to the constitution
of his state, and Turgot was its vehement protagonist in Europe.

A king ruling over a level democracy, and a democracy ruling itself
through the agency of a king, were long contending notions in the
first Assembly. One was monarchy according to Turgot, the other was
monarchy adapted to Rousseau; and the latter, for a time, prevailed.
Rousseau was the citizen of a small republic, consisting of a single
town, and he professed to have applied its example to the government
of the world. It was Geneva, not as he saw it, but as he extracted its
essential principle, and as it has since become, Geneva illustrated by
the Forest Cantons and the Landesgemeinde more than by its own
charters. The idea was that the grown men met in the market-place,
like the peasants of Glarus under their trees, to manage their
affairs, making and unmaking officials, conferring and revoking
powers. They were equal, because every man had exactly the same right
to defend his interest by the guarantee of his vote. The welfare of
all was safe in the hands of all, for they had not the separate
interests that are bred by the egotism of wealth, nor the exclusive
views that come from a distorted education. All being equal in power
and similar in purpose, there can be no just cause why some should
move apart and break into minorities. There is an implied contract
that no part shall ever be preferred to the whole, and minorities
shall always obey. Clever men are not wanted for the making of laws,
because clever men and their laws are at the root of all mischief.
Nature is a better guide than civilisation, because nature comes from
God, and His works are good; culture from man, whose works are bad in
proportion as he is remoter from natural innocence, as his desires
increase upon him, as he seeks more refined pleasures, and stores up
more superfluity. It promotes inequality, selfishness, and the ruin of
public spirit.

By plausible and easy stages the social ideas latent in parts of
Switzerland produced the theory that men come innocent from the hands
of the Creator, that they are originally equal, that progress from
equality to civilisation is the passage from virtue to vice and from
freedom to tyranny, that the people are sovereign, and govern by
powers given and taken away; that an individual or a class may be
mistaken and may desert the common cause and the general interest, but
the people, necessarily sincere, and true, and incorrupt