CHAPTER III.

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

THE dominant belief of the best minds of the latter half of the eighteenth century was a passionate faith in the illimitable possibilities of human progress. Nothing short of a general overthrow of the planet could in their eyes stay the ever upward movement of human perfectibility. They differed as to the details of the philosophy of government which they deduced from this philosophy of society, but the conviction that a golden era of tolerance, enlightenment, and material prosperity was close at hand, belonged to them all. Rousseau set his face the other way. For him the golden era had passed away from our globe many centuries ago. Simplicity had fled from the earth. Wisdom and heroism had vanished from out of the minds of leaders. The spirit of citizenship had gone from those who should have upheld the social union in brotherly accord. The dream of human perfectibility which nerved men like Condorcet, was to Rousseau a sour and fantastic mockery. The utmost that men could do was to turn their eyes to the past, to obliterate the interval, to try to walk

for a space in the track of the ancient societies. They would hardly succeed, but endeavour might at least do something to stay the plague of universal degeneracy. Hence the fatality of his system. It placed the centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational examination of social conditions, and in careful and rational effort to modify them. As we began by saying, it substituted a retrograde aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. We can hardly wonder, when we think of the intense exaltation of spirit produced both by the perfectibilitarians and the followers of Rousseau, and at the same time of the political degradation and material disorder of France, that so violent a contrast between the ideal and the actual led to a great volcanic outbreak. Alas, the crucial difficulty of political change is to summon new force without destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken so many generations to erect. The Social Contract is the formal denial of the possibility of successfully overcoming the difficulty.

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'Although man deprives himself in the civil state of many advantages which he holds from nature, yet he acquires in return others so great, his faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend, his sentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is raised to such a degree, that if the abuses of this new condition did not so often degrade him below that from which he has emerged, he would be bound to bless without ceasing the happy moment which rescued

him from it for ever, and out of a stupid and blind animal made an intelligent being and a man. The little parenthesis as to the frequent degradation produced by the abuses of the social condition, does not prevent us from recognising in the whole passage a tolerably complete surrender of the main position which was taken up in the two Discourses. The short treatise on the Social Contract is an inquiry into the just foundations and most proper form of that very political society, which the Discourses showed to have its foundation in injustice, and to be incapable of receiving any form proper for the attainment of the full measure of human happi

ness.

Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced, but accepted and defined. Locke's influence has begun to tell. The two principal objects of every system of legislation are declared to be liberty and equality. By equality we are warned not to understand that the degrees of power and wealth should be absolutely the same, but that in respect of power, such power should be out of reach of any violence, and be invariably exercised in virtue of the laws; and in respect of riches, that no citizen should be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to sell himself. Do you say this equality is a mere chimera? It is precisely because the force of things is constantly tending to destroy equality, that the force of legislation ought as constantly to be directed towards up 1 Cont. Soc., I. viii.

holding it. This is much clearer than the indefinite way of speaking which we have already noticed in the second Discourse. It means neither more nor less than that equality before the law which is one of the elementary marks of a perfectly free community.

The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract the tendencies to violent inequalities in material possessions among different members of a society, is too vague to be criticised. Does it cover and warrant so sweeping a measure as the old seisachtheia of Solon, voiding all contracts in which the debtor had pledged his land or his person; or such measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and the Gracchi? Or is it to go no further than to condemn such a law as that which in England gives unwilled lands to the eldest son? We can only criticise. accurately a general idea of this sort in connection with specific projects in which it is applied. As it stands, it is no more than the expression of what the author thinks a wise principle of public policy. It assumes the existence of property just as completely as the theory of the most rigorous capitalist could do; it gives no encouragement, as the Discourse did, to the notion of an equality in being without property. There is no element of communism in a principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea, based on the moral claim of men to have equality of opportunity. This ideal stamped itself on the minds.

1 Cont. Soc., II. xi. He had written in much the same sense in his article on Political Economy in the Encyclopædia, p. 34.

of Robespierre and the other revolutionary leaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the Church and other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market to buy in. The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to work in the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known that the most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of the revolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the two extreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-class freeholders. This state is not equality, but gradation, and there is undoubtedly an immense difference between the two. Still its origin is an illustration on the largest scale in history of the force of legislation being exerted to counteract an irregularity that had become unbearable.1

1

Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more

Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking property, and took up a position like that of Rousseau-teaching the poor contempt for the rich, not envy. "I do not want to touch your treasures," he cried, on one occasion, "however impure their source. It is far more an object of concern to me to make poverty honourable, than to proscribe wealth; the thatched hut of Fabricius never need envy the palace of Crassus. I should be at least as content, for my own part, to be one of the sons of Aristides, brought up in the Prytaneium at the public expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes, born in the mire of royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the abasement of the people, and glittering with the public misery." Quoted in Malon's Exposé des Ecoles Socialistes françaises, 15. Babœuf carried Rousseau's sentiments further towards their natural conclusion by such propositions as these: "The goal of the revolution is to destroy inequality, and to re-establish the happiness