“... If ... the peril is of such a kind that the paraphernalia of the laws are an obstacle to their preservation, the method is to nominate a supreme ruler, who shall silence all the laws and suspend for a moment the sovereign authority. In such a case, there is no doubt about the general will, and it is clear that the people’s first intention is that the State shall not perish. Thus the suspension of the legislative authority is in no sense its abolition; the magistrate who silences it cannot make it speak; he dominates it, but cannot represent it. He can do anything, except make laws.”[17] Rousseau did not fear the abuse of the emergency dictatorship or “supreme magistracy” as he termed it. It would more likely be cheapened by “indiscreet use.”[18] He would rely upon a tenure of office of prescribed duration to avoid perpetuation of the dictatorship: “However this important trust be conferred, it is important that its duration should be fixed at a very brief period, incapable of being ever prolonged. In the crises which lead to its adoption, the State is either soon lost, or soon saved; and, the present need passed, the dictatorship becomes either tyrannical or idle. At Rome, where dictators held office for six months only, most of them abdicated before their time was up. If their term had been longer, they might well have tried to prolong it still further, as the decemvirs did when chosen for a year. The dictator had only time to provide against the need that had caused him to be chosen; he had none to think of further projects.”[19] Rousseau was unwilling to rely upon an “appeal to Heaven.” John Stuart Mill concluded his ardent defense of representative government with a shattering aside: “I am far from condemning, in cases of extreme necessity, the assumption of absolute power in the form of a temporary dictatorship.”[20] This is not a loose usage of the term “dictatorship,” but a forthright support of a grant of “absolute power” to the dictator.