people what conscience is to the heart of the individual. He should
understand its besetting passions in all their bearings and not be
deceived by subterfuge or hypocrisy. Sometimes he must attack them
boldly, sometimes play off one against another, or favour one at the
expense of another which is less influential, now yielding ground, now
recovering it, but he must ever be skilful and impartial and never be
intimidated, diverted from his purpose, nor deceived by his natural
enemies.

He should be, so to speak, more conscientious than conscience itself,
because he must never forget that he has to obey to-morrow the law which
he makes to-day--_semel jussit semper paruit_. He must, therefore, be
absolutely disinterested, a thing most difficult for him, but for which
conscience requires no effort.

Not only must he be without passion, but he must have trained himself to
be impervious to passion, which is much more. We must conceive of him as
a conscience that has risen from the ashes of passion.

As Rousseau said, "to discover the perfect ruler for human society we
must find a superior intelligence who has seen all the passions of man
but has experienced none of them, who has had no sort of relations with
our nature but who knows it to the core, whose happiness is not
dependent on us, but who wishes to promote our welfare, in a word, one
who aims at a distant renown, in a remote future, and who is content to
labour in one age and to enjoy in another."

This is why the ingenious Greeks imagined certain legislators going into
exile to some remote and unknown retreat, as soon as they had made the
people adopt and swear obedience to their laws until their return. It
may have been to bind the citizens by this oath, but is it not equally
probable that they wished to escape from the laws which they themselves
had made? Possibly they felt that they could make them all the stricter
with the prospect of being able to evade obedience of them by flight.

Proudhon said: "I dream of a republic so liberal that in it I shall be
guillotined as a reactionary." Lycurgus was perhaps like Proudhon, in
that he founded so severe a republic that he knew he could not live
under it and resolved to leave it as soon as it was established. Solon
and Sylla remained in the states to which they had given laws; we must
therefore place them higher than Lycurgus who has perhaps this excuse
for himself that in all probability he never existed at all.