which
come from a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, might well be
taken for an excerpt from the Social Contract. The fragments of the
institutions by which Saint Just intended to regenerate his country,
reveal a man with the example of Lycurgus before his eyes in every
line he wrote.[198] When on the eve of the Thermidorian revolution
which overthrew him and his party, he insisted on the necessity of a
dictatorship, he was only thinking of the means by which he should at
length obtain the necessary power for forcing his regenerating
projects on the country; for he knew that Robespierre, whom he named
as the man for the dictatorship, accepted his projects, and would lend
the full force of the temporal arm to the propagation of ideas which
they had acquired together from Jean Jacques, and from the Greeks to
whom Jean Jacques had sent them for example and instruction.[199] No
doubt the condition of France after 1792 must naturally have struck
any one too deeply imbued with the spirit of the Social Contract to
look beneath the surface of the society with which the Convention had
to deal, as urgently inviting a lawgiver of the ancient stamp. The old
order in church and state had been swept away, no organs for the
performance of the functions of national life were visible, the moral
ideas which had bound the social elements together in the extinct
monarchy seemed to be permanently sapped. A politician who had for
years been dreaming about Minos and Lycurgus and Calvin, especially if
he lived in a state with such a tradition of centralisation as ruled
in France, was sure to suppose that here was the scene and the moment
for a splendid repetition on an immense scale of those immortal
achievements. The futility of the attempt was the practical and ever
memorable illustration of the defect of Rousseau's geometrical method.
It was one thing to make laws for the handful of people who lived in
Geneva in the sixteenth century, united in religious faith, and
accepting the same form and conception of the common good. It was a
very different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-five
millions of a heterogeneously composed nation, abounding in variations
of temperament, faith, laws, and habits and weltering in unfathomable
distractions. The French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sent
stranger from Corsica to make laws for them, but not until he had set
his foot upon their neck; and even Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begu