meetings that nothing can
interrupt or postpone. Do you call this chimerical? Then you have
forgotten the Roman comitia, as well as such gatherings of the people
as those of the Macedonians and the Franks and most other nations in
their primitive times. What has existed is certainly possible.[238]

It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his subject should
have contented himself with going back to Macedonia and Rome, instead
of pointing to the sovereign states that have since become confederate
with his native republic. A historian in our own time has described
with an enthusiasm that equals that of the Social Contract, how he saw
the sovereign people of Uri and the sovereign people of Appenzell
discharge the duties of legislation and choice of executive, each in
the majesty of its corporate person.[239] That Rousseau was influenced
by the free sovereignty of the states of the Swiss confederation, as
well as by that of his own city, we may well believe. Whether he was
or not, it must always be counted a serious misfortune that a writer
who was destined to exercise such power in a crisis of the history of
a great nation, should have chosen his illustrations from a time and
from societies so remote, that the true conditions of their political
system could not possibly be understood with any approach to reality,
while there were, within a few leagues of his native place,
communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sense
was actually alive and flourishing and at work. From them the full
meaning of his theories might have been practically gathered, and
whatever useful lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been made
plain. As it was, it came to pass singularly enough that the effect of
the French Revolution was the suppression, happily only for a time, of
the only governments in Europe where the doctrine of the favourite
apostle of the Revolution was a reality. The constitution of the
Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a blow to the sovereignty of
peoples in a true sense, as the old house of Austria or Charles of
Burgundy could ever have dealt. That constitution, moreover, was
directly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what it called
representative democracy, for representative democracy was just what
Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion.

The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesman
bold enough to take into his hands the reconstruct