stly
draw a capital indictment against a class. Rousseau, however, cannot
fairly be said to have had a share in the responsibility for the more
criminal part of the policy of 1793, any more than the founder of
Christianity is responsible for the atrocities that have been
committed by the more ardent worshippers of his name, and justified by
stray texts caught up from the gospels. Helvetius had said, "All
becomes legitimate and even virtuous on behalf of the public safety."
Rousseau wrote in the margin, "The public safety is nothing unless
individuals enjoy security."[210] The author of a theory is not
answerable for the applications which may be read into it by the
passions of men and the exigencies of a violent crisis. Such
applications show this much and no more, that the theory was
constructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human
nature, with too narrow a view of the conditions of society, and
therefore with an inadequate appreciation of the consequences which
the theory might be drawn to support.

It is time to come to the central conception of the Social Contract,
the dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, the
memorable doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine
Rousseau was assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggerated
language of some popular writers in France leads us to suppose that
they think of him as nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the
constitution of the Orders, and the contests of the friars with the
clergy, had engendered faintly democratic ways of thinking.[211] Among
others the great Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrine
that the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will of the prince, he
says, to be a law, must be directed by reason; law is appointed for
the common good, and not for a special or private good: it follows
from this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a prince
representing the multitude, can make a law.[212] A still more
remarkable approach to later views was made by Marsilio of Padua,
physician to Lewis of Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his master's
side, in the great contest between him and the pope (1324). Marsilio
in the first part of his work not only lays down very elaborately the
proposition that laws ought to be made by the "_universitas civium_";
he places this sovereignty of the people on the true basis (which
Rousseau only took for a secondary support to his original compact),