*See the essay by Peter Mancias in State Formation and Political Legitimacy, ed. Ronald Cohen and Judith D. Toland (Transaction Books, 1988), that observes of these remarks of Robespierre—Democracy is a state in which the people as sovereign guided by laws of its own making, does for itself all that it can do well, and by its delegates what it cannot” —that it is “brilliantly ambiguous, of course, and allowed… that all effective power could be located in the ruling clique of the Committee on Public Safety.” See also J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic, (St. Martin's Press, 1966), 441.