portant work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's notions developed, with a logic from which their first author shrunk, either from fear, or more probably from want of firmness and consistency as a reasoner. "It is to equality that nature has attached the preservation of our social faculties and happiness: and from this I conclude that legislation will only be taking useless trouble, unless all its attention is first of all directed to the establishment of equality in the fortune and condition of citizens." That is to say not only political equality, but economic communism. "What miserable folly, that persons who pass for philosophers should go on repeating after one another that without property there can be no society. Let us leave illusion. It is property that divides us into two classes, rich and poor; the first will alway prefer their fortune to that of the state, while the second will never love a government or laws that leave them in misery." This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau's diffuse and rhetorical exposition of social necessity had prepared France some twenty years before. After powerfully helping the process of general dissolution, it produced the first fruits specifically after its own kind some twenty years later in the system of Babœuf.3

The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems to exhaust one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of the subversion of society or its reorganization on a communistic basis. Within a few months of his profession of profound lament that the first man who made a claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as the arch foe of the race, he speaks most respectfully of property as the pledge of the engagements of citizens and the foundation of the social pact, while the first condition of that pact is that every one should be maintained in peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him. We need not impute

1 La Législation, I. i.

2 Ibid.

3 It is not within our province to examine the vexed question whether the Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merely political. That socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of some members, one can hardly doubt. See Von Sybel's Hist. of the French Revolution, Bk. II. ch. iv., on one side, and Quinet's La Révolution, ii. 90-107, on the other.

Economie politique, pp. 41, 53. &c.

the apparent discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was always apt to think in a slipshod manner. He sensibly though illogically accepted wholesome practical maxims, as if they flowed from theoretical premisses that were in truth utterly incompatible with them.

CHAPTER VI.

PARIS.

By what subtle process did Rousseau, whose ideal had been a summer life among all the softnesses of sweet gardens and dappled orchards, turn into panegyrist of the harsh auterity of old Cato and grim Brutus's civic devotion? The amiability of eighteenth century France-and France was amiable in spite of the atrocities of White Penitents at Toulouse, and black Jansenists at Paris, and the men and women who dealt in lettres-de-cachet at Versailleswas revolted by the name of the cruel patriot who slew his son for the honour of discipline.' How came Rousseau of all men, the great humanitarian of his time, to rise to the height of these unlovely rigours?

The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted. He had been bred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love of law and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he had been accidentally removed to a strange. city that was in active ferment with ideas that were the direct abnegation of all these. In Paris the idea of a God was either repudiated along with many other ancestral conceptions, or else it was fatally entangled with the worst superstition and not seldom with the vilest cruelties. The idea of freedom was unknown, and the idea of law was benumbed by abuses and exceptions. The idea of country was enfeebled in some and displaced in others by a growing passion for the captivating something, styled citizenship of the world. If Rousseau could have ended his days among the tran

1 Réponse à M. Bordes, 163.

quil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva might possibly never have come back to him. For it depends on circumstance, which of the chances that slumber within us shall awake, and which shall fall unroused with us into the darkness. The fact of Rousseau ranking among the greatest of the writers of the French language, and the yet more important fact that his ideas found their most ardent disciples and exploded in their most violent form in France, constantly make us forget that he was not a Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the spirit of his native city. He was thirty years old before he began even temporarily to live in France: he had only lived there some five or six years when he wrote his first famous piece, so un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas of the Social Contract were in germ before he settled in France at all.

There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva has a fundamental association with each of them. The first was that against the paganized catholicism of the renaissance, and of this Calvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the materialism of the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau. The diplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth part of the world. At the congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at the enormous place taken by the hardly visible Geneva in the midst of negotiations involving momentous issues for the whole habitable globe, called out that it was after all no more than a grain of sand. But he was not wrong who made bold to reply, "Geneva is no grain of sand; 'tis a grain of musk that perfumes all Europe." We have to remember that it was at all events as a grain of musk ever pervading the character of RousIt happened in later years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but however bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood, and Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin. We may perhaps conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant spectacle and memory of a community, free, energetic, and prosperous, whose institutions had been shaped and whose political temper had been inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully than what he had

seau.

1 Pictet de Sergy., i. 18.

picked up about Lycurgus and Lacedæmon, to give him a turn for utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy modifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certain than that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the circumstances of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to freedom, order, citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part of him on the reflective side, and which made themselves visible whenever he exchanged the life of beatified sense for moods of speculative energy. "Never," he says, "did I see the walls of that happy city, I never went into it, without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, due to excess of tender emotion. At the same time that the noble image of freedom elevated my soul, those of equality, of union, of gentle manners, touched me even to tears." His spirit never ceased to haunt city and lake to the end, and he only paid the debt of an owed acknowledgment in the dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to the republic of Geneva. It was there it had its root. The honour in which industry was held in Geneva, the democratic phrases that constituted the dialect of its government, the proud tradition of the long battle which had won and kept its independence, the severity of its manners, the simplicity of its pleasures,all these things awoke in his memory as soon as ever occasion drew him to serious thought. More than that, he had in a peculiar manner drawn in with the breath of his earliest days in this theocratically constituted city, the vital idea that there are sacred things and objects of reverence among men. And hence there came to him, though with many stains and much misdirection, the most priceless excellence of a capacity for devout veneration.

There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of reverence and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament, though a man may well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the second in rule over him, to be the contradiction to his other self. The objects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight are externally so unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is as one playing the part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama

1 Conf., iv. 248.

2 Ibid., ix. 279. Also Economie Politique.