ELEMENTS OF STATE
The state has four essential elements. These are: (1) population, (2) territory, (3) government, (4) sovereignty 1. Population: The state is a human institution. So population is its primary element. There is no hard and fast rule about population. The ancient Greek writers like Plato and Aristotle favoured a small population. According to Plato, an ideal state should have a population of 5040. Aristotle laid down a general principle that the population of a state should be large enough to make it sufficient and small enough to make good government possible. It must be remembered that both of them were thinking in terms of small city-states. In modern times, Rousseau, prompted by considerations of direct democracy, fixed the number at 10,000. In modern times states vary greatly from the few thousands of Monaco or of San Marino to the crores of China or of India. The modern tendency is in favour of large states. All that can be said is that a large populatio...