THE GEOMETRICAL METHOD. 557 



resistance to law, the complete establishment of the 

 authority of the central government, in a state of 

 society like that of Europe in the middle ages, is the 

 strongest interest of the people, and also of the 

 rulers simply because they are the rulers: and 

 responsibility on their part could not strengthen, 

 though in many conceivable ways it might weaken, 

 the motives prompting them to pursue this object. 

 During the greater part of the reign of Queen Eli- 

 zabeth, and of many other rnonarchs who might be 

 named, the sense of identity of interest between the 

 sovereign and the majority of the people was pro- 

 bably stronger than it usually is in responsible go- 

 vernments: everything that the people had most at 

 heart, the monarch had at heart too. Had Peter the 

 Great, or the rugged savages whom he began to 

 civilize, the truest inclination towards the things which 

 were <for the real interest of those savages? 



I am not here attempting to establish a theory of 

 government, and am not called upon to determine the 

 proportional weight which ought to.be given to the 

 circumstances which this school of geometrical politi- 

 cians left out of their system, and those which they 

 took into it. I am only concerned to show that their 

 method was unscientific; not to measure the amount 

 of error which may have affected their practical con- 

 clusions. 



It is but justice to them, however, to remark, 

 that their mistake was not so much one of sub- 

 stance as of form ; and consisted in presenting in a 

 systematic shape, and as the scientific treatment of a 

 great philosophical question, what should have passed 

 for that which it really was, the mere polemics of the 

 day. Although the actions of rulers are by no means 

 wholly determined by their selfish interests, it is as a 



