their natural order, let society govern itself, and the
sovereign function of the State will be to protect nature
in the execution of her own law. Government must not
be arbitrary, but it must be powerful enough to repress
arbitrary action in others. If the supreme power is needlessly limited, the secondary powers will run riot and
oppress. Its supremacy will bear no check. The problem
is to enlighten the ruler, not to restrain him; and one man
is more easily enlightened than many. Government by
opposition, by balance and control, is contrary to principle;
whereas absolutism might be requisite to the attainment
of their higher purpose. Nothing less than concentrated
power could overcome the obstacles to such beneficent
reforms as they meditated. Men who sought only the
general good must wound every distinct and separate
interest of class, and would be mad to break up the only
force that they could count upon, and thus to throw away
the means of preventing the evils that must follow if things
were left to the working of opinion and the feeling of
masses. They had no love for absolute power in itself,
but they computed that, if they had the use of it for
five years, France would be free. They distinguished
an arbitrary monarch and the irresistible but impersonal
state.
It was the era of repentant monarchy. Kings had become the first of public servants, executing, for the good of the people, what the people were unable to do for themselves; and there was a reforming movement on foot which led to many instances of prosperous and intelligent administration. To men who knew what unutterable suffering and wrong was inflicted by bad laws, and who lived in terror of the uneducated and inorganic masses, the idea of reform from above seemed preferable to parliamentary government managed by Newcastle and North, in the interest of the British landlord. The economists are outwardly and avowedly less liberal than Montesquieu, because they are incomparably more impressed by the evils of the time, and the need of immense and fundamental changes. They prepared to undo the work of absolutism by the hand of
