still haunted France, there were
maxims in the Social Contract of remarkable convenience for the
members of a Committee of Public Safety. "How can a blind multitude,"
the writer asks in one place, "which so often does not know its own
will, because it seldom knows what is good for it, execute of itself
an undertaking so vast and so difficult as a system of
legislation?"[206] Again, "as nature gives to each man an absolute
power over all his members, so the social pact gives to the body
politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same
power which, when directed by the general will, bears, as I have said,
the name of sovereignty."[207] Above all, the little chapter on a
dictatorship is the very foundation of the position of the
Robespierrists in the few months immediately preceding their fall. "It
is evidently the first intention of the people that the state should
not perish," and so on, with much criticism of the system of
occasional dictatorships, as they were resorted to in old Rome.[208]
Yet this does not in itself go much beyond the old monarchic doctrine
of Prerogative, as a corrective for the slowness and want of immediate
applicability of mere legal processes in cases of state emergency; and
it is worth noticing again and again that in spite of the shriekings
of reaction, the few atrocities of the Terror are an almost invisible
speck compared with the atrocities of Christian churchmen and lawful
kings, perpetrated in accordance with their notion of what constituted
public safety. So far as Rousseau's intention goes, we find in his
writings one of the strongest denunciations of the doctrine of public
safety that is to be found in any of the writings of the century. "Is
the safety of a citizen," he cries, "less the common cause than the
safety of the state? They may tell us that it is well that one should
perish on behalf of all. I will admire such a sentence in the mouth of
a virtuous patriot, who voluntarily and for duty's sake devotes
himself to death for the salvation of his country. But if we are to
understand that it is allowed to the government to sacrifice an
innocent person for the safety of the multitude, I hold this maxim for
one of the most execrable that tyranny has ever invented, and the most
dangerous that can be admitted."[209] It may be said that the
Terrorists did not sacrifice innocent life, but the plea is frivolous
on the lips of men who proscribed whole classes. You cannot ju