned in the management of their own public affairs.  If they had realised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchy into a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping modification of the old centralised scheme of government, they might have saved France.[242] But, once more, men interpret a political treatise on principles which either come to them by tradition; or else spring suddenly up from roots of passion.[243]

5.  The government is the minister of the sovereign.  It is an intermediate body set up between sovereign and subjects for their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of civil and political freedom.  The members comprising it are called magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed, whether of one or of more than one, is given the name of prince.  If the whole power is centred in the hands of a single magistrate, from whom all the rest hold their authority, the government is called a monarchy.  If there are more persons simply citizens than there are magistrates, this is an aristocracy.[244] If more citizen magistrates than simple private citizens, that is a democracy.  The last government is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the first for large ones—­on the principle that the number of the supreme magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens.  But there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons for exceptions to this general rule.

This common definition of the three forms of governments according to the mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, though adopted by Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate and uninstructive, without some further qualification.  Aristotle, for instance, furnishes such a qualification, when he refers to the interests in which the government is carried on, whether the interest of a small body or of the whole of the citizens.[245] Montesquieu’s well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government, outside of and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign.  To divide governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies, and despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first the number of the sovereign, and next something else, namely, the difference between a constitutional and an absolute monarch.  Then he returned to the first principle of division, and separated a republic into a government of all, which is a democracy, and a government by a part, which is aristocracy.[246] Still, to have introduced the element of law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether of one or more, was to have called attention to the fact that no single distinction is enough to furnish us with a conception of the real and vital differences which may exist between one form of government and another.[247]