nd
Cyrenians, knowing that they were too rich and could never suffer
equality.[187] The writer is thinking of Plato's Laws, when he says
that just as nature has fixed limits to the stature of a well-formed
man, outside of which she produces giants and dwarfs, so with
reference to the best constitution for a state, there are bounds to
its extent, so that it may be neither too large to be capable of good
government, nor too small to be independent and self-sufficing. The
further the social bond is extended, the more relaxed it becomes, and
in general a small state is proportionally stronger than a large
one.[188] In the remarks with which he proceeds to corroborate this
position, we can plainly see that he is privately contrasting an
independent Greek community with the unwieldy oriental monarchy
against which at one critical period Greece had to contend. He had
never realised the possibility of such forms of polity as the Roman
Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took such
enormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of states
which came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant of
his own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argument
that a state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen man
is neither dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's
argument to the same effect, on the ground that beauty demands size,
and there must not be too great nor too small size, because a ship
sails badly if it be either too heavy or too light.[189] And when
Rousseau supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, and
talks about the right size of its territory,[190] who does not think
of the five thousand and forty which the Athenian Stranger prescribed
to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper number for the perfectly
formed state?[191] The prediction of the short career which awaits a
state that is cursed with an extensive and accessible seaboard,
corresponds precisely with the Athenian Stranger's satisfaction that
the new city is to be eighty stadia from the coast.[192] When Rousseau
himself began to think about the organisation of Corsica, he praised
the selection of Corte as the chief town of a patriotic
administration, because it was far from the sea, and so its
inhabitants would long preserve their simplicity and uprightness.[193]
And in later years still, when meditating upon a constitution for
Poland, he propounded an economic system esse