ABSTRACT
There are two tests which may be applied to any Government, the test of efficiency and the test of education. The philosoph ers of the eighteenth century, impressed as they naturally were with the achievements of monarchy in their own age, and holding as they did that politics was a deductive science, a series of immutable principles discoverable by reason , valid for all time and place, and containing infinite potentiality of happiness for the human race, primarily regarded th e test of efficiency. They did not care to ask themselves what form of government was likely to enlist the greatest amount of civic energy or to impart to the members of the State the most valuable political education. Their principal concern was to discover the most efficient instrument for the rapid diffusion of rational ideas, and with few exceptions they recommended monarchy. In his beautiful life of Turgot, Condorcet describes the views of the great French reformer in the following terms: "The equal right of contributing to the formation of laws is doubtless an essential, inalienable, and imprescriptible right which belongs to all proprietors. But in the actual state of society the exercise of this right would be almost illusory for the greater part of the people, and the free and assured enjoyment
of the other rights of society has a much more extensive influence on almost all citizens. Besides, this right has no longer the same importance, if laws be regarded not as the expression of the arbitrary will of the majority, but as truths deduced by reason from principles of natural law and adopted as such by the majority. The sole difference then is that the consent to these truths is tacit in one constitution, while in another it is public and subjected to legal and regular forms." Pursuing this general line of reasoning, Turgot concludes that monarchies are peculiarly adapted to promote the general happiness of mankind, since the monarch has not and cannot have any interest in making bad laws, since he can often act in pursuance of enlightened opinion without waiting upon the slow march of the common mind, and since there was reason to hope that bad laws could be attacked to best advantage under an unfettered monarchy.'
