ss that awaits the years of old age.
Misery is the mother of great crimes. It is the sovereigns who make the
miserable, and it is they who shall answer in this world and the other
for the crimes that misery has committed."

So far as the mechanism of government is concerned, Diderot writes much
as Montesquieu had done. Under the head of _Representants_ he proclaims
the advantages, not exactly of government by a representative assembly,
but of assisting and advising the royal government by means of such an
assembly. There is no thought of universal suffrage. "_It is property
that makes the citizen_; every man who has possessions in the state is
interested in the state, and whatever be the rank that particular
conventions may assign to him, it is always as a proprietor; it is by
reason of his possessions that he ought to speak, and that he acquires
the right of having himself represented." Yet this very definite
statement does not save him from the standing difficulty of a democratic
philosophy of politics. Nor can it be reconciled in point of logic with
other propositions to which Diderot commits himself in the same article.
For instance, he says that "no order of citizens is capable of
stipulating for all; if one order had the right, it would very soon
come to stipulate only for itself; each class ought to be represented by
men who know its condition and its needs; _these needs are only well
known to those who actually feel them_." But then, in that case, the
poorest classes are those who have most need of direct representation;
they are the most numerous, their needs are sharpest, they are the
classes to which war, consumption of national capital and way of
expending national income, equal laws, judicial administration, and the
other concerns of a legislative assembly, come most close. The problem
is to reconcile the sore interests of the multitude with the ignorance
and the temper imputed in Diderot's own description of them.

An interesting study might be made, if the limits of our subject
permitted such a digression, on the new political ideas which a
century's experience in England, France, Germany, the American Union,
has added to the publicist's stock. Diderot's article on the Legislator
is a curious mixture of views which political thinkers have left behind,
with views which the most enlightened statesmen have taken up. There is
much talk after the fashion of Jean Jacques Rousseau about the admirable
legislatio