Interestingly, while Kant’s test refers to an ideal public, the examples he provides us with have to do—as in Sidgwick’s discussion—with a non-ideal public. As we shall see, however, the mechanisms on which Kant’s argument rest differ from those on which Sidgwick’s is based. Two cases are envisaged: rebellion and secession. Let us begin with the former. Kant asks: “Is rebellion a legitimate means for a people to employ in throwing off the yoke of an alleged tyrant (non titulo, sed exercitio talis)?” (1795 [1923: 382]). The publicity test is used here in two ways. First, Kant claims that the open acknowledgment of the maxim of rebellion “would make its own purpose impossible” (1795 [1923: 382]). The argument is the following: a person cannot be said to be the chief if the people may sometimes employ force against him (chief-with-absolute-power assumption). The establishment of a state requires a chief in this sense (no-state-without-chief assumption). Therefore, publicizing the maxim of rebellion would make the establishment of a state impossible. Second, the chief himself may publish the maxim according to which rebellion will be sanctioned with death, “for when he knows he possesses irresistible power […] he need not fear vitiating his own purpose by publishing his maxims” (1795 [1923: 383]). And it is because of such irresistibility that publishing this maxim will not be self-frustrating. Again, Kant does not say whether in a non-ideal situation, in which nobody is in a position to have absolute power, the fact that publishing the same maxim would frustrate its very purpose would also mean that this is an unjust maxim. And what is also worth stressing is that such purpose frustration does not imply approval by an ideal and rational public. It merely derives from power relations. Hence, were we to adopt the same line of argument, we could conclude that the stronger a despotic power, the larger the spectrum of maxims that may pass the publicity test, a conclusion that Kant implicitly endorses in the case of maxims of international law.[14]