the third is the worst of all governments.  The second is the best, for it is aristocracy properly so called.  If men only acquire rule in virtue of election, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all the other grounds of public esteem and preference, become so many new guarantees that the administration shall be wise and just.  It is the best and most natural order that the wisest should govern the multitude, provided you are sure that they will govern the multitude for its advantage, and not for their own.  If aristocracy of this kind requires one or two virtues less than a popular executive, it also demands others which are peculiar to itself, such as moderation in the rich and content in the poor.  For this form comports with a certain inequality of fortune, for the reason that it is well that the administration of public affairs should be confided to those who are best able to give their whole time to it.  At the same time it is of importance that an opposite choice should occasionally teach the people that in the merit of men there are more momentous reasons of preference than wealth.[250] Rousseau, as we have seen, had pronounced English liberty to be no liberty at all, save during the few days once in seven years when the elections to parliament take place.  Yet this scheme of an elective aristocracy was in truth a very near approach to the English form as it is theoretically presented in our own day, with a suffrage gradually becoming universal.  If the suffrage were universal, and if its exercise took place once a year, our system, in spite of the now obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy and nominal monarchy, would be as close a realisation of the scheme of the Social Contract as any representative system permits.  If Rousseau had further developed his notions of confederation, the United States would most have resembled his type.

6.  What is to be the attitude of the state in respect of religion?  Certainly not that prescribed by the policy of the middle ages.  The separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, indicated by Jesus Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of many subsequent generations, was in Rousseau’s eyes most mischievous, because it ended in the subordination of the temporal power to the spiritual, and that is incompatible with an efficient polity.  Even the kings of England, though they style themselves heads of the church, are really its ministers and servants.[251]

The last allegation evinces Rousseau’s usual ignorance of history, and need not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he lays so much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor truly good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon another world, they must necessarily be indifferent to the success or failure of such enterprises as they may take up in this.[252] In reading the Social Contract, and some other of the author’s writings besides, we have constantly to interpret the direct,