Rousseau knew hardly any history, and the few isolated pieces of old fact which he had picked up in his very slight reading were exactly the most unfortunate that a student in need of the historic method could possibly have fallen in with. The illustrations which are scantily dispersed in his pages,--and we must remark that they are no more than illustrations for conclusions arrived at quite independently of them, and not the historical proof and foundations of his conclusions,--are nearly all from the annals of the small states of ancient Greece, and from the earlier times of the Roman republic. We have already pointed out to what an extent his imagination was struck at the time of his first compositions by the tale of Lycurgus. The influence of the same notions is still paramount. The hopelessness of giving good laws to a corrupt people is supposed to be demonstrated by the case of Minos, whose legislation failed in Crete because the people for whom he made laws were sunk in vices; and by the further example of Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians and Cyrenians, knowing that they were too rich and could never suffer equality.[187] The writer is thinking of Plato's Laws, when he says that just as nature has fixed limits to the stature of a well-formed man, outside of which she produces giants and dwarfs, so with reference to the best constitution for a state, there are bounds to its extent, so that it may be neither too large to be capable of good government, nor too small to be independent and self-sufficing. The further the social bond is extended, the more relaxed it becomes, and in general a small state is proportionally stronger than a large one.[188] In the remarks with which he proceeds to corroborate this position, we can plainly see that he is privately contrasting an independent Greek community with the unwieldy oriental monarchy against which at one critical period Greece had to contend. He had never realised the possibility of such forms of polity as the Roman Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took such enormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of states which came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant of his own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argument that a state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen man is neither dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's argument to the same effect, on the ground that beauty demands size, and there must not be too great nor too small size, because a ship sails badly if it be either too heavy or too light.[189] And when Rousseau supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, and talks about the right size of its territory,[190] who does not think of the five thousand and forty which the Athenian Stranger prescribed to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper number for the perfectly formed state?[191] The prediction of the short career which awaits a