ion of France,
undoubtedly pointed in the direction of confederation. At one place,
where he became sensible of the impotence which his assumption of a
small state inflicted on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he would
presently show how the good order of a small state might be united to
the external power of a great people. Though he never did this, he
hints in a footnote that his plan belonged to the theory of
confederations, of which the principles were still to be
established.[240] When he gave advice for the renovation of the
wretched constitution of Poland, he insisted above all things that
they should apply themselves to extend and perfect the system of
federate governments, "the only one that unites in itself all the
advantages of great and small states."[241] A very few years after the
appearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign states
arose to point the political moral. The French revolutionists missed
the force alike of the practical example abroad, and of the theory of
the book which they took for gospel at home. How far they were driven
to this by the urgent pressure of foreign war, or whether they would
have followed the same course without that interference, merely in
obedience to the catholic and monarchic absolutism which had sunk so
much deeper into French character than people have been willing to
admit, we cannot tell. The fact remains that the Jacobins, Rousseau's
immediate disciples, at once took up the chain of centralised
authority where it had been broken off by the ruin of the monarchy.
They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign people, and lost
its spirit. They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's scheme,
namely, that for order and freedom and just administration the unit
should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons
concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If they had
realised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchy
into a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping
modification of the old centralised scheme of government, they might
have saved France.[242] But, once more, men interpret a political
treatise on principles which either come to them by tradition; or
else spring suddenly up from roots of passion.[243]

5. The government is the minister of the sovereign. It is an
intermediate body set up between sovereign and subjects for their
mutual correspondence, charged with the ex