n
life like the rest of his generation by writing Rousseauite essays,
made a swift return to the historic method in the equivocal shape of
the Concordat.

Not only were Rousseau's schemes of polity conceived from the point of
view of a small territory with a limited population. "You must not,"
he says in one place, "make the abuses of great states an objection to
a writer who would fain have none but small ones."[200] Again, when he
said that in a truly free state the citizens performed all their
services to the community with their arms and none by money, and that
he looked upon the corvee (or compulsory labour on the public roads)
as less hostile to freedom than taxes,[201] he showed that he was
thinking of a state not greatly passing the dimensions of a parish.
This was not the only defect of his schemes. They assumed a sort of
state of nature in the minds of the people with whom the lawgiver had
to deal. Saint Just made the same assumption afterwards, and trusted
to his military school to erect on these bare plots whatever
superstructure he might think fit to appoint. A society that had for
so many centuries been organised and moulded by a powerful and
energetic church, armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the same
moral tendencies in a long series of successive generations, was not
in the naked mental state which the Jacobins postulated. It was not
prepared to accept free divorce, the substitution of friendship for
marriage, the displacement of the family by the military school, and
the other articles in Saint Just's programme of social renovation. The
twelve apostles went among people who were morally swept and
garnished, and they went armed with instruments proper to seize the
imagination of their hearers. All moral reformers seek the ignorant
and simple, poor fishermen in one scene, labourers and women in
another, for the good reason that new ideas only make way on ground
that is not already too heavily encumbered with prejudices. But France
in 1793 was in no condition of this kind. Opinion in all its spheres
was deepened by an old and powerful organisation, to a degree which
made any attempt to abolish the opinion, as the organisation appeared
to have been abolished, quite hopeless until the lapse of three or
four hundred years had allowed due time for dissolution. After all it
was not until the fourth century of our era that the work of even the
twelve apostles began to tell decisively and quickly. As for t