The history of the Protestant churches is enough to show the pitiable

futility of the proviso for religious tolerance with which Rousseau

closed his exposition. "If there is no longer an exclusive national

religion, then every creed ought to be tolerated which tolerates other

creeds, so long as it contains nothing contrary to the duties of the

citizen. But whoever dares to say, _Out of the church, no salvation_,

ought to be banished from the state." The reason for which Henry IV.

embraced the Roman religion--namely, that in that he might be saved,

in the opinion alike of Protestants and Catholics, whereas in the

reformed faith, though he was saved according to Protestants, yet

according to Catholics he was necessarily damned,--ought to have made

every honest man, and especially every prince, reject it. It was the

more curious that Rousseau did not see the futility of drawing the

line of tolerance at any given set of dogmas, however simple and

slight and acceptable to himself they might be, because he invited

special admiration for D'Argenson's excellent maxim that "in the

republic everybody is perfectly free in what does not hurt

others."[258] Surely this maxim has very little significance or value,

unless we interpret it as giving entire liberty of opinion, because no

opinion whatever can hurt others, until it manifests itself in act,

including of course speech, which is a kind of act. Rousseau admitted

that over and above the profession of civil faith, a citizen might

hold what opinions he pleased, in entire freedom from the sovereign's

cognisance or jurisdiction; "for as the sovereign has no competence in

the other world, the fate of subjects in that other world is not his

affair, provided they are good citizens in this." But good citizenship

consists in doing or forbearing from certain actions, and to punish

men on the inference that forbidden action is likely to follow from

the rejection of a set of opinions, or to exact a test oath of

adherence to such opinions on the same principle, is to concede the

whole theory of civil intolerance, however little Rousseau may have

realised the perfectly legitimate applications of his doctrine. It was

an unconscious compromise. He was thinking of Calvin in practice and

Hobbes in theory, and he was at the same time influenced by the

moderate spirit of his time, and the comparatively reasonable

character of his personal belief. He praised Hobbes as the only author

who had seen the right remedy for the conflict of the spiritual and

temporal jurisdictions, by proposing to unite the two heads of the

eagle, and reducing all to political unity, without which never will

either state or government be duly constituted. But Hobbes was

consistent without flinching. He refused to set limits to the

religious prescriptions which a sovereign might impose, for "even when

the civil sovereign is an infidel, every one of his own subjects that

resisteth him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are the laws

of nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the apostles, that

admonisheth all Christians to obey their princes.... And for their

faith, it is internal and invisible: they have the licence that Naaman

had, and need not put themselves into danger for it; but if they do,

they ought to expect their reward in heaven, and not complain of their

lawful sovereign."[259] All this flowed from the very idea and

definition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from Hobbes, as we

have already seen. Such consequences, however, stated in these bold

terms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could not

assent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic,

Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous. He failed to see

the folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian

commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a

commonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics,

which he took for his model, of their national and official

polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theism

slightly tinged with Christianity.

Then he practically accepted Hobbes's audacious bidding to the man who

should not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously to

martyrdom, and leave the land in peace. For the modern principle,

which was contained in D'Argenson's saying previously quoted, that the

civil power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignore

spirituals, he was not prepared either by his emancipation from the

theological ideas of his youth, or by his observation of the working

and tendencies of systems, which involved the state in some more or

less close relations with the church, either as superior, equal, or

subordinate. Every test is sure to insist on mental independence

ending exactly where the speculative curiosity of the time is most

intent to begin.

Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with some of the

propositions belonging to another method of approaching the philosophy

of government, that have for their key-note the conception of

expediency or convenience, and are tested by their conformity to the

observed and recorded experience of mankind. According to this method,

the ground and origin of society is not a compact; that never existed

in any known case, and never was a condition of obligation either in

primitive or developed societies, either between subjects and

sovereign, or between the equal members of a sovereign body. The true

ground is an acceptance of conditions which came into existence by the

sociability inherent in man, and were developed by man's spontaneous

search after convenience. The statement that while the constitution

of man is the work of nature, that of the state is the work of

art,[260] is as misleading as the opposite statement that governments

are not made but grow.[261] The truth lies between them, in such

propositions as that institutions owe their existence and development

to deliberate human effort, working in accordance with circumstances

naturally fixed both in human character and in the external field of

its activity. The obedience of the subject to the sovereign has its

root not in contract but in force,--the force of the sovereign to

punish disobedience. A man does not consent to be put to death if he

shall commit a murder, for the reason alleged by Rousseau, namely, as

a means of protecting his own life against murder.[262] There is no

consent in the transaction. Some person or persons, possessed of

sovereign authority, promulgated a command that the subject should not

commit murder, and appointed penalties for such commission and it was

not a fictitious assent to these penalties, but the fact that the

sovereign was strong enough to enforce them, which made the command

valid.

Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of the sovereign people by

a majority; what binds a member of the minority to obedience?

Rousseau's answer is this:--When the law is proposed, the question

put is not whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whether

it is conformable to the general will: the general will appears from

the votes: if the opinion contrary to my own wins the day, that only

proves that I was mistaken, and that what I took for the general will

was not really so.[263] We can scarcely imagine more nonsensical

sophistry than this. The proper answer evidently is, that either

experience or calculation has taught the citizens in a popular

government that in the long run it is most expedient for the majority

of votes to decide the law. In other words, the inconvenience to the

minority of submitting to a law which they dislike, is less than the

inconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form a

separate community. The minority submit to obey laws which were made

against their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of

undergoing worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission.

The same explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the more

frequent case in the history of the race, the submission of the

majority to the laws imposed by a minority of one or more. In both

these cases, however, as in the general question of the source of our

obedience to the laws, deliberate and conscious sense of convenience

is as slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of

the field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over and

constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the

many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical

apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or

abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau,

expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt

warranted in leaving these complicating conditions out of account,

though to do so is to rob any treatise on government of much of its

possible value. The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing his

political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon the substantial

ground of propositions about human nature, which the average of

experience in given races and at given stages of advancement has shown

to be true within those limits. There are places in his writings where

he reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests, and

he does not even take care to qualify this sufficiently.[264] But

throughout the Social Contract we seem to be contemplating the

erection of a machine which is to work without reference to the only

forces that can possibly impart movement to it.

The consequence of this is that Rousseau gives us not the least help

towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government,

because these are naturally both suggested and guided by

considerations of expediency and improvement. It is as if he had never

really settled the ends for which government exists, beyond the

construction of the symmetrical machine of government itself. He is a

geometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say that he is a mechanician,

and not a biologist concerned with the conditions of a living

organism. The analogy of the body politic to the body natural was as

present to him as it had been to all other writers on society, but he

failed to seize the only useful lessons which such an analogy might

have taught him--diversity of structure, difference of function,

development of strength by exercise, growth by nutrition--all of which

might have been serviceably translated into the dialect of political

science, and might have bestowed on his conception of political

society more of the features of reality. We see no room for the free

play of divergent forces, the active rivalry of hostile interests, the

regulated conflict of multifarious personal aims, which can never be

extinguished, except in moments of driving crisis, by the most sincere

attachment to the common causes of the land. Thus the modern question

which is of such vital interest for all the foremost human societies,

of the union of collective energy with the encouragement of individual

freedom, is, if not wholly untouched, at least wholly unillumined by

anything that Rousseau says. To tell us that a man on entering a

society exchanges his natural liberty for civil liberty which is

limited by the general will,[265] is to give us a phrase, where we

seek a solution. To say that if it is the opposition of private

interests which made the establishment of societies necessary, it is

the accord of those interests which makes them possible,[266] is to

utter a truth which feeds no practical curiosity. The opposition of

private interests remains, in spite of the yoke which their accord has

imposed upon it, but which only controls and does not suppress such an

opposition. What sort of control? What degree? What bounds?

So again let us consider the statement that the instant the government

usurps the sovereignty, then the social pact is broken, and all the

citizens, restored by right to their natural liberty, are forced but

not morally obliged to obey.[267] He began by telling his readers that

man, though born free, is now everywhere in chains; and therefore it

would appear that in all existing cases the social pact has been

broken, and the citizens living under the reign of force, are free to

resume their natural liberty, if they are only strong enough to do so.

This declaration of the general duty of rebellion no doubt had its

share in generating that fervid eagerness that all other peoples

should rise and throw off the yoke, which was one of the most

astonishing anxieties of the French during their revolution. That was

not the worst quality of such a doctrine. It made government

impossible, by basing the right or duty of resistance on a question

that could not be reached by positive evidence, but must always be

decided by an arbitrary interpretation of an arbitrarily imagined

document. The moderate proposition that resistance is lawful if a

government is a bad one, and if the people are strong enough to

overthrow it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose they can

provide a less bad one in its place, supplies tests that are capable

of application. Our own writers in favour of the doctrine of

resistance partly based their arguments upon the historic instances of

the Old Testament, and it is one of the most striking contributions of

Protestantism to the cause of freedom, that it sent people in an

admiring spirit to the history of the most rebellious nation that ever

existed, and so provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a corrective

for the too submissive political teaching of the Gospel. But these

writers have throughout a tacit appeal to expediency, as writers might

always be expected to have, who were really meditating on the

possibility of their principles being brought to the test of practice.

There can be no evidence possible, with a test so vague as the fact of

the rupture of a compact whose terms are authentically known to nobody

concerned. Speak of bad laws and good, wise administration or unwise,

just government or unjust, extravagant or economical, civically

elevating or demoralising; all these are questions which men may apply

themselves to settle with knowledge, and with a more or less definite

degree of assurance. But who can tell how he is to find out whether

sovereignty has been usurped, and the social compact broken? Was there

a usurpation of sovereignty in France not many years ago, when the

assumption of power by the prince was ratified by many millions of

votes?

The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact and

restoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of the

government usurp separately the power which they ought only to

exercise in a body.[268] Now this description applies very fairly to

the famous episode in our constitutional history, connected with

George the Third's first attack of madness in 1788. Parliament cannot

lawfully begin business without a declaration of the cause of summons

from the crown. On this occasion parliament both met and deliberated

without communication from the crown. What was still more important

was a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing of

letters patent under the great seal for opening parliament by

commission, and for giving assent to a Regency Bill. This was a

distinct usurpation of regal authority. Two members of the government

(in Rousseau's sense of the term), namely the houses of parliament,

usurped the power which they ought only to have exercised along with

the crown.[269] The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, a

forgery, a phantom, but if they had been readers of the Social

Contract, and if they had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, they

would have declared the compact of union violated, and all British

citizens free to resume their natural rights. Not even the bitter

virulence of faction at that time could tempt any politician to take

up such a line, though within half a dozen years each of the

democratic factions in France had worked at the overthrow of every

other in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had formulated and

Robespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a valid

reason for annihilating a government, no matter under what

circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better,

nor how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process.

The true opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of

passive obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and duty

of throwing off any government which inflicts more disadvantages than

it confers advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevitably to

substitute a long series of struggles after phrases and shadows in the

new era, for the equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic

succession which have been the great curse of the old. Men die for a

phrase as they used to die for a family. The other theory, which all

English politicians accept in their hearts, and so many commanding

French politicians have seemed in their hearts to reject, was first

expounded in direct view of Rousseau's teaching by Paley.[270] Of

course the greatest, widest, and loftiest exposition of the bearings

of expediency on government and its conditions, is to be found in the

magnificent and immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested by

absolutist violations of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some of

them by anarchic violation of it in the affairs of France, after the

seed sown by Rousseau had brought forth fruit.

We should, however, be false to our critical principle, if we did not

recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically

valueless. There has been no attempt to palliate either the

shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract.

But there is another side to its influence. It was the match which

kindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not

in France merely, but in Germany as well, its phrases became the

language of all who aspired after freedom. Schiller spoke of Rousseau

as one who "converted Christians into human beings," and the _Robbers_

(1778) is as if it had been directly inspired by the doctrine that

usurped sovereignty restores men to their natural rights. Smaller men

in the violent movement which seized all the youth of Germany at that

time, followed the same lead, if they happened to have any feeling

about the political condition of their enslaved countries.

There was alike in France and Germany a craving for a return to nature

among the whole of the young generation.[271] The Social Contract

supplied a dialect for this longing on one side, just as the Emilius

supplied it on another. Such parts in it as people did not understand

or did not like, they left out. They did not perceive its direction

towards that "perfect Hobbism," which the author declared to be the

only practical alternative to a democracy so austere as to be

intolerable. They grasped phrases about the sovereignty of the people,

the freedom for which nature had destined man, the slavery to which

tyrants and oppressors had brought him. Above all they were struck by

the patriotism which shines so brightly in every page, like the fire

on the altar of one of those ancient cities which had inspired the

writer's ideal.

Yet there is a marked difference in the channels along which

Rousseau's influence moved in the two countries. In France it was

drawn eventually into the sphere of direct politics. In Germany it

inspired not a great political movement, but an immense literary

revival. In France, as we have already said, the patriotic flame

seemed extinct. The ruinous disorder of the whole social system made

the old love of country resemble love for a phantom, and so much of

patriotic speech as survived was profoundly hollow. Even a man like

Turgot was not so much a patriot as a passionate lover of improvement,

and with the whole school of which this great spirit was the noblest

and strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had replaced the

narrower sentiment which had inflamed antique heroism. Rousseau's

exaltation of the Greek and Roman types in all their concentration and

intensity, touches mortals of commoner mould. His theory made the

native land what it had been to the citizens of earlier date, a true

centre of existence, round which all the interests of the community,

all its pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with entire

singleness of convergence, just as religious faith is the centre of

existence to a church. It was the virile and patriotic energy thus

evoked which presently saved France from partition.

We complete the estimate of the positive worth and tendencies of the

Social Contract by adding to this, which was for the time the cardinal

service, of rekindling the fire of patriotism, the rapid deduction

from the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples of the great truth,

that a nation with a civilised polity does not consist of an order or

a caste, but of the great body of its members, the army of toilers who

make the most painful of the sacrifices that are needed for the

continuous nutrition of the social organisation. As Condorcet put it,

and he drew inspiration partly from the intellectual school of

Voltaire, and partly from the social school of Rousseau, all

institutions ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual,

and moral amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class.[272]

This is the People. Second, there gradually followed from the

important place given by Rousseau to the idea of equal association, as

at once the foundation and the enduring bond of a community, those

schemes of Mutualism, and all the other shapes of collective action

for a common social good, which have possessed such commanding

attraction for the imagination of large classes of good men in France

ever since. Hitherto these forms have been sterile and deceptive, and

they must remain so, until the idea of special function has been

raised to an equal level of importance with that of united forces

working together to a single end.

In these ways the author of the Social Contract did involuntarily and

unconsciously contribute to the growth of those new and progressive

ideas, in which for his own part he lacked all faith. Præ-Newtonians

knew not the wonders of which Newton was to find the key; and so we,

grown weary of waiting for the master intelligence who may effect the

final combination of moral and scientific ideas needed for a new

social era, may be inclined to lend a half-complacent ear to the arid

sophisters who assume that the last word of civilisation has been

heard in existing arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage from

history to hope that generations will come, to whom our system of

distributing among a few the privileges and delights that are procured

by the toil of the many, will seem just as wasteful, as morally

hideous, and as scientifically indefensible, as that older system

which impoverished and depopulated empires, in order that a despot or

a caste might have no least wish ungratified, for which the lives or

the hard-won treasure of others could suffice.

FOOTNOTES:

[176] _Cont. Soc._, I. viii.

[177] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi. He had written in much the same sense in

his article on Political Economy in the Encyclopædia, p. 34.

[178] Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking property, and

took up a position like that of Rousseau--teaching the poor contempt

for the rich, not envy. "I do not want to touch your treasures," he

cried, on one occasion, "however impure their source. It is far more

an object of concern to me to make poverty honourable, than to

proscribe wealth; the thatched hut of Fabricius never need envy the

palace of Crassus. I should be at least as content, for my own part,

to be one of the sons of Aristides, brought up in the Prytaneium at

the public expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes, born in the

mire of royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the abasement of

the people, and glittering with the public misery." Quoted in Malon's

_Exposé des Ecoles Socialistes françaises_, 15. Baboeuf carried

Rousseau's sentiments further towards their natural conclusion by such

propositions as these: "The goal of the revolution is to destroy

inequality, and to re-establish the happiness of all." "The revolution

is not finished, because the rich absorb all the property, and hold

exclusive power; while the poor toil like born slaves, languish in

wretchedness, and are nothing in the state." _Exposé des Ecoles

Socialistes françaises_, p. 29.

[179] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi.

[180] _Cont. Soc._, I. iv.

[181] _Ib._, II. vii.

[182] Ch. vi. (vol. v. 371; edit. 1801).

[183] Ch. vii. (p. 383.)

[184] Goguet, in his _Origine des Lois, des Arts, et des Sciences_

(1758), really attempted as laboriously as possible to carry out a

notion of the historical method, but the fact that history itself at

that time had never been subjected to scientific examination made his

effort valueless. He accumulates testimony which would be excellent

evidence, if only it had been sifted, and had come out of the process

substantially undiminished. Yet even Goguet, who thus carefully

followed the accounts of early societies given in the Bible and other

monuments, intersperses abstract general statements about man being

born free and independent (i. 25), and entering society as the result

of deliberate reflection.

[185] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi. Also III. viii.

[186] II. xi. Also ch. viii.

[187] II. viii.

[188] II. ix.

[189] _Politics_, VII. iv. 8, 10.

[190] _Cont. Soc._, II. x.

[191] Plato's _Laws_, v. 737.

[192] _Ib._, iv. 705.

[193] _Projet de Constitution pour la Corse_, p. 75.

[194] _Gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. xi.

[195] _Cont. Soc._, II. vii.

[196] Goguet was much nearer to a true conception of this kind; see,

for instance, _Origine des Lois_, i. 46.

[197] Decree of the Committee, April 20, 1794, reported by

Billaud-Varennes. Compare ch. iv. of Rousseau's _Considérations sur le

Gouvernement de Pologne_.

[198] Here are some of Saint Just's regulations:--No servants, nor

gold or silver vessels; no child under 16 to eat meat, nor any adult

to eat meat on three days of the decade; boys at the age of 7 to be

handed over to the school of the nation, where they were to be brought

up to speak little, to endure hardships, and to train for war; divorce

to be free to all; friendship ordained a public institution, every

citizen on coming to majority being bound to proclaim his friends, and

if he had none, then to be banished; if one committed a crime, his

friends were to be banished. Quoted in Von Sybel's _Hist. French

Rev._, iv. 49. When Morelly dreamed his dream of a model community in

1754 (see above, vol. i. p. 158) he little supposed, one would think,

that within forty years a man would be so near trying the experiment

in France as Saint Just was. Baboeuf is pronounced by La Harpe to have

been inspired by the Code de la Nature, which La Harpe impudently set

down to Diderot, on whom every great destructive piece was

systematically fathered.

[199] I forget where I have read the story of some member of the

Convention being very angry because the library contained no copy of

the laws which Minos gave to the Cretans.

[200] III. xiii.

[201] III. xv. He actually recommended the Poles to pay all public

functionaries in kind, and to have the public works executed on the

system of corvée. _Gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. xi.

[202] _Cont. Soc._, III. ii.

[203] II. i.

[204] II. ii.

[205] III. i.

[206] II. vi.

[207] II. iv.

[208] IV. vi.

[209] _Economie Politique_, p. 30.

[210] _Mélanges_, p. 310.

[211] See for instance Green's _History of the English People_, i.

266.

[212] _Summa_, xc.-cviii. (1265-1273). See Maurice's _Moral and

Metaphysical Philosophy_, i. 627, 628. Also Franck's _Réformateurs et

Publicistes de l'Europe_, p. 48, etc.

[213] _Defensor Pacis_, Pt. I., ch. xii. This, again, is an example of

Marsilio's position:--"Convenerunt enim homines ad civilem

communicationem propter commodum et vitæ sufficientiam consequendam,

et opposita declinandum. Quæ igitur omnium tangere possunt commodum et

incommodum, ab omnibus sciri debent et audiri, ut commodum assequi et

oppositum repellere possint." The whole chapter is a most interesting

anticipation, partly due to the influence of Aristotle, of the notions

of later centuries.

[214] See Bayle's Dict., s.v. _Althusius_.

[215] _Lettres de la Montagne_, I. vi. 388.

[216] _Eccles. Polity_, Bk. i.; bks. i.-iv., 1594; bk. v., 1597; bks.

vi.-viii., 1647,--being forty-seven years after the author's death.

[217] Goguet (_Origine des Lois_, i. 22) dwells on tacit conventions

as a kind of engagement to which men commit themselves with extreme

facility. He was thus rather near the true idea of the spontaneous

origin and unconscious acceptance of early institutions.

[218] Of Civil Government, ch. xiii. See also ch. xi. "This

legislative is not only the supreme power of the commonwealth, but

sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community have once

placed it; nor can any edict of anybody else, in what form soever

conceived, or by what power soever backed, have the force and

obligation of a law, which has not its sanction from that legislative

which the public has chosen and appointed; for without this the law

could not have that which is absolutely necessary to its being a

law--the consent of the society; over whom nobody can have a power to

make laws, but by their own consent, and by authority received from

them." If Rousseau had found no neater expression for his doctrine

than this, the Social Contract would assuredly have been no explosive.

[219] See especially ch. viii.

[220] Hence the antipathy of the clergy, catholic, episcopalian, and

presbyterian, to which, as Austin has pointed out (_Syst. of

Jurisprudence_, i. 288, _n._), Hobbes mainly owes his bad repute.

[221] See Diderot's article on _Hobbisme_ in the Encyclopædia,

_Oeuv._, xv. 122.

[222] _Esprit des Lois_, I. i.

[223] _Cont. Soc._, II. vi. 50.

[224] Goguet has the merit of seeing distinctly that command is the

essence of law.

[225] _Cont. Soc._, II. vi. 51-53. See Austin's _Jurisprudence_, i.

95, etc.; also _Lettres écrites de la Montagne_, I. vi. 380, 381.

[226] See, for instance, letter to Mirabeau (_l'ami des hommes_), July

26, 1767. _Corr._, v. 179. The same letter contains his criticism on

the good despot of the Economists.

[227] _L'Ordre Naturel et Essentiel des Sociétés Politiques_ (1767).

By Mercier de la Rivière. One episode in the life of Mercier de la

Rivière is worth recounting, as closely connected with the subject we

are discussing. Just as Corsicans and Poles applied to Rousseau,

Catherine of Russia, in consequence of her admiration for Rivière's

book, summoned him to Russia to assist her in making laws. "Sir," said

the Czarina, "could you point out to me the best means for the good

government of a state?" "Madame, there is only one way, and that is

being just; in other words, in keeping order and exacting obedience to

the laws." "But on what base is it best to make the laws of an empire

repose?" "There is only one base, Madame: the nature of things and of

men." "Just so; but when you wish to give laws to a people, what are

the rules which indicate most surely such laws as are most suitable?"

"To give or make laws, Madame, is a task that God has left to none.

Ah, who is the man that should think himself capable of dictating laws

for beings that he does not know, or knows so ill? And by what right

can he impose laws on beings whom God has never placed in his hands?"

"To what, then, do you reduce the science of government?" "To studying

carefully; recognising and setting forth the laws which God has graven

so manifestly in the very organisation of men, when he called them

into existence. To wish to go any further would be a great misfortune

and a most destructive undertaking." "Sir, I am very pleased to have

heard what you have to say; I wish you good day." Quoted from

Thiébault's _Souvenirs de Berlin_, in M. Daire's edition of the

_Physiocrates_, ii. 432.

[228] _Cont. Soc._, II. vii.

[229] _Corr._, v. 181.

[230] _Cont. Soc._, I. v., vi., vii.

[231] _Leviathan_, II., ch. xviii. vol. iii. 159 (Molesworth's

edition).

[232] _Cont. Soc._, III. xvi.

[233] _Civil Government_, ch. viii. § 99.

[234] I. vi. Especially the footnote.

[235] _Cont. Soc._, II. i.

[236] _Syst. of Jurisprudence_, i. 256.

[237] _Cont. Soc._, III. xv. 137. It was not long, however, before

Rousseau found reason to alter his opinion in this respect. The

champions of the Council at Geneva compared the _droit négatif_, in

the exercise of which the Council had refused to listen to the

representations of Rousseau's partisans (see above, vol. ii. p. 105)

to the right of veto possessed by the crown in Great Britain. Rousseau

seized upon this egregious blunder, which confused the power of

refusing assent to a proposed law, with the power of refusing justice

under law already passed. He at once found illustrations of the

difference, first in the case of the printers of No. 45 of the _North

Briton_, who brought actions for false imprisonment (1763), and next

in the proceedings against Wilkes at the same time. If Wilkes, said

Rousseau, had written, printed, published, or said, one-fourth against

the Lesser Council at Geneva of what he said, wrote, printed, and

published openly in London against the court and the government, he

would have been heavily punished, and most likely put to death. And so

forth, until he has proved very pungently how different degrees of

freedom are enjoyed in Geneva and in England. _Lettres écrites de la

Montague_, ix. 491-500. When he wrote this he was unaware that the

Triennial Act had long been replaced by the Septennial Act of the 1

Geo. I. On finding out, as he did afterwards, that a parliament could

sit for seven years, he thought as meanly of our liberty as ever.

_Considérations sur les gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. vii. 253-260. In

his _Projet de Constitution pour la Corse_, p. 113, he says that "the

English do not love liberty for itself, but because it is most

favourable to money-making."

[238] III., xi., xii., and xiii.

[239] Mr. Freeman's _Growth of the English Constitution_, c. i.

[240] _Cont. Soc._, III. xv. 140. A small manuscript containing his

ideas on confederation was given by Rousseau to the Count d'Antraigues

(afterwards an _émigré_), who destroyed it in 1789, lest its arguments

should be used to sap the royal authority. See extract from his

pamphlet, prefixed to M. Auguis's edition of the Social Contract, pp.

xxiii, xxiv.

[241] _Gouvernement de Pologne_, v. 246.

[242] Of course no such modification as that proposed by Comte

(_Politique Positive_, iv. 421) would come within the scope of the

doctrine of the Social Contract. For each of the seventeen Intendances

into which Comte divides France, is to be ruled by a chief, "always

appointed and removed by the central power." There is no room for the

sovereignty of the people here, even in things parochial.

[243] There was one extraordinary instance during the revolution of

attempting to make popular government direct on Rousseau's principle,

in the scheme (1790) of which Danton was a chief supporter, for

reorganising the municipal administration of Paris. The assemblies of

sections were to sit permanently; their vote was to be taken on

current questions; and action was to follow the aggregate of their

degrees. See Von Sybel's _Hist. Fr. Rev._ i. 275; M. Louis Blanc's

_History_, Bk. III. ch. ii.

[244] This was also Bodin's definition of an aristocratic state; "si

minor pars civium cæteris imperat."

[245] _Politics_, III. vi.-vii.

[246] _Esprit des Lois_, II. i. ii.

[247] Rousseau gave the name of _tyrant_ to a usurper of royal

authority in a kingdom, and _despot_ to a usurper of the sovereign

authority (_i.e._ [Greek: tyrannos] in the Greek sense). The former

might govern according to the laws, but the latter placed himself

above the laws (_Cont. Soc._, III. x.) This corresponded to Locke's

distinction: "As usurpation is the exercise of power which another

hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of a power beyond right,

which nobody can have a right to." _Civil Gov._, ch. xviii.

[248] III. iv.

[249] III. vi.

[250] III. v.

[251] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii.

[252] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii. 197-201.

[253] This is not unlike what Tocqueville says somewhere, that

Christianity bids you render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's,

but seems to discourage any inquiry whether Cæsar is an usurper or a

lawful ruler.

[254] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii. 203. As we have already seen, he had

entreated Voltaire, of all men in the world, to draw up a civil

profession of faith. See vol. i. 326.

In the New Heloïsa (V. v. 117, _n._) Rousseau expresses his opinion

that "no true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. _If I were

a magistrate, and if the law pronounced the penalty of death against

atheists, I would begin by burning as such whoever should come to

inform against another._"

[255] Plato's _Laws_, Bk. x. 909, etc.

[256] _Areopagitica_, p. 417. (Edit. 1867.)

[257] See a speech of his, which is Rousseau's "civil faith" done into

rhetoric, given in M. Louis Blanc's _Hist. de la Rév. Française_, Bk.

x. c. xiv.

[258] _Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la

France_ (1764). Quoted by Rousseau from a manuscript copy.

[259] _Leviathan_, ch. xliii. 601. Also ch. xlii.

[260] _Cont. Soc._, III. xi. Borrowed from Hobbes, who said, "Magnus

ille Leviathan quæ civitas appellatur, opificium artis est."

[261] Mackintosh's.

[262] _Cont. Soc._, II. v.

[263] IV. ii.

[264] For instance, _Gouvernement de la Pologne_, ch. xi. p. 305. And

_Corr._, v. 180.

[265] _Cont. Soc._, I. viii.

[266] _Cont. Soc._, II. i.

[267] _Ib._, III. x. "Let every individual who may usurp the

sovereignty be instantly put to death by free men." Robespierre's

_Déclaration des droits de l'homme_, § 27. "When the government

violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the people

the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties." § 35.

[268] _Cont. Soc._, III. x.

[269] See May's _Constitutional Hist. of England_, ch. iii; and Lord

Stanhope's _Life of Pitt_, vol. ii. ch. xii.

[270] In the 6th book of the _Moral Philosophy_ (1785), ch. iii., and

elsewhere. In the preface he refers to the effect which Rousseau's

political theory was supposed to have had in the civil convulsions of

Geneva, as one of the reasons which encouraged him to publish his own

book.

[271] One side of this was the passion for geographical exploration

which took possession of Europe towards the middle of the eighteenth

century. See the _Life of Humboldt_, i. 28, 29. (_Eng. Trans._ by

Lassell.)

[272] Rousseau's influence on Condorcet is seen in the latter's maxim,

which has found such favour in the eyes of socialist writers, that

"not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the

social art."

CHAPTER IV.

EMILIUS.

One whose most intense conviction was faith in the goodness

of all things and creatures as they are first produced by nature, and

so long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose of man,

was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process of

sophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and the

best of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his high

original. Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own the

doctrine of the fall of man. That doctrine, however, has never made

people any more remiss in the search after a virtue, which if they

ought to have regarded it as hopeless according to strict logic, is

still indispensable in actual life. Rousseau's way of believing that

man had fallen was so coloured at once by that expansion of sanguine

emotion which marked his century, and by that necessity for repose in

idyllic perfection of simplicity which marked his own temperament,

that enthusiasm for an imaginary human creature effectually shut out

the dogma of his fatal depravation. "How difficult a thing it is,"

Madame d'Epinay once said to him, "to bring up a child." "Assuredly

it is," answered Rousseau; "because the father and mother are not made

by nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up."[273] This

cynical speech can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen. It

was a contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is all

good and bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reaching

true happiness knows no stint.

In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what can

be made of him. Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyed

the tendencies of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by the

spirit of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young lies

fulfilment. Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is

the future to be shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of human

disposition, and in these epochs the theory is always optimistic.

Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands of men have been alike in

conduct and speculation, by inconsistency, and not shrinking from two

mutually contradictory trains of thought. Society is corrupt, and

society is the work of man. Yet man, who has engendered this corrupted

birth, is good and whole. The strain in the argument may be pardoned

for the hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought Rousseau into

harmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young character into

finer mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving to such

efforts both fervour and elevation. While others were content with

the mere enunciation of maxims and precepts, he breathed into them the

spirit of life, and enforced them with a vividness of faith that

clothed education with the augustness and unction of religion. The

training of the young soul to virtue was surrounded with something of

the awful holiness of a sacrament; and those who laboured in this

sanctified field were exhorted to a constancy of devotion, and were

promised a fulness of recompense, that raised them from the rank of

drudges to a place of highest honour among the ministers of nature.

Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps on

account of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors of

the time, and a great many people were writing about it. The Abbé de

Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greater

departments of human interest. Madame d'Epinay wrote considerations

upon the bringing up of the young.[274] Madame de Grafigny did the

same in a less grave shape.[275] She received letters from the

precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and sensible

precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing

eloquence in the pages of Emilius.[276] Grimm had an elaborate scheme

for a treatise on education.[277] Helvétius followed his exploration

of the composition of the human mind, by a treatise on the training

proper for the intellectual and moral faculties. Education by these

and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been

known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly came

to be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of

ideas upon education was only one phase of that great general movement

towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a

spectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education now

came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents

and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The direction

of this wider feeling about such relations tended strongly towards an

increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous

suffusion of tenderness and long attachment. All this was part of the

general revival of naturalism. People began to reflect that nature was

not likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women than

their own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the society

of those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful

hearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigid

discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable monition of

strangers.

Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps

contributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break

the religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the

parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence over

the ideas, habits, and affections of his children. The rebellion was

aimed against the spirit as well as the manner of the established

system. The church had not fundamentally modified the significance of

the dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was still

conceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mystical

old Adam. The new current flowed in channels far away from that black

folly of superstition. Men at length ventured once more to look at one

another with free and generous gaze. The veil of the temple was rent,

and the false mockeries of the shrine of the Hebrew divinity made

plain to scornful eyes. People ceased to see one another as guilty

victims cowering under a divine curse. They stood erect in

consciousness of manhood. The palsied conception of man, with his

large discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty and

majestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets of

truth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the

universe, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love for

his comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his own

wrong-doing,--the palsied and crushing conception of this excellent

and helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive and

meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, only

to be appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into those

regions of night, whence the depth of human misery and the

obscuration of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, to

hang evilly over the western world for a season. So vital a change in

the point of view quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringing

of the young. Education began to figure less as the suppression of the

natural man, than his strengthening and development; less as a process

of rooting out tares, more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding

in promise of richness. What had been the most drearily mechanical of

duties, was transformed into a task that surpassed all others in

interest and hope. If man be born not bad but good, under no curse,

but rather the bestower and receiver of many blessings, then the

entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil and the peril,

is made cheerful with the sunshine and warmth of the great folded

possibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing.

I.

Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneer

of French thought. In education there is less room for scientific

originality. The sage of a parish, provided only she began her trade

with an open and energetic mind, may here pass philosophers. Locke was

nearly as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women.

The honest plainness of certain of his prescriptions for the

preservation of physical health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near the

earth. His manner throughout is marked by the stout wisdom of the

practical teacher, who is content to assume good sense in his hearers,

and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or raising a tempest. He

gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy, instructed,

upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be rightly

fitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it a

fair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the people

with whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise is one of the most

admirable protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, and

parents already moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to

their sons, will hardly find another book better suited to their ends.

Besides Locke, we must also count Charron, and the amazing educator of

Gargantua, and Montaigne before either, among the writers whom

Rousseau had read, with that profit and increase which attends the

dropping of the good ideas of other men into fertile minds.

There is an immense class of natures, and those not the lowest, which

the connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough.

They only stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal,

and raised the mechanical offices of the narrow day into association

with the spaciousness and height of spiritual things. To these

Rousseau came. For both the tenour and the wording of the most

striking precepts of the Emilius, he owes much to Locke. But what was

so realistic in him becomes blended in Rousseau with all the power and

richness and beauty of an ideal that can move the most generous parts

of human character. The child is treated as the miniature of humanity;

it thus touches the whole sphere of our sympathies, warms our

curiosity as to the composition of man's nature, and becomes the very

eye and centre of moral and social aspirations.

Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating his

conception of the kind of human creature which it is worth while to

take the trouble to rear, and the only kind which pure nature will

help you in perfecting. Hence Emilius, besides being a manual for

parents, contains the lines of a moral type of life and character for

all others. The old thought of the Discourses revives in full vigour.

The artifices of society, the perverting traditions of use, the feeble

maxims of indolence, convention, helpless dependence on the aid or the

approval of others, are routed at the first stroke. The old regimen of

accumulated prejudice is replaced, in dealing alike with body and

soul, by the new system of liberty and nature. In saying this we have

already said that the exaltation of Spartan manners which runs through

Rousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every trace of the

much-vaunted military and public training has yielded before the

attractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home. Public

instruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no

longer such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer be

citizens. Only domestic education can now help us to rear the man

according to nature,--the man who knows best among us how to bear

the mingled good and ill of our life.

The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after a

return to nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm by

Rousseau's famous exhortations to mothers to nourish their own little

ones. Morelly, as we have seen, had already enjoined the adoption of

this practice. So too had Buffon. But Morelly's voice had no

resonance, Buffon's reasons were purely physical, and children were

still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more passionate moral

entreaties awoke maternal conscience. "Do these tender mothers," he

exclaimed, "who, when they have got rid of their infants, surrender

themselves gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what sort of

usage the child in the village is receiving, fastened in his swaddling

band? At the least interruption that comes, they hang him up by a nail

like a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature remains thus

crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs. Every child found

in this position had a face of purple; as the violent compression of

the chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all went to the

head, and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just because it

had not strength enough to cry out."[278] But in Rousseau, as in

Beethoven, a harsh and rugged passage is nearly always followed by

some piece of exquisite and touching melody. The force of these

indignant pictures was heightened and relieved by moving appeal to

all the tender joys of maternal solicitude, and thoughts of all that

this solicitude could do for the happiness of the home, the father,

and the young. The attraction of domestic life is pronounced the best

antidote to the ill living of the time. The bustle of children, which

you now think so importunate, gradually becomes delightful; it brings

father and mother nearer to one another; and the lively animation of a

family added to domestic cares, makes the dearest occupation of the

wife, and the sweetest of all his amusements to the husband. If women

will only once more become mothers again, men will very soon become

fathers and husbands.[279]

The physical effect of this was not altogether wholesome. Rousseau's

eloquence excited women to an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for the

duty of suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denunciation of

the gaieties of Paris could not extinguish the love of amusement.

Quid quod libelli Stoici inter sericos

Jacere pulvillos amant?

So young mothers tried as well as they could to satisfy both desires,

and their babes were brought to them at all unseasonable hours, while

they were full of food and wine, or heated with dancing or play, and

there received the nurture which, but for Rousseau, they would have

drawn in more salutary sort from a healthy foster-mother in the

country. This, however, was only an incidental drawback to a movement

which was in its main lines full of excellent significance. The

importance of giving freedom to the young limbs, of accustoming the

body to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of surrounding youth with

light and cheerfulness and air, and even a tiny detail such as the

propriety of substituting for coral or ivory some soft substance

against which the growing teeth might press a way without irritation,

all these matters are handled with a fervid reality of interest that

gives to the tedium of the nursery a genuine touch of the poetic.

Swathings, bandages, leading-strings, are condemned with a warmth like

that with which the author had denounced comedy.[280] The city is held

up to indignant reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it had

been in his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies of

the adult life. Every child ought to be born and nursed in the

country, and it would be all the better if it remained in the country

to the last day of its existence. You must accustom it little by

little to the sight of disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes;

also in the same gradual manner to the sound of alarming noises,

beginning with snapping a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries from

pain which you cannot remove, make no attempt to soothe it; your

caresses will not lessen the anguish of its colic, while the child

will remember what it has to do in order to be coaxed and to get its

own way. The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively cries, but she is

not to din useless words into its ears; the first articulations that

come to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently repeated, and

only referring to objects which may be shown to the child. "Our

unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do not

understand, begins earlier than we suppose." Let there be no haste in

inducing the child to speak articulately. The evil of precipitation in

this respect is not that children use and hear words without sense,

but that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own,

without our perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thus

early, have an influence, even after they are cured, over the turn of

the mind for the rest of the creature's life. Hence it is a good thing

to keep a child's vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should

have more words than ideas, and should say more than it can possibly

realise in thought.[281]

In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval in

human life is that between birth and the age of twelve. The great

secret is to make the early education purely negative; a process of

keeping the heart, naturally so good, clear of vice, and the

intelligence, naturally so true, clear of error. Take for first,

second, and third precept, to follow nature and leave her free to the

performance of her own tasks. Until the age of reason, there can be no

idea of moral beings or social relations. Therefore, says Rousseau, no

moral discussion. Locke's maxim in favour of constantly reasoning with

children was a mistake. Of all the faculties of man, reason, which is

only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest in development,

and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those which come

earliest of all. Such a course is to begin at the end, and to turn the

finished work into an instrument. "In speaking to children in these

early years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom them

to cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, to

think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and

mutinous." If you forget that nature meant children to be children

before growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neither

ripeness nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthful

doctors and old infants.

To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseau

was too impetuous to see. Perfected reason is truly the tardiest of

human endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the

process be begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning is

made, the earlier will be the ripening. To know the grounds of right

conduct is, we admit, a different thing from feeling a disposition to

practise it. But nobody will deny the expediency of an intelligent

acquaintance with the reasons why one sort of conduct is bad, and its

opposite good, even if such an acquaintance can never become a

substitute for the spontaneous action of thoroughly formed habit. For

one thing, cases are constantly arising in a man's life that demand

the exercise of reason, to settle the special application of

principles which may have been acquired without knowledge of their

rational foundation. In such cases, which are the critical and testing

points of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or less

justly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it. Now, as we

have said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls

such attention to the early age at which mental influences begin to

operate. Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of using

the mind be any exception?

Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational

systems. Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeply

effective, if only the will and the throng of various motives which

guide it, instantly followed impression of a truth upon the

intelligence. And they are, moreover, so easily communicated, saving

the parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking in shaping his own

character, after such a pattern as shall silently draw all within its

influence to pursuit of good and honourable things. The most valuable

of Rousseau's notions about education, though he by no means

consistently adhered to them, was his urgent contempt for this

fatuous substitution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the

deeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visible

circumstance. The vast improvements that have since taken place in the

theory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he has

the honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter,

may all be traced to the spread of this wise principle, and its

adoption in various forms. The change in the up-bringing of the young

exactly corresponds to the change in the treatment of the insane. We

may look back to the old system of endless catechisms, apophthegms,

moral fables, and the rest of the paraphernalia of moral didactics,

with the same horror with which we regard the gags, strait-waistcoats,

chains, and dark cells, of poor mad people before the intervention of

Pinel.

It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this most

important of all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first quality

in connection with right doing, which you can develop in the young,

and this spontaneousness of habit is best secured by associating it

with the approval of those to whom the child looks. Sympathy, in a

word, is the true foundation from which to build up the structure of

good habit. The young should be led to practise the elementary parts

of right conduct from the desire to please, because that is a securer

basis than the conclusions of an embryo reason, applied to the most

complex conditions of action, while the grounds on which action is

justified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time, when

the understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and terms

essential to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each without

sacrifice of the other. These are, first, that the child shall grow up

with firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retain

respect for reason and an open mind. The latter may be acquired in the

less immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earlier

times, a man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, that

makes his life either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helpless

for want of ready conclusions.

The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we might

expect such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, is

declared to be that of property. And he can only acquire this idea by

having something of his own. But how are we to teach him the

significance of a thing being one's own? It is a prime rule to attempt

to teach nothing by a verbal lesson; all instruction ought to be left

to experience.[282] Therefore you must contrive some piece of

experience which shall bring this notion of property vividly into a

child's mind; the following for instance. Emilius is taken to a piece

of garden; his instructor digs and dresses the ground for him, and the

boy takes possession by sowing some beans. "We come every day to water

them, and see them rise out of the ground with transports of joy. I

add to this joy by saying, This belongs to you. Then explaining the

term, I let him feel that he has put into the ground this time,

labour, trouble, his person in short; that there is in this bit of

ground something of himself which he may maintain against every comer,

as he might withdraw his own arm from the hand of another man who

would fain retain it in spite of him." One day Emilius comes to his

beloved garden, watering-pot in hand, and finds to his anguish and

despair that all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground has

been turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. The

gardener comes up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown the

seed of a precious Maltese melon in that particular spot long before

Emilius had come with his trumpery beans, and that therefore it was

his land; that nobody touches the garden of his neighbour, in order

that his own may remain untouched; and that if Emilius wants a piece

of garden, he must pay for it by surrendering to the owner half the

produce.[283] Thus, says Rousseau, the boy sees how the notion of

property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant as

derived from labour. We should have thought it less troublesome, as it

is certainly more important, to teach a boy the facts of property

positively and imperatively. This rather elaborate ascent to origins

seems an exaggerated form of that very vice of over-instructing the

growing reason in abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned so short

a time before.

Again, there is the very strong objection to conveying lessons by

artificially contrived incidents, that children are nearly always

extremely acute in suspecting and discovering such contrivances. Yet

Rousseau recurs to them over and over again, evidently taking delight

in their ingenuity. Besides the illustration of the origin and

significance of property, there is the complex fancy in which a

juggler is made to combine instruction as to the properties of the

magnet with certain severe moral truths.[284] The tutor interests

Emilius in astronomy and geography by a wonderful stratagem indeed.

The poor youth loses his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger and

weariness, and then is led on by his cunning tutor to a series of

inferences from the position of the sun and so forth, which convince

him that his home is just over the hedge, where it is duly found to

be.[285] Here, again, is the way in which the instructor proposes to

stir activity of limb in the young Emilius. "In walking with him of an

afternoon, I used sometimes to put in my pocket two cakes of a sort he

particularly liked; we each of us ate one. One day he perceived that I

had three cakes; he could easily have eaten six; he promptly

despatches his own, to ask me for the third. Nay, I said to him, I

could well eat it myself, or we would divide it, but I would rather

see it made the prize of a running match between the two little boys

there." The little boys run their race, and the winner devours the

cake. This and subsequent repetitions of the performance at first

only amused Emilius, but he presently began to reflect, and perceiving

that he also had two legs, he began privately to try how fast he could

run. When he thought he was strong enough, he importuned his tutor for

the third cake, and on being refused, insisted on being allowed to

compete for it. The habit of taking exercise was not the only

advantage gained. The tutor resorted to a variety of further

stratagems in order to induce the boy to find out and practise visual

compass, and so forth.[286] If we consider, as we have said, first the

readiness of children to suspect a stratagem wherever instruction is

concerned, and next their resentment on discovering artifice of that

kind, all this seems as little likely to be successful as it is

assuredly contrary to Rousseau's general doctrine of leaving

circumstances to lead.

In truth Rousseau's appreciation of the real nature of spontaneousness

in the processes of education was essentially inadequate, and that it

was so, arose from a no less inadequate conception of the right

influence upon the growing character, of the great principle of

authority. His dread lest the child should ever be conscious of the

pressure of a will external to its own, constituted a fundamental

weakness of his system. The child, we are told with endless

repetition, ought always to be led to suppose that it is following its

own judgment or impulses, and has only them and their consequences to

consider. But Rousseau could not help seeing, as he meditated on the

actual development of his Emilius, that to leave him thus to the

training of accident would necessarily end in many fatal gaps and

chasms. Yet the hand and will of the parent or the master could not be

allowed to appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the secret

preparation of artificial sets of circumstances, alike in work and in

amusement. Jean Paul was wiser than Jean Jacques. "Let not the teacher

after the work also order and regulate the games. It is decidedly

better not to recognise or make any order in games, than to keep it up

with difficulty and send the zephyrets of pleasure through artistic

bellows and air-pumps to the little flowers."[287]

The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist in

promptly willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed

from without, but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under

all its various conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to

itself on the one hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be

pleasant to its parents on the other. "You must never," Rousseau

gravely warns us, "inflict punishment upon children as punishment; it

should always fall upon them as a natural consequence of their

ill-behaviour."[288] But why should one of the most closely following

of all these consequences be dissembled or carefully hidden from

sight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the contentment of the

child's nearest friend? Why are the effects of conduct upon the

actor's own physical well-being to be the only effects honoured with

the title of being natural? Surely, while we leave to the young the

widest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to decide

for themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound afterwards

to state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that on the

next occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others into

proper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty

than it seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do. One

of the most important of educating influences is lost, if the young

are not taught to place the feelings of others in a front place, when

they think in their own simple way of what will happen to them from

yielding to a given impulse. Rousseau was quite right in insisting on

practical experience of consequences as the only secure foundation for

self-acting habit; he was fatally wrong in mutilating this experience

by the exclusion from it of the effects of perceiving, resisting,

accepting, ignoring, all will and authority from without. The great,

and in many respects so admirable, school of Rousseauite

philanthropists, have always been feeble on this side, alike in the

treatment of the young by their instructors, and the treatment of

social offenders by a government.

Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities which are

associated with affectionate respect for a more fully informed

authority. In a world where necessity stands for so much, it is no

inconsiderable gain to have learnt the lesson of docility on easy

terms in our earliest days. If in another sense the will of each

individual is all-powerful over his own destinies, it is best that

this idea of firm purpose and a settled energy that will not be

denied, should grow up in the young soul in connection with a riper

wisdom and an ampler experience than its own; for then, when the time

for independent action comes, the force of the association will

continue. Finally, although none can be vicariously wise, none sage by

proxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet is it not a

puerile wastefulness to send forth the young all bare to the ordeal,

while the armour of old experience and tempered judgment hangs idle on

the wall? Surely it is thus by accumulation of instruction from

generation to generation, that the area of right conduct in the world

is extended. Such instruction must with youth be conveyed by military

word of command as often as by philosophical persuasion of its worth.

Nor is the atmosphere of command other than bracing, even to those who

are commanded. If education is to be mainly conducted by force of

example, it is a dreadful thing that the child is ever to have before

its eyes as living type and practical exemplar the pale figure of

parents without passions, and without a will as to the conduct of

those who are dependent on them. Even a slight excess of anger,

impatience, and the spirit of command, would be less demoralising to

the impressionable character than the constant sight of a man

artificially impassive. Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men to

try to lay aside their masks; yet the model instructor whom he has

created for us is to be the most artfully and elaborately masked of

all men; unless he happens to be naturally without blood and without

physiognomy.

Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods which imprisoned the

young spirit in injunctions and over-solicitous monitions, yet did

none the less in his own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse,

which with its regulated temperature and artificially contrived access

of light and air, was in many respects as little the method of nature,

that is to say it gave as little play for the spontaneous working and

growth of the forces of nature in the youth's breast, as that regimen

of the cloister which he so profoundly abhorred. Partly this was the

result of a ludicrously shallow psychology. He repeats again and again

that self-love is the one quality in the youthful embryo of character,

from which you have to work. From this, he says, springs the desire of

possessing pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on which the

lever of experience rests. Not only so, but from this same

unslumbering quality of self-love you have to develop regard for

others. The child's first affection for his nurse is a result of the

fact that she serves his comfort, and so down to his passion in later

years for his mistress. Now this is not the place for a discussion as

to the ultimate atom of the complex moral sentiments of men and women,

nor for an examination of the question whether the faculty of

sympathy has or has not an origin independent of self-love. However

that may be, no one will deny that sympathy appears in good natures

extremely early, and is susceptible of rapid cultivation from the very

first. Here is the only adequate key to that education of the

affections, from their rudimentary expansion in the nursery, until

they include the complete range of all the objects proper to them.

One secret of Rousseau's omission of this, the most important of all

educating agencies, from the earlier stages of the formation of

character, was the fact which is patent enough in every page, that he

was not animated by that singular tenderness and almost mystic

affection for the young, which breathes through the writings of some

of his German followers, of Richter above all others, and which

reveals to those who are sensible of it, the hold that may so easily

be gained for all good purposes upon the eager sympathy of the

youthful spirit. The instructor of Emilius speaks the words of a wise

onlooker, sagely meditating on the ideal man, rather than of a parent

who is living the life of his child through with him. Rousseau's

interest in children, though perfectly sincere, was still æsthetic,

moral, reasonable, rather than that pure flood of full-hearted feeling

for them, which is perhaps seldom stirred except in those who have

actually brought up children of their own. He composed a vindication

of his love for the young in an exquisite piece;[289] but it has none

of the yearnings of the bowels of tenderness.

II.

Education being the art of preparing the young to grow into

instruments of happiness for themselves and others, a writer who

undertakes to speak about it must naturally have some conception of

the kind of happiness at which his art aims. We have seen enough of

Rousseau's own life to know what sort of ideal he would be likely to

set up. It is a healthier epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make

happiness safe in case that circumstances should frown. The man who

has lived most is not he who has counted most years, but he who has

most felt life.[290] It is mere false wisdom to throw ourselves

incessantly out of ourselves, to count the present for nothing, ever

to pursue without ceasing a future which flees in proportion as we

advance, to try to transport ourselves from whence we are not, to some

place where we shall never be.[291] He is happiest who suffers fewest

pains, and he is most miserable who feels fewest pleasures. Then we

have a half stoical strain. The felicity of man here below is only a

negative state, to be measured by the more or less of the ills he

undergoes. It is in the disproportion between desires and faculties

that our misery consists. Happiness, therefore, lies not in

diminishing our desires, nor any more in extending our faculties, but

in diminishing the excess of desire over faculty, and in bringing

power and will into perfect balance.[292] Excepting health, strength,

respect for one's self, all the goods of this life reside in opinion;

excepting bodily pain and remorse of conscience, all our ills are in

imagination. Death is no evil; it is only made so by half-knowledge

and false wisdom. "Live according to nature, be patient, and drive

away physicians; you will not avoid death, but you will only feel it

once, while they on the other hand would bring it daily before your

troubled imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging your

days, only hinders you from enjoying them. Suffer, die, or recover;

but above all things live, live up to your last hour." It is

foresight, constantly carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true

source of our miseries.[293] O man, confine thy existence within

thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable. Thy liberty, thy power,

reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no further; all the

rest is slavery and illusion. The only man who has his own will is he

who does not need in order to have it the arms of another person at

the end of his own.[294]

The training that follows from this is obvious. The instructor has

carefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which is

only fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life.

Emilius, who is brought up in the country, has nothing in his room to

distinguish it from that of a peasant.[295] If he is taken to a

luxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to

reflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands have been

employed in preparing it.[296] His preference for gay colours in his

clothes is to be consulted, because this is natural and becoming to

his age, but the moment he prefers a stuff merely because it is rich,

behold a sophisticated creature.[297] The curse of the world is

inequality, and inequality springs from the multitude of wants, which

cause us to be so much the more dependent. What makes man essentially

good is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself with

others; what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and to

cling much to opinion.[298] Hence, although Emilius happened to have

both wealth and good birth, he is not brought up to be a gentleman,

with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness too naturally

associated with that abused name.

This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary of

self-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius and

every one else must learn some trade. To work is an indispensable duty

in the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen

is a knave. And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with his

hands. It is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of

knowing one, as for the sake of conquering the prejudices which

despise it. Labour for glory, if you have not to labour from

necessity. Lower yourself to the condition of the artisan, so as to be

above your own. In order to reign in opinion, begin by reigning over

it. All things well considered, the trade most to be preferred is

that of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and capable of being carried

on in the house; it demands address and diligence in the workman, and

though the form of the work is determined by utility, still elegance

and taste are not excluded.[299] There are few prettier pictures than

that where Sophie enters the workshop, and sees in amazement her young

lover at the other end, in his white shirt-sleeves, his hair loosely

fastened back, with a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other,

too intent upon his work to perceive even the approach of his

mistress.[300]

When the revolution came, and princes and nobles wandered in indigent

exile, the disciples of Rousseau pointed in unkind triumph to the

advantage these unfortunate wretches would have had if they had not

been too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism to follow the prudent

example of Emilius in learning a craft. That Rousseau should have laid

so much stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might cause even

a king to be grateful one day that he had a trade at the end of his

arms, is sometimes quoted as a proof of his foresight of troublous

times. This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances

of such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping

school at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Roman

scrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender,

wandering from court to court in search of succour and receiving only

rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 a

considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had gone

into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.[301]

Besides all this, the propriety of being able to earn one's bread by

some kind of toil that would be useful in even the simplest societies,

flowed necessarily from every part of his doctrine of the aims of life

and the worth of character. He did, however, say, "We approach a state

of crisis and an age of revolutions," which proved true, but he added

too much when he pronounced it impossible that the great monarchies of

Europe could last long.[302] And it is certain that the only one of

the great monarchies which did actually fall would have had a far

better chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. had been as expert in the

trade of king as he was in that of making locks and bolts.

From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain social notions,

of which Rousseau had the distinction of being the most powerful

propagator. As has so often been said, his contemporaries were willing

to leave social questions alone, provided only the government would

suffer the free expression of opinion in literature and science.

Rousseau went deeper. His moral conception of individual life and

character contained in itself a social conception, and he did not

shrink from boldly developing it. The rightly constituted man suffices

for himself and is free from prejudices. He has arms, and knows how to

use them; he has few wants, and knows how to satisfy them. Nurtured in

the most absolute freedom, he can think of no worse ill than

servitude. He attaches himself to the beauty which perishes not,

limiting his desires to his condition, learning to lose whatever may

be taken away from him, to place himself above events, and to detach

his heart from loved objects without a pang.[303] He pities miserable

kings, who are the bondsmen of all that seems to obey them; he pities

false sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their empty renown;

he pities the silly rich, martyrs to their own ostentation.[304] All

the sympathies of such a man therefore naturally flow away from these,

the great of the earth, to those who lead the stoic's life perforce.

"It is the common people who compose the human race; what is not the

people is hardly worth taking into account. Man is the same in all

ranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve most

respect. Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he

marks the same passions and the same feelings in the clown as in the

man covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, and

a varnish more or less elaborately laid on. Study people of this

humble condition; you will perceive that under another sort of

language, they have as much intelligence as you, and more good sense.

Respect your species: reflect that it is essentially made up of the

collection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher were

cut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the world

would go none the worse."[305] As it is, the universal spirit of the

law in every country is invariably to favour the strong against the

weak, and him who has, against him who has not. The many are

sacrificed to the few. The specious names of justice and subordination

serve only as instruments for violence and arms for iniquity. The

ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are in

truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.[306]

This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New

Heloïsa, as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a

gravity and a directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of

a fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who has

approached Rousseau, so far as I know, in fulness and depth of

expression in proclaiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind

crowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant civilisation

with its handful of occupants, is the author of the Book of the

People. Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of his

pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and

as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness

of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity

and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from

resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us

like a tale of noble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first

sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion

and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the

tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal

man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of

the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. He

marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of

detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed.

Social or political education, that is the training which character

receives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account,

and so is the correlative process of preparation for the various

conditions and exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is too

late to take its natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsier

than the way in which Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence

and nature of his relations with his fellows. And the reason of this

was that he had never himself in the course of his ruminations,

willingly thought of Emilius as being in a condition of active social

relation, the citizen of a state.

III.

There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups of

faculties associated with each of them, which it is the business of

the instructor firmly to establish in the character of the future man.

The first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth; for the

conclusions, that is to say, of the scientific reason, comprehending

also a constant anxiety to take all possible pains that such

conclusions shall be rightly drawn. Connected with this is the

discipline of the whole range of intellectual faculties, from the

simple habit of correct observation, down to the highly complex habit

of weighing and testing the value of evidence. This very important

branch of early discipline, Rousseau for reasons of his own which we

have already often referred to, cared little about, and he throws very

little light upon it, beyond one or two extremely sensible precepts of

the negative kind, warning us against beginning too soon and forcing

an apparent progress too rapidly. The second fundamental state in a

rightly formed character is a deep feeling for things of the spirit

which are unknown and incommensurable; a sense of awe, mystery,

sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at its beginning and its

end. Here is the Religious side, and what Rousseau has to say of this

we shall presently see. It is enough now to remark that Emilius was

never to hear the name of a God or supreme being until his reason was

fairly ripened. The third state, which is at least as difficult to

bring to healthy perfection as either of the other two, is a passion

for Justice.

The little use which Rousseau made of this momentous and

much-embracing word, which names the highest peak of social virtue, is

a very striking circumstance. The reason would seem to be that his

sense of the relations of men with one another was not virile enough

to comprehend the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of the

benignant divinity of Justice. In the one place in his writings where

he speaks of justice freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which was

perhaps as much due to intellectual confusion as to lack of moral

robustness. He says excellently that "love of the human race is

nothing else in us but love of justice," and that "of all the virtues,

justice is that which contributes most to the common good of men."

While enjoining the discipline of pity as one of the noblest of

sentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness,

and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when it

accords with justice.[308] But that is all. What constitutes justice,

what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence the

extraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be invested

among the most highly civilised societies of men, we are never told,

nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility of such

questions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he would,

it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of the

natural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it was

meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations

in an expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have to

be impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other

mysteries. As a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up to

humanity, or sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he was

left without a further guide to define the marks of truly social

conduct.

This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau's

tenacity in keeping society in the background of the picture of life

which he opened to his pupil. He said, indeed, "We must study society

by men, and men by society; those who would treat politics and

morality apart will never understand anything about either one or the

other."[309] This is profoundly true, but we hardly see in the

morality which is designed for Emilius the traces of political

elements. Yet without some gradually unfolded presentation of society

as a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the idea of justice

with any hope of large fertility. You may begin at a very early time

to develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a notion of

equity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social justice

can only find room in a character that has been made spacious by

habitual contemplation of the height and breadth and close

compactedness of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, and

of the share, integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has in

the happiness or woe of other souls. And this contemplation should

begin when we prepare the foundation of all the other maturer habits.

Youth can hardly recognise too soon the enormous unresting machine

which bears us ceaselessly along, because we can hardly learn too soon

that its force and direction depend on the play of human motives, of

which our own for good or evil form an inevitable part when the ripe

years come. To one reared with the narrow care devoted to Emilius, or

with the capricious negligence in which the majority are left to grow

to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral

wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with

egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a

bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted

and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case

is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is

transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common

excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our business

to fix and root the habit of thinking of that _moral_ union, into

which, as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the _pathological_

necessities of situation that first compelled social concert, have

been gradually transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly the

primitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory of education

brings first into prominence; as if knowledge of origins were

indispensable to a right attachment to the transformed conditions of a

maturer system.

It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality upon personal

interest, perhaps even more specially than Helvétius himself. The

accusation is just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of

that social conscience, which animates a man with all the associations

of duty and right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for the

future, in face of the great body of which he finds himself a part. "I

observe," says Rousseau, "that in the modern ages men have no hold

upon one another save through force and interest, while the ancients

on the other hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of

the soul."[310] The reason was that with the ancients, supposing him

to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social conscience was so much wider

in its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of duty which is

supposed to come under the sacred power of conscience in the more

complex and less closely contained organisation of a modern state. The

neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times comprehended all the

members of his state. The neighbours of the modern preacher of duty

are either the few persons with whom each of us is brought into actual

and palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of dwellers on the

earth,--a conception that for many ages to come will remain with the

majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic and

concentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no further

than an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism.

What the young need to have taught to them in this too little

cultivated region, is that they are born not mere atoms floating

independent and apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, and

sucking up as much more than their share of nourishment as they can

seize; nor citizens of the world with no more definite duty than to

keep their feelings towards all their fellows in a steady simmer of

bland complacency; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity whose

boundaries are not set down in maps, members of a church the

handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the hieroglyphs of idle

mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands beyond death. They

need to be taught that they owe a share of their energies to the great

struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all societies in an endless

variety of forms, between new truth and old prejudice, between love of

self or class and solicitous passion for justice, between the

obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the generous mental

activity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of the social

conscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all

lands,--here is the church militant in which we should early seek to

enrol the young, and the true state to which they should be taught

that they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship. These are

the struggles with which the modern instructor should associate those

virtues of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy,

readiness to assert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves,

willingness to suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men

of old knew how to show for their gods or their sovereign. But the

ideal of Emilius was an ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul in

patience, with a suppressed intelligence, a suppressed sociality,

without a single spark of generous emulation in the courses of

strong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of heroical pursuit after so

much as one great forlorn cause.

"If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels of the famous

ancients, to desire to be another rather than himself, were this other

Socrates, were he Cato, you have missed the mark; he who begins to

make himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he forgets

himself altogether."[311] But if a man only nurses the conception of

his own personality, for the sake of keeping his own peace and

self-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly the best

thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his example

should infect others with the same base contagion. Excessive

personality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personality

that only hugs itself is under all circumstances chief among unclean

things. Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of moral enthusiasm is

fatally tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the very

book which contained so many elements of new life for a state, was at

bottom the apotheosis of social despair.

IV.

The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of a

social conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of a

strong and energetic public spirit at work around the growing

character, must be found in the study of history rightly directed with

a view to this end. It is here, in observing the long processes of

time and appreciating the slowly accumulating sum of endeavour, that

the mind gradually comes to read the great lessons how close is the

bond that links men together. It is here that he gradually begins to

acquire the habit of considering what are the conditions of wise

social activity, its limits, its objects, its rewards, what is the

capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort is the

significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off the

yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.

Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young

children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral

relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms

and ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp

of the very young.[312] He might have based his objections equally

well upon the impossibility of little children knowing the meaning of

the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a historical manual,

or realising the relations between events in bare point of time,

although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some

mechanical acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was to

appear very late in the educational course, when the youth was almost

ready to enter the world. It was to be the finishing study, from which

he should learn not sociality either in its scientific or its higher

moral sense, but the composition of the heart of man, in a safer way

than through actual intercourse with society. Society might make him

either cynical or frivolous. History would bring him the same

information, without subjecting him to the same perils. In society you

only hear the words of men; to know man you must observe his actions,

and actions are only unveiled in history.[313] This view is hardly

worth discussing. The subject of history is not the heart of man, but

the movements of societies. Moreover, the oracles of history are

entirely dumb to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping of

daily conduct, or living instruction as to the motives, aims,

caprices, capacities of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those with

whom the occasions of life bring us into contact.

It is true that at the close of the other part of his education,

Emilius was to travel and there find the comment upon the completed

circle of his studies.[314] But excellent as travel is for some of the

best of those who have the opportunity, still for many it is

valueless for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the great

majority it is impossible for lack of opportunity. To trust so much as

Rousseau did to the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm in

education unbridged.

It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau's notions about

history as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few of

them are so good, others are so characteristically narrow. "The worst

historians for a young man," he says, "are those who judge. The facts,

the facts; then let him judge for himself. If the author's judgment is

for ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, and

as soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing." Modern history is not

fit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all our

men being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intent

on brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much as

painting highly coloured portraits, which for the most part represent

nothing at all.[315] Of course such a judgment as this implies an

ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of history, which, considering

that he was living in the midst of a singular revival of historical

study, is not easy to pardon. If we are to look only to perfection of

form and arrangement, it may have been right for one living in the

middle of the last century to place the ancients in the first rank

without competitors. But the author of the Discourse upon literature

and the arts might have been expected to look beyond composition, and

the contemporary of Voltaire's _Essai sur les Moeurs_ (1754-1757)

might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the

human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Among

the ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model,

because he reports facts without judging, and omits none of the

circumstances proper for enabling us to judge of them for

ourselves--though how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has omitted,

I am unable to divine. Then come Cæsar's Commentaries and Xenophon's

Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The good Herodotus, without portraits and

without maxims, but abounding in details the most capable of

interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of historians, if

only these details did not so often degenerate into puerilities. Livy

is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhetorician.

Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art of

reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.

The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and Cæsar,

Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving

out the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten

chronicles of peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection

that historians while recounting facts omit the gradual and

progressive causes which led to them. "They often find in a battle

lost or won the reason of a revolution, which even before the battle

was already inevitable. War scarcely does more than bring into full

light events determined by moral causes, which historians can seldom

penetrate."[316] A third complaint against the study which he began by

recommending as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is that

it does not present men but actions, or at least men only in their

parade costume and in certain chosen moments, and he justly reproaches

writers alike of history and biography, for omitting those trifling

strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the true physiognomy of

character. "Remain then for ever, without bowels, without nature;

harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency, and make

yourselves despicable by force of dignity."[317] And so after all, by

a common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and

falls back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and

familiar details being banished from modern style, however true and

characteristic, men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors in

their private lives as they were tricked out upon the stage of the

world.

V.

As women are from the constitution of things the educators of us all

at the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex from the

beginning to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfect

treatise on this world-interesting subject can hardly avoid saying

something on the upbringing of women. Such a writer may start from

one of three points of view; he may consider the woman as destined to

be a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the companion of a man,

as the rearer of the young, or as an independent personality, endowed

with gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or greater number, and

capable, as in the case of men, of being trained to the worst or the

best uses. Of course to every one who looks into life, each of these

three ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think of them

effectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's appreciation

of the conditions of human progress by observing the function which he

makes most prominent. A man's whole thought of the worth and aim of

womanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal which

is silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating the

relations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable

of thinking of them as human beings, independently of these two

functions, he is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connection

with them in respect of the functions which he makes paramount.

Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developed

the theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on

man being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man

of art and manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came

to speak of women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way,

by giving equally free room in the two halves of the human race, for

the development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins by

saying, he wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a

physician nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other special

calling, but to be first and above all a man, why should not Sophie

too be brought up above all to be a human being, in whom the special

qualifications of wifehood and motherhood may be developed in their

due order? Emilius is a man first, a husband and a father afterwards

and secondarily. How can Sophie be a companion for him, and an

instructor for their children, unless she likewise has been left in

the hands of nature, and had the same chances permitted to her as were

given to her predestined mate? Again, the pictures of the New Heloïsa

would have led us to conceive the ideal of womanly station not so much

in the wife, as in the house-mother, attached by esteem and sober

affection to her husband, but having for her chief functions to be the

gentle guardian of her little ones, and the mild, firm, and prudent

administrator of a cheerful and well-ordered household. In the last

book of the Emilius, which treats of the education of girls, education

is reduced within the compass of an even narrower ideal than this. We

are confronted with the oriental conception of women. Every principle

that has been followed in the education of Emilius is reversed in the

education of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue among men, is

among women its high throne. The whole education of women ought to be

relative to men; to please them, to be useful to them, to make

themselves loved and honoured by them, to console them, to render

their lives agreeable and sweet to them,--these are the duties which

ought to be taught to women from their childhood. Every girl ought to

have the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband.

Not being in a condition to judge for themselves, they ought to

receive the decision of fathers and husbands as if it were that of the

church. And since authority is the rule of faith for women, it is not

so much a matter of explaining to them the reasons for belief, as for

expounding clearly to them what to believe. Although boys are not to

hear of the idea of God until they are fifteen, because they are not

in a condition to apprehend it, yet girls who are still less in a

condition to apprehend it, are _therefore_ to have it imparted to them

at an earlier age. Woman is created to give way to man, and to suffer

his injustice. Her empire is an empire of gentleness, mildness, and

complaisance. Her orders are caresses, and her threats are tears.

Girls must not only be made laborious and vigilant; they must also

very early be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in restraint. This

misfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from their sex, and if

ever they attempt to escape from it, they will only suffer misfortunes

still more cruel in consequence.[318]

After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind,

it is of little purpose to tell us that women have more intelligence

and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason; that men

will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will be

more skilful in reading it.[319] And it is a mere mockery to end the

matter by a fervid assurance, that in spite of prejudices that have

their origin in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what is

worthy and noble is no more foreign to women than it is to men, and

that there is nothing which under the guidance of nature may not be

obtained from them as well as from ourselves.[320] Finally there is a

complete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence as

this: "I only know for either sex two really distinct classes; one the

people who think, the other the people who do not think, and this

difference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first of

these classes ought not to marry into the other; for the greatest

charm of companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife he

is reduced to think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that

provides agreeable commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing for a father

of a family who loves his home, to be obliged to shut himself up

within himself, and to have no one about him who understands him.

Besides, how is a woman who has no habits of reflection to bring up

her children?"[321] Nothing could be more excellently urged. But how

is a woman to have habits of reflection, when she has been constantly

brought up in habits of the closest mental bondage, trained always to

consider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and her

instruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?

This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his most

serious errors, to Rousseau's want of a conception of improvement in

human affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot,

Condorcet, and others were, he would have been forced as they were, to

meditate upon changes in the education and the recognition accorded to

women, as one of the first conditions of improvement. For lack of

this, he contributed nothing to the most important branch of the

subject that he had undertaken to treat. He was always taunting the

champions of reigning systems of training for boys, with the vicious

or feeble men whom he thought he saw on every hand around him. The

same kind of answer obviously meets the current idea, which he adopted

with a few idyllic decorations of his own, of the type of the

relations between men and women. That type practically reduces

marriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorous

parody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other cause

to keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members of

a society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus it

produces a waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it is

deplorable, and besides rearing these creatures of mutilated faculty

to be the intellectually demoralising companions of the remaining half

of their own generation, makes them the mothers and the earliest and

most influential instructors of the whole of the generation that comes

after.[322] Of course, if any one believes that the existing

arrangements of a western community are the most successful that we

can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not complain of

Rousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that a

considerable portion of the change will be effected in the hitherto

neglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of the

family, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightly

sought after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, was

essentially impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornment

of a semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between the

frowzy ideal of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of a

Parisian gallant. Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake in

defending the free gratification of sensual passion, as one of the

conditions of happiness and making the most of our lives.[323] But

even this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order of

the family, than Rousseau's enervating notion of keeping women in

strict intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family as

the true school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitful

seed-ground of wise activities and new hopes for each fresh

generation.

This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary tendencies. Fortunately

for the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated the

gallery of heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his

power was in this respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in

the general spirit of the age. The aristocracy of sex was subjected to

the same destructive criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The same

feeling for justice which inspired the demand for freedom and equality

of opportunity among men, led to the demand for the same freedom and

equality of opportunity between men and women. All this was part of

the energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked with undisguised

bitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his quietest visions. He

had no conception, with his sensuous brooding imagination, never

wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of women whom

French history so often produced in the seventeenth century, and who

were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in which

devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine

candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and

intellectual uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were not

for Rousseau, a dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for none

of us any more. When we turn to modern literature from the pages in

which Fénelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that

the world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence has

passed out from our hearts?

The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women,

but an idyll. We have already seen the circumstances under which

Rousseau composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the

midst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower

poured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is

delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is

naught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it

be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic

irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's most energetic adversary

could have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental

principle, has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to the

blameless Emilius, her lord.[324]

VI.