ey dislike, is less than the
inconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form a
separate community. The minority submit to obey laws which were made
against their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of
undergoing worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission.
The same explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the more
frequent case in the history of the race, the submission of the
majority to the laws imposed by a minority of one or more. In both
these cases, however, as in the general question of the source of our
obedience to the laws, deliberate and conscious sense of convenience
is as slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of
the field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over and
constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the
many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical
apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or
abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau,
expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt
warranted in leaving these complicating conditions out of account,
though to do so is to rob any treatise on government of much of its
possible value. The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing his
political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon the substantial
ground of propositions about human nature, which the average of
experience in given races and at given stages of advancement has shown
to be true within those limits. There are places in his writings where
he reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests, and
he does not even take care to qualify this sufficiently.[264] But
throughout the Social Contract we seem to be contemplating the
erection of a machine which is to work without reference to the only
forces that can possibly impart movement to it.

The consequence of this is that Rousseau gives us not the least help
towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government,
because these are naturally both suggested and guided by
considerations of expediency and improvement. It is as if he had never
really settled the ends for which government exists, beyond the
construction of the symmetrical machine of government itself. He is a
geometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say that he is a mechanician,
and not a biologist concerned with the conditions of a living
organism. The analo