Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more inconvenient shapes

than this. A terrible libel appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coarsest

calumnies. Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent it

to Paris to be published there with a prefatory note, stating that it

was by a Genevese pastor whom he named. This landed him in fresh

mortification, for the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declined

to accept the disavowal, and sensible men were wearied by acrimonious

declarations, explanations, protests.[164] Then the clergy of

Neuchâtel were not able any longer to resist the opportunity of

inflicting such torments as they could, upon a heretic whom they might

more charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting torments

which were so precious to their religious imagination. They began to

press the pastor of the village where Rousseau lived, and with whom he

had hitherto been on excellent terms. The pastor, though he had been

liberal enough to admit his singular parishioner to the communion, in

spite of the Savoyard Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist the

bigotry of the professional body to which he belonged. He warned

Rousseau not to present himself at the next communion. The philosopher

insisted that he had a right to do this, until formally cast out by

the consistory. The consistory, composed mainly of a body of peasants

entirely bound to their minister in matters of religion, cited him to

appear, and answer such questions as might test his loyalty to the

faith. Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication of all that he

had written, which he intended to speak to his rustic judges. The eve

of the morning on which he had to appear, he knew his discourse by

heart; when morning came he could not repeat two sentences. So he fell

back on the instrument over which he had more mastery than he had over

tongue or memory, and wrote what he wished to say. The pastor, in whom

irritated egoism was probably by this time giving additional heat to

professional zeal, was for fulminating a decree of excommunication,

but there appears to have been some indirect interference with the

proceedings of the consistory by the king's officials at Neuchâtel,

and the ecclesiastical bolt was held back.[165] Other weapons were not

wanting. The pastor proceeded to spread rumours among his flock that

Rousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most prodigious of all,

that he had written a book containing the monstrous doctrine that

women have no souls. The pulpit resounded with sermons proving to the

honest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their parish in very

flesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of plausibleness to

such an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door of his

neighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now

and again whistled past his ear. His botanising expeditions were

believed to be devoted to search for noxious herbs, and a man who

died in the agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have been

poisoned by him.[166] If persons went to the post-office for letters

for him, they were treated with insult.[167] At length the ferment

against him grew hot enough to be serious. A huge block of stone was

found placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one night

an attempt was made to stone him in his house.[168] Popular hate shown

with this degree of violence was too much for his fortitude, and after

a residence of rather more than three years (September 8-10, 1765), he

fled from the inhospitable valley to seek refuge he knew not where.

In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in the

lake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory.

Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, with

something of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of the

sun. He forgot or was heedless of the circumstance that the isle of

St. Peter lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose

government had forbidden him their territory. Strong craving for a

little ease in the midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought of

jurisdictions and proscriptive decrees.

The spot where he now found peace for a brief space usually

disappoints the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearying

himself with the follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonic

that he can find in the lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees

only tameness in a pygmy island, that offers nothing sublimer than a

high grassy terrace, some cool over-branching avenues, some mimic

vales, and meadows and vineyards sloping down to the sheet of blue

water at their feet. Yet, as one sits here on a summer day, with tired

mowers sleeping on their grass heaps in the sun, in a stillness

faintly broken by the timid lapping of the water in the sedge, or the

rustling of swift lizards across the heated sand, while the Bernese

snow giants line a distant horizon with mysterious solitary shapes, it

is easy to know what solace life in such a scene might bring to a man

distracted by pain of body and pain and weariness of soul. Rousseau

has commemorated his too short sojourn here in the most perfect of all

his compositions.[169]

"I found my existence so charming, and led a life so

agreeable to my humour, that I resolved here to end my days.

My only source of disquiet was whether I should be allowed

to carry my project out. In the midst of the presentiments

that disturbed me, I would fain have had them make a

perpetual prison of my refuge, to confine me in it for all

the rest of my life. I longed for them to cut off all chance

and all hope of leaving it; to forbid me holding any

communication with the mainland, so that, knowing nothing

of what was going on in the world, I might have forgotten

the world's existence, and people might have forgotten mine

too. They only suffered me to pass two months in the island,

but I could have passed two years, two centuries, and all

eternity, without a moment's weariness, though I had not,

with my companion, any other society than that of the

steward, his wife, and their servants. They were in truth

honest souls and nothing more, but that was just what I

wanted.... Carried thither in a violent hurry, alone and

without a thing, I afterwards sent for my housekeeper, my

books, and my scanty possessions, of which I had the delight

of unpacking nothing, leaving my boxes and chests just as

they had come, and dwelling in the house where I counted on

ending my days, exactly as if it were an inn whence I must

needs set forth on the morrow. All things went so well, just

as they were, that to think of ordering them better were to

spoil them. One of my greatest joys was to leave my books

safely fastened up in their boxes, and to be without even a

case for writing. When any luckless letter forced me to take

up a pen for an answer, I grumblingly borrowed the steward's

inkstand, and hurried to give it back to him with all the

haste I could, in the vain hope that I should never have

need of the loan any more. Instead of meddling with those

weary quires and reams and piles of old books, I filled my

chamber with flowers and grasses, for I was then in my first

fervour for botany. Having given up employment that would be

a task to me, I needed one that would be an amusement, nor

cause me more pains than a sluggard might choose to take. I

undertook to make the _Flora petrinsularis_, and to describe

every single plant on the island, in detail enough to occupy

me for the rest of my days. In consequence of this fine

scheme, every morning after breakfast, which we all took in

company, I used to go with a magnifying glass in my hand and

my Systema Naturæ under my arm, to visit some district of

the island. I had divided it for that purpose into small

squares, meaning to go through them one after another in

each season of the year. At the end of two or three hours I

used to return laden with an ample harvest, a provision for

amusing myself after dinner indoors, in case of rain. I

spent the rest of the morning in going with the steward, his

wife, and Theresa, to see the labourers and the harvesting,

and I generally set to work along with them; many a time

when people from Berne came to see me, they found me perched

on a high tree, with a bag fastened round my waist; I kept

filling it with fruit and then let it down to the ground

with a rope. The exercise I had taken in the morning and the

good humour that always comes from exercise, made the repose

of dinner vastly pleasant to me. But if dinner was kept up

too long, and fine weather invited me forth, I could not

wait, but was speedily off to throw myself all alone into a

boat, which, when the water was smooth enough, I used to

pull out to the middle of the lake. There, stretched at full

length in the boat's bottom, with my eyes turned up to the

sky, I let myself float slowly hither and thither as the

water listed, sometimes for hours together, plunged in a

thousand confused delicious musings, which, though they had

no fixed nor constant object, were not the less on that

account a hundred times dearer to me than all that I had

found sweetest in what they call the pleasures of life.

Often warned by the going down of the sun that it was time

to return, I found myself so far from the island that I was

forced to row with all my might to get in before it was

pitch dark. At other times, instead of losing myself in the

midst of the waters, I had a fancy to coast along the green

shores of the island, where the clear waters and cool

shadows tempted me to bathe. But one of my most frequent

expeditions was from the larger island to the less; there I

disembarked and spent my afternoon, sometimes in mimic

rambles among wild elders, persicaries, willows, and shrubs

of every species, sometimes settling myself on the top of a

sandy knoll, covered with turf, wild thyme, flowers, even

sainfoin and trefoil that had most likely been sown there in

old days, making excellent quarters for rabbits. They might

multiply in peace without either fearing anything or harming

anything. I spoke of this to the steward. He at once had

male and female rabbits brought from Neuchâtel, and we went

in high state, his wife, one of his sisters, Theresa, and I,

to settle them in the little islet. The foundation of our

colony was a feast-day. The pilot of the Argonauts was not

prouder than I, as I bore my company and the rabbits in

triumph from our island to the smaller one....

When the lake was too rough for me to sail, I spent my

afternoon in going up and down the island, gathering plants

to right and left; seating myself now in smiling lonely

nooks to dream at my ease, now on little terraces and

knolls, to follow with my eyes the superb and ravishing

prospect of the lake and its shores, crowned on one side by

the neighbouring hills, and on the other melting into rich

and fertile plains up to the feet of the pale blue mountains

on their far-off edge.

As evening drew on, I used to come down from the high ground

and sit on the beach at the water's brink in some hidden

sheltering place. There the murmur of the waves and their

agitation, charmed all my senses and drove every other

movement away from my soul; they plunged it into delicious

dreamings, in which I was often surprised by night. The flux

and reflux of the water, its ceaseless stir-swelling and

falling at intervals, striking on ear and sight, made up for

the internal movements which my musings extinguished; they

were enough to give me delight in mere existence, without

taking any trouble of thinking. From time to time arose some

passing thought of the instability of the things of this

world, of which the face of the waters offered an image; but

such light impressions were swiftly effaced in the

uniformity of the ceaseless motion, which rocked me as in a

cradle; it held me with such fascination that even when

called at the hour and by the signal appointed, I could not

tear myself away without summoning all my force.

After supper, when the evening was fine, we used to go all

together for a saunter on the terrace, to breathe the

freshness of the air from the lake. We sat down in the

arbour, laughing, chatting, or singing some old song, and

then we went home to bed, well pleased with the day, and

only craving another that should be exactly like it on the

morrow....

All is in a continual flux upon the earth. Nothing in it

keeps a form constant and determinate; our affections,

fastening on external things, necessarily change and pass

just as they do. Ever in front of us or behind us, they

recall the past that is gone, or anticipate a future that in

many a case is destined never to be. There is nothing solid

to which the heart can fix itself. Here we have little more

than a pleasure that comes and passes away; as for the

happiness that endures, I cannot tell if it be so much as

known among men. There is hardly in the midst of our

liveliest delights a single instant when the heart could

tell us with real truth--"_I would this instant might last

for ever_." And how can we give the name of happiness to a

fleeting state that all the time leaves the heart unquiet

and void, that makes us regret something gone, or still long

for something to come?

But if there is a state in which the soul finds a situation

solid enough to comport with perfect repose, and with the

expansion of its whole faculty, without need of calling back

the past, or pressing on towards the future; where time is

nothing for it, and the present has no ending; with no mark

for its own duration and without a trace of succession;

without a single other sense of privation or delight, of

pleasure or pain, of desire or apprehension, than this

single sense of existence--so long as such a state endures,

he who finds himself in it may talk of bliss, not with a

poor, relative, and imperfect happiness such as people find

in the pleasures of life, but with a happiness full,

perfect, and sufficing, that leaves in the soul no conscious

unfilled void. Such a state was many a day mine in my

solitary musings in the isle of St. Peter, either lying in

my boat as it floated on the water, or seated on the banks

of the broad lake, or in other places than the little isle

on the brink of some broad stream, or a rivulet murmuring

over a gravel bed.

What is it that one enjoys in a situation like this? Nothing

outside of one's self, nothing except one's self and one's

own existence.... But most men, tossed as they are by

unceasing passion, have little knowledge of such a state;

they taste it imperfectly for a few moments, and then retain

no more than an obscure confused idea of it, that is too

weak to let them feel its charm. It would not even be good

in the present constitution of things, that in their

eagerness for these gentle ecstasies, they should fall into

a disgust for the active life in which their duty is

prescribed to them by needs that are ever on the increase.

But a wretch cut off from human society, who can do nothing

here below that is useful and good either for himself or for

other people, may in such a state find for all lost human

felicities many recompenses, of which neither fortune nor

men can ever rob him.

'Tis true that these recompenses cannot be felt by all

souls, nor in all situations. The heart must be in peace,

nor any passion come to trouble its calm. There must be in

the surrounding objects neither absolute repose nor excess

of agitation, but a uniform and moderated movement without

shock, without interval. With no movement, life is only

lethargy. If the movement be unequal or too strong, it

awakes us; by recalling us to the objects around, it

destroys the charm of our musing, and plucks us from within

ourselves, instantly to throw us back under the yoke of

fortune and man, in a moment to restore us to all the

consciousness of misery. Absolute stillness inclines one to

gloom. It offers an image of death: then the help of a

cheerful imagination is necessary, and presents itself

naturally enough to those whom heaven has endowed with such

a gift. The movement which does not come from without then

stirs within us. The repose is less complete, it is true;

but it is also more agreeable when light and gentle ideas,

without agitating the depths of the soul, only softly skim

the surface. This sort of musing we may taste whenever there

is tranquillity about us, and I have thought that in the

Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no object struck my

sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice pleasurable

day.

But it must be said that all this came better and more

happily in a fruitful and lonely island, where nothing

presented itself to me save smiling pictures, where nothing

recalled saddening memories, where the fellowship of the few

dwellers there was gentle and obliging, without being

exciting enough to busy me incessantly, where, in short, I

was free to surrender myself all day long to the promptings

of my taste or to the most luxurious indolence.... As I came

out from a long and most sweet musing fit, seeing myself

surrounded by verdure and flowers and birds, and letting my

eyes wander far over romantic shores that fringed a wide

expanse of water bright as crystal, I fitted all these

attractive objects into my dreams; and when at last I slowly

recovered myself and recognised what was about me, I could

not mark the point that cut off dream from reality, so

equally did all things unite to endear to me the lonely

retired life I led in this happy spot! Why can that life not

come back to me again? Why can I not go finish my days in

the beloved island, never to quit it, never again to see in

it one dweller from the mainland, to bring back to me the

memory of all the woes of every sort that they have

delighted in heaping on my head for all these long years?...

Freed from the earthly passions engendered by the tumult of

social life, my soul would many a time lift itself above

this atmosphere, and commune beforehand with the heavenly

intelligences, into whose number it trusts to be ere long

taken."

The exquisite dream, thus set to words of most soothing music, came

soon to its end. The full and perfect sufficience of life was abruptly

disturbed. The government of Berne gave him notice to quit the island

and their territory within fifteen days. He represented to the

authorities that he was infirm and ill, that he knew not whither to

go, and that travelling in wintry weather would be dangerous to his

life. He even made the most extraordinary request that any man in

similar straits ever did make. "In this extremity," he wrote to their

representative, "I only see one resource for me, and however frightful

it may appear, I will adopt it, not only without repugnance, but with

eagerness, if their excellencies will be good enough to give their

consent. It is that it should please them for me to pass the rest of

my days in prison in one of their castles, or such other place in

their states as they may think fit to select. I will there live at my

own expense, and I will give security never to put them to any cost. I

submit to be without paper or pen, or any communication from without,

except so far as may be absolutely necessary, and through the channel

of those who shall have charge of me. Only let me have left, with the

use of a few books, the liberty to walk occasionally in a garden, and

I am content. Do not suppose that an expedient, so violent in

appearance, is the fruit of despair. My mind is perfectly calm at this

moment; I have taken time to think about it, and it is only after

profound consideration that I have brought myself to this decision.

Mark, I pray you, that if this seems an extraordinary resolution, my

situation is still more so. The distracted life that I have been made

to lead for several years without intermission would be terrible for a

man in full health; judge what it must be for a miserable invalid worn

down with weariness and misfortune, and who has now no wish save only

to die in a little peace."[170]

That the request was made in all sincerity we may well believe. The

difference between being in prison and being out of it was really not

considerable to a man who had the previous winter been confined to his

chamber for eight months without a break.[171] In other respects the

world was as cheerless as any prison could be. He was an exile from

the only places he knew, and to him a land unknown was terrible. He

had thought of Vienna, and the Prince of Würtemburg had sought the

requisite permission for him, but the priests were too strong in the

court of the house of Austria.[172] Madame d'Houdetot offered him a

resting-place in Normandy, and Saint Lambert in Lorraine.[173] He

thought of Potsdam. Rey, the printer, pressed him to go to Holland. He

wondered if he should have strength to cross the Alps and make his way

to Corsica. Eventually he made up his mind to go to Berlin, and he

went as far as Strasburg on his road thither.[174] Here he began to

fear the rude climate of the northern capital; he changed his plans,

and resolved to accept the warm invitations that he had received to

cross over to England. His friends used their interest to procure a

passport for him,[175] and the Prince of Conti offered him an

apartment in the privileged quarter of the Temple, on his way through

Paris. His own purpose seems to have been irresolute to the last, but

his friends acted with such energy and bustle on his behalf that the

English scheme was adopted, and he found himself in Paris (Dec. 17,

1765), on his way to London, almost before he had deliberately

realised what he was doing. It was a step that led him into many fatal

vexations, as we shall presently see. Meanwhile we may pause to

examine the two considerable books which had involved his life in all

this confusion and perplexity.

FOOTNOTES:

[94] June, 1762-December, 1765.

[95] _Conf._, xi. 175. It is generally printed in the volume of his

works entitled _Mélanges_.

[96] _Corr._, iii. 416.

[97] _Conf._, xi. 172.

[98] For a remarkable anticipation of the ruin of France, see _Conf._,

xi. 136.

[99] M. Roguin. June 14, 1762.

[100] _Corr._, ii. 347.

[101] Streckeisen, i. 35.

[102] His friend Moultou wrote him the news, Streckeisen, i. 43.

Geneva was the only place at which the Social Contract was burnt. Here

there were peculiar reasons, as we shall see.

[103] _Corr._, ii. 356.

[104] _Ib._, ii. 358, 369, etc.

[105] The principality of Neuchâtel had fallen by marriage (1504) to

the French house of Orleans-Longueville, which with certain

interruptions retained it until the extinction of the line by the

death of Marie, Duchess of Nemours (1707). Fifteen claimants arose

with fifteen varieties of far-off title, as well as a party for

constituting Neuchâtel a Republic and making it a fourteenth canton.

(Saint Simon, v. 276.) The Estates adjudged the sovereignty to the

Protestant house of Prussia (Nov. 3, 1707). Lewis XIV., as heir of the

pretensions of the extinct line, protested. Finally, at the peace of

Utrecht (1713), Lewis surrendered his claim in exchange for the

cession by Prussia of the Principality of Orange, and Prussia held it

until 1806. The disturbed history of the connection between Prussia

and Neuchâtel from 1814, when it became the twenty-first canton of the

Swiss Confederation, down to 1857, does not here concern us.

[106] _Corr._, ii. 370.

[107] _Corr._, ii. 371. July 1762.

[108] D'Alembert, who knew Frederick better than any of the

philosophers, to Voltaire, Nov. 22, 1765.

[109] Letter to Hume; Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 105, corroborating

_Conf._, xii. 196.

[110] Marischal to J.J.R.; Streckeisen, ii. 70.

[111] _Corr._, iii. 40. Nov. 1, 1762.

[112] Burton's _Life_, ii. 113.

[113] Voltaire's _Corr._ (1758). _Oeuv._, lxxv. pp. 31 and 80.

[114] _Conf._, xii. 237.

[115] _Corr._, iii. 41. Nov. 11, 1762.

[116] _Corr._, iii. 38. Oct. 30, 1762.

[117] _Ib._, iii. 110-115. Jan. 28, 1763.

[118] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 103, 59, etc.

[119] George Keith (1685-1778) was elder brother of Frederick's famous

field-marshal, James Keith. They had taken part in the Jacobite rising

of 1715, and fled abroad on its failure. James Keith brought his

brother into the service of the King of Prussia, who sent him as

ambassador to Paris (1751), afterwards made him Governor of Neuchâtel

(1754), and eventually prevailed on the English Government to

reinstate him in the rights which he had forfeited by his share in the

rebellion (1763).

[120] Streckeisen, ii. 98, etc.

[121] One of Rousseau's chief distresses hitherto arose from the

indigence in which Theresa would be placed in case of his death. Rey,

the bookseller, gave her an annuity of about £16 a year, and Lord

Marischal's gift seems to have been 300 louis, the only money that

Rousseau was ever induced to accept from any one in his life. See

Streckeisen, ii. 99; _Corr._, iii. 336. The most delicate and sincere

of the many offers to provide for Theresa was made by Madame de

Verdelin (Streckeisen, ii. 506). The language in which Madame de

Verdelin speaks of Theresa in all her letters is the best testimony to

character that this much-abused creature has to produce.

[122] _Ib._, 90, 92, etc. Summer of 1763.

[123] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 105. Oct. 2, 1762.

[124] The Confessions are not our only authority for this. See

Streckeisen, ii. 64; also D'Alembert to Voltaire, Sept. 8, 1762.

[125] Voltaire's _Corr._ _Oeuv._, lxvii. 458, 459, 485, etc.

[126] To D'Alembert, Sept. 15, 1762.

[127] Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.

[128] Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.

[129] Streckeisen, i. 50.

[130] _Ib._, i. 76.

[131] _Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont_, pp. 163-166.

[132] _Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont_, pp. 130-135.

[133] _Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont_, p. 93.

[134] Carlyle's _Frederick_, Bk. xxi. ch. iv. Rousseau, _Corr._, iii.

102.

[135] _Corr._, iii. 57. Nov. 1762. To M. Montmollin.

[136] _Conf._, xii. 206.

[137] _Conf._, xii. 198.

[138] _Corr._, iii. 295. Dec. 25, 1763.

[139] Quoted in Musset-Pathay, ii. 500.

[140] For instance, _Corr._, iii. 249.

[141] _Ib._, iii. 364, 381.

[142] _Corr._, iii. 181-186, etc.

[143] Prince Lewis Eugene, son of Charles Alexander (reigning duke

from 1733 to 1737); a younger brother of Charles Eugene, known as

Schiller's Duke of Würtemberg, who reigned up to 1793. Frederick

Eugene, known in the Seven Years' War, was another brother. Rousseau's

correspondent became reigning duke in 1793, but only lived a year and

a half afterwards.

[144] _Corr._, iii. 250. Sept. 29, 1763.

[145] The prince's letters are given in the Streckeisen collection,

vol. ii.

[146] Streckeisen, ii. 202.

[147] Possibly Wilkes also; _Corr._, iv. 200.

[148] Streckeisen, i. 89. June 1, 1763.

[149] _Corr._, iii. 202. June 4, 1763.

[150] _Memoirs of my Life_, p. 55, _n._ (Ed. 1862). Necker

(1732-1804), whom Mdlle. Curchod ultimately married, was an eager

admirer of Rousseau. "Ah, how close the tender, humane, and virtuous

soul of Julie," he wrote to her author, "has brought me to you. How

the reading of those letters gratified me! how many good emotions did

they stir or fortify! How many sublimities in a thousand places in

these six volumes; not the sublimity that perches itself in the

clouds, but that which pushes everyday virtues to their highest

point," and so on. Feb. 16, 1761. Streckeisen, i. 333.

[151] Boswell's name only occurs twice in Rousseau's letters, I

believe; once (_Corr._, iv. 394) as the writer of a letter which Hume

was suspected of tampering with, and previously (iv. 70) as the bearer

of a letter. See also Streckeisen, i. 262.

[152] Streckeisen, ii. 111. Jan. 18, 1765.

[153] Bk. ii. ch. x.

[154] Boswell's _Account of Corsica_, p. 367.

[155] The correspondence between Rousseau and Buttafuoco has been

published in the _Oeuvres et Corr. Inédites de J.J.R._, 1861. See pp.

35, 43, etc.

[156] Boswell's _Life_, 179, 193, etc. (Ed. 1866).

[157] _"Je suis tout homme de pouvoir vous regarder avec pitié!"_

Letter dated Jan. 4, 1766, and given by Musset-Pathay as from a Scotch

lord, unnamed. Boswell had the honour of conducting Theresa to

England, after Hume had taken Rousseau over. "This young gentleman,"

writes Hume, "very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad--has

such a rage for literature that I dread some circumstance fatal to our

friend's honour. You remember the story of Terentia, who was first

married to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age married

a young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some secret which

would convey to him eloquence and genius." Burton's _Life_, ii. 307,

308. Boswell mentions that he met Rousseau in England (_Account of

Corsica_, p. 340), and also gives Rousseau's letter introducing him to

Paoli (p. 266).

[158] To Buttafuoco, p. 48, etc.

[159] _Corr._, vi. 176. Feb. 26, 1770.

[160] It may be worth noticing, as a link between historic personages,

that Napoleon Bonaparte's first piece was a _Lettre à Matteo

Buttafuoco_ (1791), the same Buttafuoco with whom Rousseau

corresponded, who had been Choiseul's agent in the union of the island

to France, was afterwards sent as deputy to the Constituent, and

finally became the bitterest enemy of Paoli and the patriotic party.

[161] _Corr._, iii. 190. To the First Syndic, May 12, 1763.

[162] Grimm's _Corr. Lit._, iv. 235. For Rousseau's opinion of his

book's companion at the stake, see _Corr._, iii. 442.

[163] Streckeisen, ii. 526.

[164] There appears to be no doubt that Rousseau was wrong in

attributing to Vernes the _Sentimens des Citoyens_.

[165] _Corr._, iv. 116, 122 (April 1765), 165-196 (August); also

_Conf._, xii. 245.

[166] Note to M. Auguis's edition, _Corr._, v. 395.

[167] _Corr._, iv. 204.

[168] _Conf._, xii. 259. This lapidation has sometimes been doubted,

and treated as an invention of Rousseau's morbid suspicion. The

official documents prove that his account was substantially true (see

Musset-Pathay, ii. 559.)

[169] The fifth of the _Rêveries_. See also _Conf._, 262-279, and

_Corr._, iv. 206-224. His stay in the island was from the second week

in September down to the last in October, 1765.

[170] _Corr._, iv. 221. Oct. 20, 1765.

[171] _Ib._, iv. 136, etc. April 27, 1765.

[172] Streckeisen-Moultou, ii. 209, 212.

[173] _Ib._, ii. 554.

[174] He arrived at Strasburg on the 2d or 3d of November, left it

about the end of the first week in December, and arrived in Paris on

the 16th of December 1765. A sort of apocryphal tradition is said to

linger in the island about Rousseau's last evening on the island, how

after supper he called for a lute, and sang some passably bad verses.

See M. Bougy's _J.J. Rousseau_, p. 179 (Paris: 1853.)

[175] Madame de Verdelin to J.J.R. Streckeisen, ii. 532. The minister

even expressed his especial delight at being able to serve Rousseau,

so little seriousness was there now in the formalities of absolution.

_Ib._ 547.

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.

"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."[176] 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 happiness.

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 upholding it.[177] 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 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.[178]

Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more extravagant elements of

the old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of the

fundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors.

"If the sea," he says in one place, "bathes nothing but inaccessible

rocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will live all

the more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more

happily."[179] Apart from an outburst like this, the central idea

remained the same, though it was approached from another side and with

different objects. The picture of a state of nature had lost none of

its perilous attraction, though it was hung in a slightly changed

light. It remained the starting-point of the right and normal

constitution of civil society, just as it had been the starting-point

of the denunciation of civil society as incapable of right

constitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally with

the Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historic

method which traces the present along a line of ascertained

circumstances, and seeks an improved future in an unbroken

continuation of that line. The opening words, which sent such a thrill

through the generation to which they were uttered in two continents,

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," tell us at the

outset that we are as far away as ever from the patient method of

positive observation, and as deeply buried as ever in deducing

practical maxims from a set of conditions which never had any other

than an abstract and phantasmatic existence. How is a man born free?

If he is born into isolation, he perishes instantly. If he is born

into a family, he is at the moment of his birth committed to a state

of social relation, in however rudimentary a form; and the more or

less of freedom which this state may ultimately permit to him, depends

upon circumstances. Man was hardly born free among Romans and

Athenians, when both law and public opinion left a father at perfect

liberty to expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive the

circumstances, the later the period at which he gains freedom. A child

was not born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the

_patria potestas_ was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back,

was he born free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abraham

had full right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing his

daughter.

But to speak thus is to speak what we do know. Rousseau was not open

to such testimony. "My principles," he said in contempt of Grotius,

"are not founded on the authority of poets; they come from the nature

of things and are based on reason."[180] He does indeed in one place

express his reverence for the Judaic law, and administers a just

rebuke to the philosophic arrogance which saw only successful

impostors in the old legislators.[181] But he paid no attention to

the processes and usages of which this law was the organic expression,

nor did he allow himself to learn from it the actual conditions of the

social state which accepted it. It was Locke, whose essay on civil

government haunts us throughout the Social Contract, who had taught

him that men are born free, equal, and independent. Locke evaded the

difficulty of the dependence of childhood by saying that when the son

comes to the estate that made his father a free man, he becomes a free

man too.[182] What of the old Roman use permitting a father to sell

his son three times? In the same metaphysical spirit Locke had laid

down the absolute proposition that "conjugal society is made by a

voluntary compact between man and woman."[183] This is true of a small

number of western societies in our own day, but what of the primitive

usages of communal marriages, marriages by capture, purchase, and the

rest? We do not mean it as any discredit to writers upon government in

the seventeenth century that they did not make good out of their own

consciousness the necessary want of knowledge about primitive

communities. But it is necessary to point out, first, that they did

not realise all the knowledge within their reach, and next that, as a

consequence of this, their propositions had a quality that vitiated

all their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that man is not

naturally free was truer than the position of Locke and Rousseau, and

it was so because Filmer consulted and appealed to the most authentic

of the historic records then accessible.[184]

It is the more singular that Rousseau should have thus deliberately

put aside all but the most arbitrary and empirical historical lessons,

and it shows the extraordinary force with which men may be mastered by

abstract prepossessions, even when they have a partial knowledge of

the antidote; because Rousseau in several places not only admits, but

insists upon, the necessity of making institutions relative to the

state of the community, in respect of size, soil, manners, occupation,

morality, character. "It is in view of such relations as these that we

must assign to each people a particular system, which shall be the

best, not perhaps in itself, but for the state for which it is

destined."[185] In another place he calls attention to manners,

customs, above all to opinion, as the part of a social system on which

the success of all the rest depends; particular rules being only the

arching of the vault, of which manners, though so much tardier in

rising, form a key-stone that can never be disturbed.[186] This was

excellent so far as it went, but it was one of the many great truths,

which men may hold in their minds without appreciating their full

value. He did not see that these manners, customs, opinions, have old

roots which must be sought in a historic past; that they are connected

with the constitution of human nature, and that then in turn they

prepare modifications of that constitution. His narrow, symmetrical,

impatient humour unfitted him to deal with the complex tangle of the

history of social growths. It was essential to his mental comfort that

he should be able to see a picture of perfect order and logical system

at both ends of his speculation. Hence, he invented, to begin with,

his ideal state of nature, and an ideal mode of passing from that to

the social state. He swept away in his imagination the whole series of

actual incidents between present and past; and he constructed a system

which might be imposed upon all societies indifferently by a

legislator summoned for that purpose, to wipe out existing uses, laws,

and institutions, and make afresh a clear and undisturbed beginning of

national life. The force of habit was slowly and insensibly to be

substituted for that of the legislator's authority, but the existence

of such habits previously as forces to be dealt with, and the

existence of certain limits of pliancy in the conditions of human

nature and social possibility, are facts of which the author of the

Social Contract takes not the least account.

Rousseau knew hardly any history, and the few isolated pieces of old

fact which he had picked up in his very slight reading were exactly

the most unfortunate that a student in need of the historic method

could possibly have fallen in with. The illustrations which are

scantily dispersed in his pages,--and we must remark that they are no

more than illustrations for conclusions arrived at quite independently

of them, and not the historical proof and foundations of his

conclusions,--are nearly all from the annals of the small states of

ancient Greece, and from the earlier times of the Roman republic. We

have already pointed out to what an extent his imagination was struck

at the time of his first compositions by the tale of Lycurgus. The

influence of the same notions is still paramount. The hopelessness of

giving good laws to a corrupt people is supposed to be demonstrated by

the case of Minos, whose legislation failed in Crete because the

people for whom he made laws were sunk in vices; and by the further

example of Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians and

Cyrenians, knowing that they were too rich and could never suffer

equality.[187] The writer is thinking of Plato's Laws, when he says

that just as nature has fixed limits to the stature of a well-formed

man, outside of which she produces giants and dwarfs, so with

reference to the best constitution for a state, there are bounds to

its extent, so that it may be neither too large to be capable of good

government, nor too small to be independent and self-sufficing. The

further the social bond is extended, the more relaxed it becomes, and

in general a small state is proportionally stronger than a large

one.[188] In the remarks with which he proceeds to corroborate this

position, we can plainly see that he is privately contrasting an

independent Greek community with the unwieldy oriental monarchy

against which at one critical period Greece had to contend. He had

never realised the possibility of such forms of polity as the Roman

Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took such

enormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of states

which came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant of

his own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argument

that a state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen man

is neither dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's

argument to the same effect, on the ground that beauty demands size,

and there must not be too great nor too small size, because a ship

sails badly if it be either too heavy or too light.[189] And when

Rousseau supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, and

talks about the right size of its territory,[190] who does not think

of the five thousand and forty which the Athenian Stranger prescribed

to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper number for the perfectly

formed state?[191] The prediction of the short career which awaits a

state that is cursed with an extensive and accessible seaboard,

corresponds precisely with the Athenian Stranger's satisfaction that

the new city is to be eighty stadia from the coast.[192] When Rousseau

himself began to think about the organisation of Corsica, he praised

the selection of Corte as the chief town of a patriotic

administration, because it was far from the sea, and so its

inhabitants would long preserve their simplicity and uprightness.[193]

And in later years still, when meditating upon a constitution for

Poland, he propounded an economic system essentially Spartan; the

people were enjoined to think little about foreigners, to give

themselves little concern about commerce, to suppress stamped paper,

and to put a tithe upon the land.[194]

The chapter on the Legislator is in the same region. We are again

referred to Lycurgus; and to the circumstance that Greek towns usually

confided to a stranger the sacred task of drawing up their laws. His

experience in Venice and the history of his native town supplemented

the examples of Greece. Geneva summoned a stranger to legislate for

her, and "those who only look on Calvin as a theologian have a scanty

idea of the extent of his genius; the preparation of our wise edicts,

in which he had so large a part, do him as much honour as his

Institutes."[195] Rousseau's vision was too narrow to let him see the

growth of government and laws as a co-ordinate process, flowing from

the growth of all the other parts and organs of society, and advancing

in more or less equal step along with them. He could begin with

nothing short of an absolute legislator, who should impose a system

from without by a single act, a structure hit upon once for all by his

individual wisdom, not slowly wrought out by many minds, with popular

assent and co-operation, at the suggestion of changing social

circumstances and need.[196]

All this would be of very trifling importance in the history of

political literature, but for the extraordinary influence which

circumstances ultimately bestowed upon it. The Social Contract was the

gospel of the Jacobins, and much of the action of the supreme party in

France during the first months of the year 1794 is only fully

intelligible when we look upon it as the result and practical

application of Rousseau's teaching. The conception of the situation

entertained by Robespierre and Saint Just was entirely moulded on all

this talk about the legislators of Greece and Geneva. "The transition

of an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which nature

rose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a

people whom you wish to make free--destroy its prejudices, alter its

habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.

The state therefore must lay hold on every human being at his birth,

and direct his education with powerful hand. Solon's weak confidence

threw Athens into fresh slavery, while Lycurgus's severity founded the

republic of Sparta on an immovable basis."[197] These words, which

come from a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, might well be

taken for an excerpt from the Social Contract. The fragments of the

institutions by which Saint Just intended to regenerate his country,

reveal a man with the example of Lycurgus before his eyes in every

line he wrote.[198] When on the eve of the Thermidorian revolution

which overthrew him and his party, he insisted on the necessity of a

dictatorship, he was only thinking of the means by which he should at

length obtain the necessary power for forcing his regenerating

projects on the country; for he knew that Robespierre, whom he named

as the man for the dictatorship, accepted his projects, and would lend

the full force of the temporal arm to the propagation of ideas which

they had acquired together from Jean Jacques, and from the Greeks to

whom Jean Jacques had sent them for example and instruction.[199] No

doubt the condition of France after 1792 must naturally have struck

any one too deeply imbued with the spirit of the Social Contract to

look beneath the surface of the society with which the Convention had

to deal, as urgently inviting a lawgiver of the ancient stamp. The old

order in church and state had been swept away, no organs for the

performance of the functions of national life were visible, the moral

ideas which had bound the social elements together in the extinct

monarchy seemed to be permanently sapped. A politician who had for

years been dreaming about Minos and Lycurgus and Calvin, especially if

he lived in a state with such a tradition of centralisation as ruled

in France, was sure to suppose that here was the scene and the moment

for a splendid repetition on an immense scale of those immortal

achievements. The futility of the attempt was the practical and ever

memorable illustration of the defect of Rousseau's geometrical method.

It was one thing to make laws for the handful of people who lived in

Geneva in the sixteenth century, united in religious faith, and

accepting the same form and conception of the common good. It was a

very different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-five

millions of a heterogeneously composed nation, abounding in variations

of temperament, faith, laws, and habits and weltering in unfathomable

distractions. The French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sent

stranger from Corsica to make laws for them, but not until he had set

his foot upon their neck; and even Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun

life like the rest of his generation by writing Rousseauite essays,

made a swift return to the historic method in the equivocal shape of

the Concordat.

Not only were Rousseau's schemes of polity conceived from the point of

view of a small territory with a limited population. "You must not,"

he says in one place, "make the abuses of great states an objection to

a writer who would fain have none but small ones."[200] Again, when he

said that in a truly free state the citizens performed all their

services to the community with their arms and none by money, and that

he looked upon the corvée (or compulsory labour on the public roads)

as less hostile to freedom than taxes,[201] he showed that he was

thinking of a state not greatly passing the dimensions of a parish.

This was not the only defect of his schemes. They assumed a sort of

state of nature in the minds of the people with whom the lawgiver had

to deal. Saint Just made the same assumption afterwards, and trusted

to his military school to erect on these bare plots whatever

superstructure he might think fit to appoint. A society that had for

so many centuries been organised and moulded by a powerful and

energetic church, armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the same

moral tendencies in a long series of successive generations, was not

in the naked mental state which the Jacobins postulated. It was not

prepared to accept free divorce, the substitution of friendship for

marriage, the displacement of the family by the military school, and

the other articles in Saint Just's programme of social renovation. The

twelve apostles went among people who were morally swept and

garnished, and they went armed with instruments proper to seize the

imagination of their hearers. All moral reformers seek the ignorant

and simple, poor fishermen in one scene, labourers and women in

another, for the good reason that new ideas only make way on ground

that is not already too heavily encumbered with prejudices. But France

in 1793 was in no condition of this kind. Opinion in all its spheres

was deepened by an old and powerful organisation, to a degree which

made any attempt to abolish the opinion, as the organisation appeared

to have been abolished, quite hopeless until the lapse of three or

four hundred years had allowed due time for dissolution. After all it

was not until the fourth century of our era that the work of even the

twelve apostles began to tell decisively and quickly. As for the

Lycurgus of whom the French chattered, if such a personality ever

existed out of the region of myth, he came to his people armed with an

oracle from the gods, just as Moses did, and was himself regarded as

having a nature touched with divinity. No such pretensions could well

be made by any French legislator within a dozen years or so of the

death of Voltaire.

Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as the

desperate absurdity of the assumptions of the Social Contract, which

constituted the power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the

hands of men who surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts.

The Social Contract is worked out precisely in that fashion which, if

it touches men at all, makes them into fanatics. Long trains of

reasoning, careful allegation of proofs, patient admission on every

hand of qualifying propositions and multitudinous limitations, are

essential to science, and produce treatises that guide the wise

statesman in normal times. But it is dogma that gives fervour to a

sect. There are always large classes of minds to whom anything in the

shape of a vigorously compact system is irresistibly fascinating, and

to whom the qualification of a proposition, or the limitation of a

theoretic principle is distressing or intolerable. Such persons always

come to the front for a season in times of distraction, when the party

that knows its own aims most definitely is sure to have the best

chance of obtaining power. And Rousseau's method charmed their

temperament. A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarily

slow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance with

a speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has a

magical potency over men who insist on having politics and theology

drawn out in exact theorems like those of Euclid.

Rousseau traces his conclusions from words, and develops his system

from the interior germs of phrases. Like the typical schoolman, he

assumes that analysis of terms is the right way of acquiring new

knowledge about things; he mistakes the multiplication of propositions

for the discovery of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contract

are mere logical deductions from verbal definitions: the slightest

attempt to confront them with actual fact would have shown them to be

not only valueless, but wholly meaningless, in connection with real

human nature and the visible working of human affairs. He looks into

the word, or into his own verbal notion, and tells us what is to be

found in that, whereas we need to be told the marks and qualities that

distinguish the object which the word is meant to recall. Hence arises

his habit of setting himself questions, with reference to which we

cannot say that the answers are not true, but only that the questions

themselves were never worth asking. Here is an instance of his method

of supposing that to draw something from a verbal notion is to find

out something corresponding to fact. "We can distinguish in the

magistrate three essentially different wills: 1st, the will peculiar

to him as an individual, which only tends to his own particular

advantage; 2nd, the common will of the magistrates, which refers only

to the advantage of the prince [_i.e._ the government], and this we

may name corporate will, which is general in relation to the

government, and particular in relation to the state of which the

government is a part; 3rd, the will of the people or sovereign will,

which is general, as well in relation to the state considered as a

whole, as in relation to the government considered as part of the

whole."[202] It might be hard to prove that all this is not true, but

then it is unreal and comes to nothing, as we see if we take the

trouble to turn it into real matter. Thus a member of the British

House of Commons, who is a magistrate in Rousseau's sense, has three

essentially different wills: first, as a man, Mr. So-and-so; second,

his corporate will, as member of the chamber, and this will is general

in relation to the legislature, but particular in relation to the

whole body of electors and peers; third, his will as a member of the

great electoral body, which is a general will alike in relation to the

electoral body and to the legislature. An English publicist is

perfectly welcome to make assertions of this kind, if he chooses to do

so, and nobody will take the trouble to deny them. But they are

nonsense. They do not correspond to the real composition of a member

of parliament, nor do they shed the smallest light upon any part

either of the theory of government in general, or the working of our

own government in particular. Almost the same kind of observation

might be made of the famous dogmatic statements about sovereignty.

"Sovereignty, being only the exercise of the general will, can never

be alienated, and the sovereign, who is only a collective being, can

only be represented by himself: the power may be transmitted, but not

the will;"[203] sovereignty is indivisible, not only in principle, but

in object;[204] and so forth. We shall have to consider these remarks

from another point of view. At present we refer to them as

illustrating the character of the book, as consisting of a number of

expansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared with the

facts of which the words are representatives. This way of treating

political theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude and

precision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive. Burke

poured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics and

algebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seeming

demonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau's

disciples with a supreme and undoubting confidence which leaves the

modern student of these schemes in amazement unspeakable. The thinness

of Robespierre's ideas on government ceases to astonish us, when we

remember that he had not trained himself to look upon it as the art of

dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile

passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces.

He had disciplined his political intelligence on such meagre and

unsubstantial argumentation as the following:--"Let us suppose the

state composed of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can only be

considered collectively and as a body; but each person, in his quality

as subject, is considered as an individual unit; thus the sovereign is

to the subject as ten thousand is to one; in other words, each member

of the state has for his share only the ten-thousandth part of the

sovereign authority, though he is submitted to it in all his own

entirety. If the people be composed of a hundred thousand men, the

condition of the subjects does not change, and each of them bears

equally the whole empire of the laws, while his suffrage, reduced to a

hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in drawing them up.

Then, the subject remaining still only one, the relation of the

sovereign augments in the ratio of the number of the citizens. Whence

it follows that, the larger the state becomes, the more does liberty

diminish."[205]

Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the deep charm which

their assurance of expression had for the narrow and fervid minds of

which England and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Anabaptists

and Fifth Monarchy men, but which still haunted France, there were

maxims in the Social Contract of remarkable convenience for the

members of a Committee of Public Safety. "How can a blind multitude,"

the writer asks in one place, "which so often does not know its own

will, because it seldom knows what is good for it, execute of itself

an undertaking so vast and so difficult as a system of

legislation?"[206] Again, "as nature gives to each man an absolute

power over all his members, so the social pact gives to the body

politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same

power which, when directed by the general will, bears, as I have said,

the name of sovereignty."[207] Above all, the little chapter on a

dictatorship is the very foundation of the position of the

Robespierrists in the few months immediately preceding their fall. "It

is evidently the first intention of the people that the state should

not perish," and so on, with much criticism of the system of

occasional dictatorships, as they were resorted to in old Rome.[208]

Yet this does not in itself go much beyond the old monarchic doctrine

of Prerogative, as a corrective for the slowness and want of immediate

applicability of mere legal processes in cases of state emergency; and

it is worth noticing again and again that in spite of the shriekings

of reaction, the few atrocities of the Terror are an almost invisible

speck compared with the atrocities of Christian churchmen and lawful

kings, perpetrated in accordance with their notion of what constituted

public safety. So far as Rousseau's intention goes, we find in his

writings one of the strongest denunciations of the doctrine of public

safety that is to be found in any of the writings of the century. "Is

the safety of a citizen," he cries, "less the common cause than the

safety of the state? They may tell us that it is well that one should

perish on behalf of all. I will admire such a sentence in the mouth of

a virtuous patriot, who voluntarily and for duty's sake devotes

himself to death for the salvation of his country. But if we are to

understand that it is allowed to the government to sacrifice an

innocent person for the safety of the multitude, I hold this maxim for

one of the most execrable that tyranny has ever invented, and the most

dangerous that can be admitted."[209] It may be said that the

Terrorists did not sacrifice innocent life, but the plea is frivolous

on the lips of men who proscribed whole classes. You cannot justly

draw a capital indictment against a class. Rousseau, however, cannot

fairly be said to have had a share in the responsibility for the more

criminal part of the policy of 1793, any more than the founder of

Christianity is responsible for the atrocities that have been

committed by the more ardent worshippers of his name, and justified by

stray texts caught up from the gospels. Helvétius had said, "All

becomes legitimate and even virtuous on behalf of the public safety."

Rousseau wrote in the margin, "The public safety is nothing unless

individuals enjoy security."[210] The author of a theory is not

answerable for the applications which may be read into it by the

passions of men and the exigencies of a violent crisis. Such

applications show this much and no more, that the theory was

constructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human

nature, with too narrow a view of the conditions of society, and

therefore with an inadequate appreciation of the consequences which

the theory might be drawn to support.

It is time to come to the central conception of the Social Contract,

the dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, the

memorable doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine

Rousseau was assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggerated

language of some popular writers in France leads us to suppose that

they think of him as nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the

constitution of the Orders, and the contests of the friars with the

clergy, had engendered faintly democratic ways of thinking.[211] Among

others the great Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrine

that the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will of the prince, he

says, to be a law, must be directed by reason; law is appointed for

the common good, and not for a special or private good: it follows

from this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a prince

representing the multitude, can make a law.[212] A still more

remarkable approach to later views was made by Marsilio of Padua,

physician to Lewis of Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his master's

side, in the great contest between him and the pope (1324). Marsilio

in the first part of his work not only lays down very elaborately the

proposition that laws ought to be made by the "_universitas civium_";

he places this sovereignty of the people on the true basis (which

Rousseau only took for a secondary support to his original compact),

namely, the greater likelihood of laws being obeyed in the first

place, and being good laws in the second, when they are made by the

body of the persons affected. "No one knowingly does hurt to himself,

or deliberately asks what is unjust, and on that account all or a

great majority must wish such law as best suits the common interest of

the citizens."[213] Turning from this to the Social Contract, or to

Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and

correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality

there can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a

metaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the

eighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classification

of thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed by

differences of method. It is impossible that in the constant play of

circumstances and ideas in the minds of different thinkers, the same

combinations of form and colour in a philosophic arrangement of such

circumstances and ideas should not recur. Signal novelties in thought

are as limited as signal inventions in architectural construction. It

is only one of the great changes in method, that can remove the limits

of the old combinations, by bringing new material and fundamentally

altering the point of view.

In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the

right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to

be distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the

great historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by

the Dutch, we find the Declaration of Independence running, "that if a

prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from

harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The

subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but

the prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince." This is

obviously divine right, fundamentally modified by a popular

principle, accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and to

justify after the event a measure which was dictated by urgent need

for practical relief. Such a notion of the social compact was still

emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can be

from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood it. But

it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the development of

Protestant principles which produced and necessarily involved the

extreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full

expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided

by a suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it

inevitable. Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the

supreme legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the

source or seat of that authority, though he admits the vague position

which even Lewis XIV. did not deny, that the object of political

society is the greatest good of every citizen or the whole state. In

1603 a Protestant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name,

published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine of the

sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the profound

indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.[214] Rousseau

mentions his name;[215] it does not appear that he read Althusen's

rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably have a place

in the traditions of political theorising current at Geneva, to the

spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicating

episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans, had

still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law

natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and

had laid down such propositions as these: "Laws they are not, which

public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what

kind soever, are available by consent," and so on.[216] The views of

the Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the

foundation of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular

leaders in our own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak

of the French Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle

that the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements,

then proceeded to assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and

implied, promise on the part of all who become members of a community,

to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of those to whom

authority has been delegated.[217] This is a unilateral view of the

social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in

Rousseau's idea was cardinal.

Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed

himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's

principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly

as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important

difference that Locke's essay on Civil Government was the

justification in theory of a revolution which had already been

accomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it was

by silent reference in the mind of the writer to Geneva, was yet a

speculation in the air. The circumstances under which it was written

gave to the propositions of Locke's piece a reserve and moderation

which savour of a practical origin and a special case. They have not

the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision of the

corresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of those

concise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine is

there. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its

principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had

any intention to carry them, when he said that "the legislature being

only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in

the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative."[218]

It may be questioned how many of the peers of that day would have

assented to the proposition that the people--and did Locke mean by the

people the electors of the House of Commons, or all males over

twenty-one, or all householders paying rates?--could by any expression

of their will abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or

put an end to the legislative and executive powers of the crown. But

Locke's statements are direct enough, though he does not use so terse

a label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed to it.

Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likely

gave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in the

civil state in a pact or contract, which was represented as the

foundation and first condition of the civil state. From this naturally

flowed the connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied as

given by the people to each new law. We need not quote passages from

Locke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption

between him and the author of the Social Contract. They are found in

every chapter.[219] Such principles were indispensable for the defence

of a Revolution like that of 1688, which was always carefully marked

out by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent apologist and

expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all things

a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution. They

represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the

political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished

from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had

prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.

Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first

rank in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy

of government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of

either of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They were

each in the theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or

was able to comprehend the application of philosophic principles to

their own case or to that of their adversaries.[220] Hebrew precedents

and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and high church

doctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the acceptance

of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field of a

social constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was

very marked, and very singular. There were numerous differences

between the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of Malmesbury.

The one looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. The

one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a

state of war. The one believed that laws and institutions had depraved

man, the other that they had improved him.[221] But these differences

did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a

curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the

conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of

which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin

supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes

the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception

of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two

together he made the great image of the sovereign people. Strike the

crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of

the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently

well for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of other

obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shall

point out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of the

notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in

Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a

definition inextricably confused: "Laws are necessary relations

flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have

their laws, divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws,

the intelligences superior to men have their laws, the beasts have

their laws, man has his laws.... There is a primitive reason, and laws

are the relations to be found between that and the different beings,

and the relations of these different beings among one another."[222]

Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper

distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state,

and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing

about the other.[223] Hobbes's phraseology is much less definite than

this, and shows that he had not himself wholly shaken off the same

confusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a century later. But

then Hobbes's account of the true meaning of sovereignty was so clear,

firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any fairly perspicuous

student who followed him, to apply it to the true meaning of law. And

on this head of law not so much fault is to be found with Rousseau, as

on the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not look long

enough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their distinctive

qualities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that a law is

a command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this,

because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumption

of contract as the base of the social union.[224] But he did at all

events grasp the quality of generality as belonging to laws proper,

and separated them justly from what he calls decrees, which we are now

taught to name occasional or particular commands.[225] This is worth

mentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits of

intellectual laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headed

master before him, of a very considerable degree of precision of

thought, however liable it was to fall into error or deficiency for

want of abundant comparison with bodies of external fact. Let us now

proceed to some of the central propositions of the Social Contract.

1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacles

which impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are too

strong for such forces as each individual can employ in order to keep

himself in that state. At this point they can only save themselves by

aggregation. Problem: to find a form of association which defends and

protects with the whole common force the person and property of each

associate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys

himself, and remains as free as he was before. Solution: a social

compact reducible to these words, "Each of us places in common his

person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general

will; and we further receive each member as indivisible part of the

whole." This act of association constitutes a moral and collective

body, a public person.

The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to

repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the

corollary that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them,

and also therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of

unmaking them. This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the

dictator, or divinely commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and

human nature alike were passive and infinitely pliable; they were the

material out of which the legislator was to devise conventions at

pleasure, without apprehension as to their suitableness either to the

conditions of society among which they were to work, or to the

passions and interests of those by whom they were to be carried out,

and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It would be unjust

to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took the

consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the

science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications,

and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.[226] But

to base society on conventions is to impute an element of

arbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make them

independent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed by

the nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of all

the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation.

It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was at

this time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in full

possession of the true view of the limits set by the natural ordering

of societies to the power of convention and the function of the

legislators. Five years after the publication of the Social Contract,

a remarkable book was written by one of the economic sect of the

Physiocrats, the later of whom, though specially concerned with the

material interests of communities, very properly felt the necessity of

connecting the discussion of wealth with the assumption of certain

fundamental political conditions. They felt this, because it is

impossible to settle any question about wages or profits, for

instance, until you have first settled whether you are assuming the

principles of liberty and property. This writer with great consistency

found the first essential of all social order in conformity of

positive law and institution to those qualities of human nature, and

their relations with those material instruments of life, which, and

not convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual grounds,

of the perpetuation of our societies.[227] This was wiser than

Rousseau's conception of the lawgiver as one who should change human

nature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally his own,

to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him.[228] Rousseau

once wrote, in a letter about Rivière's book, that the great problem

in politics, which might be compared with the quadrature of the circle

in geometry, is to find a form of government which shall place law

above man.[229] A more important problem, and not any less difficult

for the political theoriser, is to mark the bounds at which the

authority of the law is powerless or mischievous in attempting to

control the egoistic or non-social parts of man. This problem Rousseau

ignored, and that he should do so was only natural in one who

believed that man had bound himself by a convention, strictly to

suppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and who based all his

speculation on this pact as against the force, or the paternal

authority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers

founded the social union.

2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Each

citizen is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relation

to individuals _qua_ individuals; he is also as an individual a member

of the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the first

point of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the body

politic are one and the same thing.[230]

Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine enough has already

been said. Its general truth as a description either of what is, or

what ought to be and will be, demands an ampler discussion than there

is any occasion to carry on here. We need only point out its place as

a kind of intermediate dissolvent for which the time was most ripe. It

breaks up the feudal conception of political authority as a property

of land-ownership, noble birth, and the like, and it associates this

authority widely and simply with the bare fact of participation in any

form of citizenship in the social union. The later and higher idea of

every share of political power as a function to be discharged for the

good of the whole body, and not merely as a right to be enjoyed for

the advantage of its possessor, was a form of thought to which

Rousseau did not rise. That does not lessen the effectiveness of the

blow which his doctrine dealt to French feudalism, and which is its

main title to commemoration in connection with his name.

The social compact thus made is essentially different from the social

compact which Hobbes described as the origin of what he calls

commonwealths by institution, to distinguish them from commonwealths

by acquisition, that is to say, states formed by conquest or resting

on hereditary rule. "A commonwealth," Hobbes says, "is said to be

instituted when a multitude of men do agree and covenant, every one

with every one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of men shall be

given by the major part the right to present the person of them all,

that is to say, to be their representative; every one ... shall

authorise all the actions and judgments of that man or assembly of

men, in the same manner as if they were his own, to the end to live

peaceably among themselves, and be protected against other men."[231]

But Rousseau's compact was an act of association among equals, who

also remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act of surrender on the

part of the many to one or a number. The first was the constitution of

civil society, the second was the erection of a government. As nobody

now believes in the existence of any such compact in either one form

or the other, it would be superfluous to inquire which of the two is

the less inaccurate. All we need do is to point out that there was

this difference. Rousseau distinctly denied the existence of any

element of contract in the erection of a government; there is only one

contract in the state, he said, and it is that of association.[232]

Locke's notion of the compact which was the beginning of every

political society is indefinite on this point; he speaks of it

indifferently as an agreement of a body of free men to unite and

incorporate into a society, and an agreement to set up a

government.[233] Most of us would suppose the two processes to be as

nearly identical as may be; Rousseau drew a distinction, and from this

distinction he derived further differences.

Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the history of the ideas

of the revolution, of one of the most prominent of them all, that of

Fraternity. If the whole structure of society rests on an act of

partnership entered into by equals on behalf of themselves and their

descendants for ever, the nature of the union is not what it would be,

if the members of the union had only entered it to place their

liberties at the feet of some superior power. Society in the one case

is a covenant of subjection, in the other a covenant of social

brotherhood. This impressed itself deeply on the feelings of men like

Robespierre, who were never so well pleased as when they could find

for their sentimentalism a covering of neat political logic. The same

idea of association came presently to receive a still more remarkable

and momentous extension, when it was translated from the language of

mere government into that of the economic organisation of communities.

Rousseau's conception went no further than political association, as

distinct from subjection. Socialism, which came by and by to the front

place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity, and presented all the

relations of men with one another as fixed by the same bond. Men had

entered the social union as brethren, equal, and co-operators, not

merely for purposes of government, but for purposes of mutual succour

in all its aspects. This naturally included the most important of all,

material production. They were not associated merely as equal

participants in political sovereignty; they were equal participants in

all the rest of the increase made to the means of human happiness by

united action. Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternal

association from politics, where Rousseau left it, to the wider sphere

of industrial force.

It is perhaps worth notice that another famous revolutionary term

belongs to the same source. All the associates of this act of union,

becoming members of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, as

participating in the sovereign authority.[234] The term was in

familiar use enough among the French in their worst days, but it was

Rousseau's sanction which marked it in the new times with a sort of

sacramental stamp. It came naturally to him, because it was the name

of the first of the two classes which constituted the active portion

of the republic of Geneva, and the only class whose members were

eligible to the chief magistracies.

3. We next have a group of propositions setting forth the attributes

of sovereignty. It is inalienable.[235] It is indivisible.

These two propositions, which play such a part in the history of some

of the episodes of the French Revolution, contain no more than was

contended for by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times by

Austin. When Hobbes says that "to the laws which the sovereign maketh,

the sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws

he were subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom,"

his notion of sovereignty is exactly that expressed by Rousseau in his

unexplained dogma of the inalienableness of sovereignty. So Rousseau

means no more by the dogma that sovereignty is indivisible, than

Austin meant when he declared of the doctrine that the legislative

sovereign powers and the executive sovereign powers belong in any

society to distinct parties, that it is a supposition too palpably

false to endure a moment's examination.[236] The way in which this

account of the indivisibleness of sovereignty was understood during

the revolution, twisted it into a condemnation of the dreaded idea of

Federalism. It might just as well have been interpreted to condemn

alliances between nations; for the properties of sovereignty are

clearly independent of the dimensions of the sovereign unit. Another

effect of this doctrine was the rejection by the Constituent Assembly

of the balanced parliamentary system, which the followers of

Montesquieu would fain have introduced on the English model. Whether

that was an evil or a good, publicists will long continue to dispute.

4. The general will of the sovereign upon an object of common interest

is expressed in a law. Only the sovereign can possess this law-making

power, because no one but the sovereign has the right of declaring the

general will. The legislative power cannot be exerted by delegation or

representation. The English fancy that they are a free nation, but

they are grievously mistaken. They are only free during the election

of members of parliament; the members once chosen, the people are

slaves, nay, as people they have ceased to exist.[237] It is

impossible for the sovereign to act, except when the people are

assembled. Besides such extraordinary assemblies as unforeseen events

may call for, there must be fixed periodical meetings that nothing can

interrupt or postpone. Do you call this chimerical? Then you have

forgotten the Roman comitia, as well as such gatherings of the people

as those of the Macedonians and the Franks and most other nations in

their primitive times. What has existed is certainly possible.[238]

It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his subject should

have contented himself with going back to Macedonia and Rome, instead

of pointing to the sovereign states that have since become confederate

with his native republic. A historian in our own time has described

with an enthusiasm that equals that of the Social Contract, how he saw

the sovereign people of Uri and the sovereign people of Appenzell

discharge the duties of legislation and choice of executive, each in

the majesty of its corporate person.[239] That Rousseau was influenced

by the free sovereignty of the states of the Swiss confederation, as

well as by that of his own city, we may well believe. Whether he was

or not, it must always be counted a serious misfortune that a writer

who was destined to exercise such power in a crisis of the history of

a great nation, should have chosen his illustrations from a time and

from societies so remote, that the true conditions of their political

system could not possibly be understood with any approach to reality,

while there were, within a few leagues of his native place,

communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sense

was actually alive and flourishing and at work. From them the full

meaning of his theories might have been practically gathered, and

whatever useful lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been made

plain. As it was, it came to pass singularly enough that the effect of

the French Revolution was the suppression, happily only for a time, of

the only governments in Europe where the doctrine of the favourite

apostle of the Revolution was a reality. The constitution of the

Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a blow to the sovereignty of

peoples in a true sense, as the old house of Austria or Charles of

Burgundy could ever have dealt. That constitution, moreover, was

directly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what it called

representative democracy, for representative democracy was just what

Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion.

The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesman

bold enough to take into his hands the reconstruction of France,

undoubtedly pointed in the direction of confederation. At one place,

where he became sensible of the impotence which his assumption of a

small state inflicted on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he would

presently show how the good order of a small state might be united to

the external power of a great people. Though he never did this, he

hints in a footnote that his plan belonged to the theory of

confederations, of which the principles were still to be

established.[240] When he gave advice for the renovation of the

wretched constitution of Poland, he insisted above all things that

they should apply themselves to extend and perfect the system of

federate governments, "the only one that unites in itself all the

advantages of great and small states."[241] A very few years after the

appearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign states

arose to point the political moral. The French revolutionists missed

the force alike of the practical example abroad, and of the theory of

the book which they took for gospel at home. How far they were driven

to this by the urgent pressure of foreign war, or whether they would

have followed the same course without that interference, merely in

obedience to the catholic and monarchic absolutism which had sunk so

much deeper into French character than people have been willing to

admit, we cannot tell. The fact remains that the Jacobins, Rousseau's

immediate disciples, at once took up the chain of centralised

authority where it had been broken off by the ruin of the monarchy.

They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign people, and lost

its spirit. They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's scheme,

namely, that for order and freedom and just administration the unit

should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons

concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If they had

realised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchy

into a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping

modification of the old centralised scheme of government, they might

have saved France.[242] But, once more, men interpret a political

treatise on principles which either come to them by tradition; or

else spring suddenly up from roots of passion.[243]

5. The government is the minister of the sovereign. It is an

intermediate body set up between sovereign and subjects for their

mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the

maintenance of civil and political freedom. The members comprising it

are called magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed,

whether of one or of more than one, is given the name of prince. If

the whole power is centred in the hands of a single magistrate, from

whom all the rest hold their authority, the government is called a

monarchy. If there are more persons simply citizens than there are

magistrates, this is an aristocracy.[244] If more citizen magistrates

than simple private citizens, that is a democracy. The last government

is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the first for

large ones--on the principle that the number of the supreme

magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens.

But there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons

for exceptions to this general rule.

This common definition of the three forms of governments according to

the mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, though

adopted by Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate and

uninstructive, without some further qualification. Aristotle, for

instance, furnishes such a qualification, when he refers to the

interests in which the government is carried on, whether the interest

of a small body or of the whole of the citizens.[245] Montesquieu's

well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of

pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government,

outside of and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign.

To divide governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies,

and despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first the

number of the sovereign, and next something else, namely, the

difference between a constitutional and an absolute monarch. Then he

returned to the first principle of division, and separated a republic

into a government of all, which is a democracy, and a government by a

part, which is aristocracy.[246] Still, to have introduced the element

of law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether of one or more,

was to have called attention to the fact that no single distinction is

enough to furnish us with a conception of the real and vital

differences which may exist between one form of government and

another.[247]

The important fact about a government lies quite as much in the

qualifying epithet which is to be affixed to any one of the three

names, as in the name itself. We know nothing about a monarchy, until

we have been told whether it is absolute or constitutional; if

absolute, whether it is administered in the interests of the realm,

like that of Prussia under Frederick the Great, or in the interests of

the ruler, like that of an Indian principality under a native prince;

if constitutional, whether the real power is aristocratic, as in Great

Britain a hundred years ago, or plutocratic, as in Great Britain

to-day, or popular, as it may be here fifty years hence. And so with

reference to each of the other two forms; neither name gives us any

instruction, except of a merely negative kind, until it has been made

precise by one or more explanatory epithets. What is the common

quality of the old Roman republic, the republics of the Swiss

confederation, the republic of Venice, the American republic, the

republic of Mexico? Plainly the word republic has no further effect

beyond that of excluding the idea of a recognised dynasty.

Rousseau is perhaps less open to this kind of criticism than other

writers on political theory, for the reason that he distinguishes the

constitution of the state from the constitution of the government. The

first he settles definitely. The whole body of the people is to be

sovereign, and to be endowed alone with what he conceived as the only

genuinely legislative power. The only question which he considers open

is as to the form in which the _delegated executive authority_ shall

be organised. Democracy, the immediate government of all by all, he

rejects as too perfect for men; it requires a state so small that each

citizen knows all the others, manners so simple that the business may

be small and the mode of discussion easy, equality of rank and fortune

so general as not to allow of the overriding of political equality by

material superiority, and so forth.[248] Monarchy labours under a

number of disadvantages which are tolerably obvious. "One essential

and inevitable defect, which must always place monarchic below

republican government, is that in the latter the public voice hardly

ever promotes to the first places any but capable and enlightened men

who fill them with honour; whereas those who get on in monarchies, are

for the most part small busybodies, small knaves, small intriguers, in

whom the puny talents which are the secret of reaching substantial

posts in courts, only serve to show their stupidity to the public as

soon as they have made their way to the front. The people is far less

likely to make a blunder in a choice of this sort, than the prince,

and a man of true merit is nearly as rare in the ministry, as a fool

at the head of the government of a republic."[249] There remains

aristocracy. Of this there are three sorts: natural, elective, and

hereditary. The first can only thrive among primitive folk, while the

third is the worst of all governments. The second is the best, for it

is aristocracy properly so called. If men only acquire rule in virtue

of election, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all the other

grounds of public esteem and preference, become so many new guarantees

that the administration shall be wise and just. It is the best and

most natural order that the wisest should govern the multitude,

provided you are sure that they will govern the multitude for its

advantage, and not for their own. If aristocracy of this kind requires

one or two virtues less than a popular executive, it also demands

others which are peculiar to itself, such as moderation in the rich

and content in the poor. For this form comports with a certain

inequality of fortune, for the reason that it is well that the

administration of public affairs should be confided to those who are

best able to give their whole time to it. At the same time it is of

importance that an opposite choice should occasionally teach the

people that in the merit of men there are more momentous reasons of

preference than wealth.[250] Rousseau, as we have seen, had pronounced

English liberty to be no liberty at all, save during the few days once

in seven years when the elections to parliament take place. Yet this

scheme of an elective aristocracy was in truth a very near approach

to the English form as it is theoretically presented in our own day,

with a suffrage gradually becoming universal. If the suffrage were

universal, and if its exercise took place once a year, our system, in

spite of the now obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy and

nominal monarchy, would be as close a realisation of the scheme of the

Social Contract as any representative system permits. If Rousseau had

further developed his notions of confederation, the United States

would most have resembled his type.

6. What is to be the attitude of the state in respect of religion?

Certainly not that prescribed by the policy of the middle ages. The

separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, indicated by

Jesus Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of many

subsequent generations, was in Rousseau's eyes most mischievous,

because it ended in the subordination of the temporal power to the

spiritual, and that is incompatible with an efficient polity. Even the

kings of England, though they style themselves heads of the church,

are really its ministers and servants.[251]

The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignorance of history, and

need not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he lays

so much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor

truly good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon another

world, they must necessarily be indifferent to the success or failure

of such enterprises as they may take up in this.[252] In reading the

Social Contract, and some other of the author's writings besides, we

have constantly to interpret the direct, positive, categorical form of

assertion into something of this kind--"Such and such consequences

ought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or the

definition of a principle, or from such and such motives." The change

of this moderate form of provisional assertion into the unconditional

statement that such and such consequences have actually followed,

constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who tests

them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and unwritten,

at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took less

trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience than

any writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to be

made on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian or

ecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers of

the state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of the

debt of Rousseau's conception of a state to the old pagan conception.

It was the main characteristic of the polities which Christian

monotheism and feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recognise

no such division as that between church and state, pope and emperor.

Rousseau resumed the old conception. But he adjusted it in a certain

degree to the spirit of his own time, and imposed certain

philosophical limitations upon it. His scheme is as follows.

Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered as

of three kinds. First, natural religion, without temple, altar, or

rite, the true and pure theism of the natural conscience of man.

Second, local, civil, or positive religion, with dogmas, rites,

exercises; a theology of a primitive people, exactly co-extensive with

all the rights and all the duties of men. Third, a religion like the

Christianity of the Roman church, which gives men two sets of laws,

two chiefs, two countries, submits them to contradictory duties, and

prevents them from being able to be at once devout and patriotic. The

last of these is so evidently pestilent as to need no discussion. The

second has the merit of teaching men to identify duty to their gods

with duty to their country; under this to die for the land is

martyrdom, to break its laws impiety, and to subject a culprit to

public execration is to devote him to the anger of the gods. But it is

bad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and because it makes a

people sanguinary and intolerant. The first of all, which is now

styled a Christian theism, having no special relation with the body

politic, adds no force to the laws. There are many particular

objections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its not being a

kingdom of this world, and this above all, that Christianity only

preaches servitude and dependence.[253] What then is to be done? The

sovereign must establish a purely civil profession of faith. It will

consist of the following positive dogmas:--the existence of a

divinity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent and foreseeing; the life

to come; the happiness of the just, the chastisement of the wicked;

the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. These articles of

belief are imposed, not as dogmas of religion exactly, but as

sentiments of sociability. If any one declines to accept them, he

ought to be exiled, not for being impious, but for being unsociable,

incapable of sincere attachment to the laws, or of sacrificing his

life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas,

carries himself as if he did not believe them, let him be punished by

death, for he has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied before

the laws.[254]

Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to its climax that

reaction against the absorption of the state in the church which had

first taken a place in literature in the controversy between legists

and canonists, and had found its most famous illustration in the De

Monarchiâ of the great poet of catholicism. The division of two

co-equal realms, one temporal, the other spiritual, was replaced in

the Genevese thinker by what he admitted to be "pure Hobbism." This,

the rigorous subordination of the church to the state, was the end, so

far as France went, of the speculative controversy which had occupied

Europe for so many ages, as to the respective powers of pope and

emperor, of positive law and law divine. The famous civil constitution

of the clergy (1790), which was the expression of Rousseau's principle

as formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the

revolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose most

melodramatic episode had been the scene in the courtyard of Canossa.

Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all who should not

believe in God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments for

the deeds done in the body, and putting to death any who, after

subscribing to the required profession, should seem no longer to hold

it, has naturally created a very lively horror in a tolerant

generation like our own, some of whose finest spirits have rejected

deliberately and finally the articles of belief, without which they

could not have been suffered to exist in Rousseau's state. It seemed

to contemporaries, who were enthusiastic above all things for humanity

and infinite tolerance, these being the prizes of the long conflict

which they hoped they were completing, to be a return to the horrors

of the Holy Office. Men were as shocked as the modern philosopher is,

when he finds the greatest of the followers of Socrates imposing in

his latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five years, to be

followed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not believe

in the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker.[255] And we can

hardly comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws

which no city ever yet received, and "fed his fancy with making many

edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him,

wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an

academic night-sitting."[256] Rousseau's ideas fell among men who were

most potent and corporeal burgomasters. In the winter of 1793 two

parties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic, Voltairean

party of the Commune, named improperly after Hébert, but whose best

member was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party, led by

Robespierre. The first had industriously desecrated the churches, and

consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the

public worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set up

for deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries

of the Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism as

the crime of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed.

Chaumette was not directly implicated in the proceedings which led to

their fall, but he was by and by accused of conspiring with Hébert,

Clootz, and the rest, "to destroy all notion of Divinity and base the

government of France on atheism." "They attack the immortality of the

soul," cried Saint Just, "the thought which consoled Socrates in his

dying moments, and their dream is to raise atheism into a worship."

And this was the offence, technically and officially described, for

which Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine (April 1794),

strictly on the principle which had been laid down in the Social

Contract, and accepted by Robespierre.[257]

It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with the

infallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should not

have seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditions

of human nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to the

three or four articles which happened to constitute his own belief.

Having once granted the general position that a citizen may be

required to profess some religious faith, there is no speculative

principle, and there is no force in the world, which can fix any bound

to the amount or kind of religious faith which the state has the right

thus to exact. Rousseau said that a man was dangerous to the city who

did not believe in God, a future state, and divine reward and

retribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous who did not

believe both that there is only one God, and also that there are

three Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and Servetus to the

stake, on the one common principle that the civil magistrate is

concerned with heresy. And Hébert was only following out the same

doctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on

preventing the publication of a book in which the author professed his

belief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference with

opinion leads you the whole way.