ecution of the laws and the
maintenance of civil and political freedom. The members comprising it
are called magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed,
whether of one or of more than one, is given the name of prince. If
the whole power is centred in the hands of a single magistrate, from
whom all the rest hold their authority, the government is called a
monarchy. If there are more persons simply citizens than there are
magistrates, this is an aristocracy.[244] If more citizen magistrates
than simple private citizens, that is a democracy. The last government
is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the first for
large ones--on the principle that the number of the supreme
magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens.
But there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons
for exceptions to this general rule.

This common definition of the three forms of governments according to
the mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, though
adopted by Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate and
uninstructive, without some further qualification. Aristotle, for
instance, furnishes such a qualification, when he refers to the
interests in which the government is carried on, whether the interest
of a small body or of the whole of the citizens.[245] Montesquieu's
well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of
pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government,
outside of and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign.
To divide governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies,
and despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first the
number of the sovereign, and next something else, namely, the
difference between a constitutional and an absolute monarch. Then he
returned to the first principle of division, and separated a republic
into a government of all, which is a democracy, and a government by a
part, which is aristocracy.[246] Still, to have introduced the element
of law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether of one or more,
was to have called attention to the fact that no single distinction is
enough to furnish us with a conception of the real and vital
differences which may exist between one form of government and
another.[247]

The important fact about a government lies quite as much in the
qualifying epithet which is to be affixed to any one of the three
names, as in the