ee, and
everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves to be the masters
of others cease not to be greater slaves than the people they govern."
He goes on in the next paragraph to tell us that if he were only to
consider force and the effects of it, he would say that if a nation was
constrained to obey and did obey, it did well, but that whenever it
could throw off its yoke and did throw it off, it acted better. His
words, written in 1762, became a text for the pioneers of the French
Revolution. But they would have done well to read further into the book.
As Rousseau goes on, we find a different conception. He passes from
considering the fiction of a social contract to a discussion of the
power over the individual of the General Will, by virtue of which a
people becomes a people. This General Will, the _Volonte Generale_, he
distinguishes from the Volonte de Tous, which is a mere numerical sum of
individual wills. These particular wills do not rise above themselves.
The General Will, on the other hand, represents what is greater than the
individual volition of those who compose the society of which it is the
will. On occasions, this higher will is more apparent than at other
times. But it may, if there is social slackness, be difficult to
distinguish from a mere aggregate of voices, from the will of a mob.
What is interesting is that Rousseau, so often associated with doctrine
of quite another kind, should finally recognize the bond of a General
Will as what really holds the community together. For him, as for those
who have had a yet clearer grasp of the principle, in willing the
General Will we not only realize our true selves but we may rise above
our ordinary habit of mind. We may reach heights which we could not
reach, or which at all events most of us could not reach, in isolation.
There are few observers who have not been impressed with the wonderful
unity and concentration of purpose which an entire nation may
display--above all, in a period of crisis. We see it in time of war,
when a nation is fighting for its life or for a great cause. We have
marvelled at the illustrations with which history abounds of the General
Will rising to heights of which but few of the individual citizens in
whom it is embodied have ever before been conscious even in their
dreams.

By leadership a common ideal can be made to penetrate the soul of a
people and to take complete possession of it. The ideal may be very
high, or i