In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to be distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the great historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by the Dutch, we find the Declaration of Independence running, "that if a prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but the prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince." This is obviously divine right, fundamentally modified by a popular principle, accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and to justify after the event a measure which was dictated by urgent need for practical relief. Such a notion of the social compact was still emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can be from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood it. But it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the development of Protestant principles which produced and necessarily involved the extreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided by a suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it inevitable. Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the supreme legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the source or seat of that authority, though he admits the vague position which even Lewis XIV. did not deny, that the object of political society is the greatest good of every citizen or the whole state. In 1603 a Protestant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name, published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the profound indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.[214] Rousseau mentions his name;[215] it does not appear that he read Althusen's rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably have a place in the traditions of political theorising current at Geneva, to the spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicating episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans, had still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and had laid down such propositions as these: "Laws they are not, which public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what kind soever, are available by consent," and so on.[216] The views of the Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the foundation of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular leaders in our own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak of the French Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle that the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements, then proceeded to assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and implied, promise on the part of all who become members of a community, to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of those to whom authority has been delegated.[217] This is a unilateral view of the social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in Rousseau's idea was cardinal.

Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important difference that Locke's essay on Civil Government was the justification in theory of a revolution which had already been accomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it was by silent reference in the mind of the writer to Geneva, was yet a speculation in the air. The circumstances under which it was written gave to the propositions of Locke's piece a reserve and moderation which savour of a practical origin and a special case. They have not the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision of the corresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of those concise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine is there. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had any intention to carry them, when he said that "the legislature being only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative."[218] It may be questioned how many of the peers of that day would have assented to the proposition that the people—and did Locke mean by the people the electors of the House of Commons, or all males over twenty-one, or all householders paying rates?—could by any expression of their will abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or put an end to the legislative and executive powers of the crown. But Locke's statements are direct enough, though he does not use so terse a label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed to it.

Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likely gave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in the civil state in a pact or contract, which was represented as the foundation and first condition of the civil state. From this naturally flowed the connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied as given by the people to each new law. We need not quote passages from Locke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption between him and the author of the Social Contract. They are found in every chapter.[219] Such principles were indispensable for the defence of a Revolution like that of 1688, which was always carefully marked out by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent apologist and expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all things a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution. They represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.

Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first rank in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy of government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of either of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They were each in the theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or was able to comprehend the application of philosophic principles to their own case or to that of their adversaries.[220] Hebrew precedents and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and high church doctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the acceptance of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field of a social constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was very marked, and very singular. There were numerous differences between the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of Malmesbury. The one looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. The one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a state of war. The one believed that laws and institutions had depraved man, the other that they had improved him.[221] But these differences did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two together he made the great image of the sovereign people. Strike the crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently well for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of other obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shall point out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of the notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a definition inextricably confused: "Laws are necessary relations flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have their laws, divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws, the intelligences superior to men have their laws, the beasts have their laws, man has his laws.... There is a primitive reason, and laws are the relations to be found between that and the different beings, and the relations of these different beings among one another."[222] Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state, and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing about the other.[223] Hobbes's phraseology is much less definite than this, and shows that he had not himself wholly shaken off the same confusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a century later. But then Hobbes's account of the true meaning of sovereignty was so clear, firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any fairly perspicuous student who followed him, to apply it to the true meaning of law. And on this head of law not so much fault is to be found with Rousseau, as on the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not look long enough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their distinctive qualities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that a law is a command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this, because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumption of contract as the base of the social union.[224] But he did at all events grasp the quality of generality as belonging to laws proper, and separated them justly from what he calls decrees, which we are now taught to name occasional or particular commands.[225] This is worth mentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits of intellectual laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headed master before him, of a very considerable degree of precision of thought, however liable it was to fall into error or deficiency for want of abundant comparison with bodies of external fact. Let us now proceed to some of the central propositions of the Social Contract.

1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacles which impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are too strong for such forces as each individual can employ in order to keep himself in that state. At this point they can only save themselves by aggregation. Problem: to find a form of association which defends and protects with the whole common force the person and property of each associate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys himself, and remains as free as he was before. Solution: a social compact reducible to these words, "Each of us places in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general will; and we further receive each member as indivisible part of the whole." This act of association constitutes a moral and collective body, a public person.

The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the corollary that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them, and also therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of unmaking them. This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the dictator, or divinely commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and human nature alike were passive and infinitely pliable; they were the material out of which the legislator was to devise conventions at pleasure, without apprehension as to their suitableness either to the conditions of society among which they were to work, or to the passions and interests of those by whom they were to be carried out, and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It would be unjust to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took the consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications, and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.[226] But to base society on conventions is to impute an element of arbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make them independent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed by the nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of all the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation.

It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was at this time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in full possession of the true view of the limits set by the natural ordering of societies to the power of convention and the function of the legislators. Five years after the publication of the Social Contract, a remarkable book was written by one of the economic sect of the Physiocrats, the later of whom, though specially concerned with the material interests of communities, very properly felt the necessity of connecting the discussion of wealth with the assumption of certain fundamental political conditions. They felt this, because it is impossible to settle any question about wages or profits, for instance, until you have first settled whether you are assuming the principles of liberty and property. This writer with great consistency found the first essential of all social order in conformity of positive law and institution to those qualities of human nature, and their relations with those material instruments of life, which, and not convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual grounds, of the perpetuation of our societies.[227] This was wiser than Rousseau's conception of the lawgiver as one who should change human nature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally his own, to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him.[228] Rousseau once wrote, in a letter about Riviere's book, that the great problem in politics, which might be compared with the quadrature of the circle in geometry, is to find a form of government which shall place law above man.[229] A more important problem, and not any less difficult for the political theoriser, is to mark the bounds at which the authority of the law is powerless or mischievous in attempting to control the egoistic or non-social parts of man. This problem Rousseau ignored, and that he should do so was only natural in one who believed that man had bound himself by a convention, strictly to suppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and who based all his speculation on this pact as against the force, or the paternal authority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers founded the social union.

2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Each citizen is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relation to individuals qua individuals; he is also as an individual a member of the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the first point of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the body politic are one and the same thing.[230]

Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine enough has already been said. Its general truth as a description either of what is, or what ought to be and will be, demands an ampler discussion than there is any occasion to carry on here. We need only point out its place as a kind of intermediate dissolvent for which the time was most ripe. It breaks up the feudal conception of political authority as a property of land-ownership, noble birth, and the like, and it associates this authority widely and simply with the bare fact of participation in any form of citizenship in the social union. The later and higher idea of every share of political power as a function to be discharged for the good of the whole body, and not merely as a right to be enjoyed for the advantage of its possessor, was a form of thought to which Rousseau did not rise. That does not lessen the effectiveness of the blow which his doctrine dealt to French feudalism, and which is its main title to commemoration in connection with his name.

The social compact thus made is essentially different from the social compact which Hobbes described as the origin of what he calls commonwealths by institution, to distinguish them from commonwealths by acquisition, that is to say, states formed by conquest or resting on hereditary rule. "A commonwealth," Hobbes says, "is said to be instituted when a multitude of men do agree and covenant, every one with every one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of men shall be given by the major part the right to present the person of them all, that is to say, to be their representative; every one ... shall authorise all the actions and judgments of that man or assembly of men, in the same manner as if they were his own, to the end to live peaceably among themselves, and be protected against other men."[231] But Rousseau's compact was an act of association among equals, who also remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act of surrender on the part of the many to one or a number. The first was the constitution of civil society, the second was the erection of a government. As nobody now believes in the existence of any such compact in either one form or the other, it would be superfluous to inquire which of the two is the less inaccurate. All we need do is to point out that there was this difference. Rousseau distinctly denied the existence of any element of contract in the erection of a government; there is only one contract in the state, he said, and it is that of association.[232] Locke's notion of the compact which was the beginning of every political society is indefinite on this point; he speaks of it indifferently as an agreement of a body of free men to unite and incorporate into a society, and an agreement to set up a government.[233] Most of us would suppose the two processes to be as nearly identical as may be; Rousseau drew a distinction, and from this distinction he derived further differences.

Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the history of the ideas of the revolution, of one of the most prominent of them all, that of Fraternity. If the whole structure of society rests on an act of partnership entered into by equals on behalf of themselves and their descendants for ever, the nature of the union is not what it would be, if the members of the union had only entered it to place their liberties at the feet of some superior power. Society in the one case is a covenant of subjection, in the other a covenant of social brotherhood. This impressed itself deeply on the feelings of men like Robespierre, who were never so well pleased as when they could find for their sentimentalism a covering of neat political logic. The same idea of association came presently to receive a still more remarkable and momentous extension, when it was translated from the language of mere government into that of the economic organisation of communities. Rousseau's conception went no further than political association, as distinct from subjection. Socialism, which came by and by to the front place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity, and presented all the relations of men with one another as fixed by the same bond. Men had entered the social union as brethren, equal, and co-operators, not merely for purposes of government, but for purposes of mutual succour in all its aspects. This naturally included the most important of all, material production. They were not associated merely as equal participants in political sovereignty; they were equal participants in all the rest of the increase made to the means of human happiness by united action. Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternal association from politics, where Rousseau left it, to the wider sphere of industrial force.

It is perhaps worth notice that another famous revolutionary term belongs to the same source. All the associates of this act of union, becoming members of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, as participating in the sovereign authority.[234] The term was in familiar use enough among the French in their worst days, but it was Rousseau's sanction which marked it in the new times with a sort of sacramental stamp. It came naturally to him, because it was the name of the first of the two classes which constituted the active portion of the republic of Geneva, and the only class whose members were eligible to the chief magistracies.

3. We next have a group of propositions setting forth the attributes of sovereignty. It is inalienable.[235] It is indivisible.

These two propositions, which play such a part in the history of some of the episodes of the French Revolution, contain no more than was contended for by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times by Austin. When Hobbes says that "to the laws which the sovereign maketh, the sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws he were subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom," his notion of sovereignty is exactly that expressed by Rousseau in his unexplained dogma of the inalienableness of sovereignty. So Rousseau means no more by the dogma that sovereignty is indivisible, than Austin meant when he declared of the doctrine that the legislative sovereign powers and the executive sovereign powers belong in any society to distinct parties, that it is a supposition too palpably false to endure a moment's examination.[236] The way in which this account of the indivisibleness of sovereignty was understood during the revolution, twisted it into a condemnation of the dreaded idea of Federalism. It might just as well have been interpreted to condemn alliances between nations; for the properties of sovereignty are clearly independent of the dimensions of the sovereign unit. Another effect of this doctrine was the rejection by the Constituent Assembly of the balanced parliamentary system, which the followers of Montesquieu would fain have introduced on the English model. Whether that was an evil or a good, publicists will long continue to dispute.

4. The general will of the sovereign upon an object of common interest is expressed in a law. Only the sovereign can possess this law-making power, because no one but the sovereign has the right of declaring the general will. The legislative power cannot be exerted by delegation or representation. The English fancy that they are a free nation, but they are grievously mistaken. They are only free during the election of members of parliament; the members once chosen, the people are slaves, nay, as people they have ceased to exist.[237] It is impossible for the sovereign to act, except when the people are assembled. Besides such extraordinary assemblies as unforeseen events may call for, there must be fixed periodical meetings that nothing can interrupt or postpone. Do you call this chimerical? Then you have forgotten the Roman comitia, as well as such gatherings of the people as those of the Macedonians and the Franks and most other nations in their primitive times. What has existed is certainly possible.[238]

It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his subject should have contented himself with going back to Macedonia and Rome, instead of pointing to the sovereign states that have since become confederate with his native republic. A historian in our own time has described with an enthusiasm that equals that of the Social Contract, how he saw the sovereign people of Uri and the sovereign people of Appenzell discharge the duties of legislation and choice of executive, each in the majesty of its corporate person.[239] That Rousseau was influenced by the free sovereignty of the states of the Swiss confederation, as well as by that of his own city, we may well believe. Whether he was or not, it must always be counted a serious misfortune that a writer who was destined to exercise such power in a crisis of the history of a great nation, should have chosen his illustrations from a time and from societies so remote, that the true conditions of their political system could not possibly be understood with any approach to reality, while there were, within a few leagues of his native place, communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sense was actually alive and flourishing and at work. From them the full meaning of his theories might have been practically gathered, and whatever useful lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been made plain. As it was, it came to pass singularly enough that the effect of the French Revolution was the suppression, happily only for a time, of the only governments in Europe where the doctrine of the favourite apostle of the Revolution was a reality. The constitution of the Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a blow to the sovereignty of peoples in a true sense, as the old house of Austria or Charles of Burgundy could ever have dealt. That constitution, moreover, was directly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what it called representative democracy, for representative democracy was just what Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion.

The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesman bold enough to take into his hands the reconstruction of France, undoubtedly pointed in the direction of confederation. At one place, where he became sensible of the impotence which his assumption of a small state inflicted on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he would presently show how the good order of a small state might be united to the external power of a great people. Though he never did this, he hints in a footnote that his plan belonged to the theory of confederations, of which the principles were still to be established.[240] When he gave advice for the renovation of the wretched constitution of Poland, he insisted above all things that they should apply themselves to extend and perfect the system of federate governments, "the only one that unites in itself all the advantages of great and small states."[241] A very few years after the appearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign states arose to point the political moral. The French revolutionists missed the force alike of the practical example abroad, and of the theory of the book which they took for gospel at home. How far they were driven to this by the urgent pressure of foreign war, or whether they would have followed the same course without that interference, merely in obedience to the catholic and monarchic absolutism which had sunk so much deeper into French character than people have been willing to admit, we cannot tell. The fact remains that the Jacobins, Rousseau's immediate disciples, at once took up the chain of centralised authority where it had been broken off by the ruin of the monarchy. They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign people, and lost its spirit. They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's scheme, namely, that for order and freedom and just administration the unit should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If they had realised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchy into a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping modification of the old centralised scheme of government, they might have saved France.[242] But, once more, men interpret a political treatise on principles which either come to them by tradition; or else spring suddenly up from roots of passion.[243]

5. The government is the minister of the sovereign. It is an intermediate body set up between sovereign and subjects for their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of civil and political freedom. The members comprising it are called magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed, whether of one or of more than one, is given the name of prince. If the whole power is centred in the hands of a single magistrate, from whom all the rest hold their authority, the government is called a monarchy. If there are more persons simply citizens than there are magistrates, this is an aristocracy.[244] If more citizen magistrates than simple private citizens, that is a democracy. The last government is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the first for large ones—on the principle that the number of the supreme magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens. But there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons for exceptions to this general rule.

This common definition of the three forms of governments according to the mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, though adopted by Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate and uninstructive, without some further qualification. Aristotle, for instance, furnishes such a qualification, when he refers to the interests in which the government is carried on, whether the interest of a small body or of the whole of the citizens.[245] Montesquieu's well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government, outside of and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign. To divide governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies, and despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first the number of the sovereign, and next something else, namely, the difference between a constitutional and an absolute monarch. Then he returned to the first principle of division, and separated a republic into a government of all, which is a democracy, and a government by a part, which is aristocracy.[246] Still, to have introduced the element of law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether of one or more, was to have called attention to the fact that no single distinction is enough to furnish us with a conception of the real and vital differences which may exist between one form of government and another.[247]

The important fact about a government lies quite as much in the qualifying epithet which is to be affixed to any one of the three names, as in the name itself. We know nothing about a monarchy, until we have been told whether it is absolute or constitutional; if absolute, whether it is administered in the interests of the realm, like that of Prussia under Frederick the Great, or in the interests of the ruler, like that of an Indian principality under a native prince; if constitutional, whether the real power is aristocratic, as in Great Britain a hundred years ago, or plutocratic, as in Great Britain to-day, or popular, as it may be here fifty years hence. And so with reference to each of the other two forms; neither name gives us any instruction, except of a merely negative kind, until it has been made precise by one or more explanatory epithets. What is the common quality of the old Roman republic, the republics of the Swiss confederation, the republic of Venice, the American republic, the republic of Mexico? Plainly the word republic has no further effect beyond that of excluding the idea of a recognised dynasty.

Rousseau is perhaps less open to this kind of criticism than other writers on political theory, for the reason that he distinguishes the constitution of the state from the constitution of the government. The first he settles definitely. The whole body of the people is to be sovereign, and to be endowed alone with what he conceived as the only genuinely legislative power. The only question which he considers open is as to the form in which the delegated executive authority shall be organised. Democracy, the immediate government of all by all, he rejects as too perfect for men; it requires a state so small that each citizen knows all the others, manners so simple that the business may be small and the mode of discussion easy, equality of rank and fortune so general as not to allow of the overriding of political equality by material superiority, and so forth.[248] Monarchy labours under a number of disadvantages which are tolerably obvious. "One essential and inevitable defect, which must always place monarchic below republican government, is that in the latter the public voice hardly ever promotes to the first places any but capable and enlightened men who fill them with honour; whereas those who get on in monarchies, are for the most part small busybodies, small knaves, small intriguers, in whom the puny talents which are the secret of reaching substantial posts in courts, only serve to show their stupidity to the public as soon as they have made their way to the front. The people is far less likely to make a blunder in a choice of this sort, than the prince, and a man of true merit is nearly as rare in the ministry, as a fool at the head of the government of a republic."[249] There remains aristocracy. Of this there are three sorts: natural, elective, and hereditary. The first can only thrive among primitive folk, while the third is the worst of all governments. The second is the best, for it is aristocracy properly so called. If men only acquire rule in virtue of election, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all the other grounds of public esteem and preference, become so many new guarantees that the administration shall be wise and just. It is the best and most natural order that the wisest should govern the multitude, provided you are sure that they will govern the multitude for its advantage, and not for their own. If aristocracy of this kind requires one or two virtues less than a popular executive, it also demands others which are peculiar to itself, such as moderation in the rich and content in the poor. For this form comports with a certain inequality of fortune, for the reason that it is well that the administration of public affairs should be confided to those who are best able to give their whole time to it. At the same time it is of importance that an opposite choice should occasionally teach the people that in the merit of men there are more momentous reasons of preference than wealth.[250] Rousseau, as we have seen, had pronounced English liberty to be no liberty at all, save during the few days once in seven years when the elections to parliament take place. Yet this scheme of an elective aristocracy was in truth a very near approach to the English form as it is theoretically presented in our own day, with a suffrage gradually becoming universal. If the suffrage were universal, and if its exercise took place once a year, our system, in spite of the now obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy and nominal monarchy, would be as close a realisation of the scheme of the Social Contract as any representative system permits. If Rousseau had further developed his notions of confederation, the United States would most have resembled his type.

6. What is to be the attitude of the state in respect of religion? Certainly not that prescribed by the policy of the middle ages. The separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, indicated by Jesus Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of many subsequent generations, was in Rousseau's eyes most mischievous, because it ended in the subordination of the temporal power to the spiritual, and that is incompatible with an efficient polity. Even the kings of England, though they style themselves heads of the church, are really its ministers and servants.[251]

The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignorance of history, and need not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he lays so much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor truly good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon another world, they must necessarily be indifferent to the success or failure of such enterprises as they may take up in this.[252] In reading the Social Contract, and some other of the author's writings besides, we have constantly to interpret the direct, positive, categorical form of assertion into something of this kind—"Such and such consequences ought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or the definition of a principle, or from such and such motives." The change of this moderate form of provisional assertion into the unconditional statement that such and such consequences have actually followed, constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who tests them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and unwritten, at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took less trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience than any writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to be made on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian or ecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers of the state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of the debt of Rousseau's conception of a state to the old pagan conception. It was the main characteristic of the polities which Christian monotheism and feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recognise no such division as that between church and state, pope and emperor. Rousseau resumed the old conception. But he adjusted it in a certain degree to the spirit of his own time, and imposed certain philosophical limitations upon it. His scheme is as follows.

Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered as of three kinds. First, natural religion, without temple, altar, or rite, the true and pure theism of the natural conscience of man. Second, local, civil, or positive religion, with dogmas, rites, exercises; a theology of a primitive people, exactly co-extensive with all the rights and all the duties of men. Third, a religion like the Christianity of the Roman church, which gives men two sets of laws, two chiefs, two countries, submits them to contradictory duties, and prevents them from being able to be at once devout and patriotic. The last of these is so evidently pestilent as to need no discussion. The second has the merit of teaching men to identify duty to their gods with duty to their country; under this to die for the land is martyrdom, to break its laws impiety, and to subject a culprit to public execration is to devote him to the anger of the gods. But it is bad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and because it makes a people sanguinary and intolerant. The first of all, which is now styled a Christian theism, having no special relation with the body politic, adds no force to the laws. There are many particular objections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its not being a kingdom of this world, and this above all, that Christianity only preaches servitude and dependence.[253] What then is to be done? The sovereign must establish a purely civil profession of faith. It will consist of the following positive dogmas:—the existence of a divinity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent and foreseeing; the life to come; the happiness of the just, the chastisement of the wicked; the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. These articles of belief are imposed, not as dogmas of religion exactly, but as sentiments of sociability. If any one declines to accept them, he ought to be exiled, not for being impious, but for being unsociable, incapable of sincere attachment to the laws, or of sacrificing his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas, carries himself as if he did not believe them, let him be punished by death, for he has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied before the laws.[254]

Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to its climax that reaction against the absorption of the state in the church which had first taken a place in literature in the controversy between legists and canonists, and had found its most famous illustration in the De Monarchia of the great poet of catholicism. The division of two co-equal realms, one temporal, the other spiritual, was replaced in the Genevese thinker by what he admitted to be "pure Hobbism." This, the rigorous subordination of the church to the state, was the end, so far as France went, of the speculative controversy which had occupied Europe for so many ages, as to the respective powers of pope and emperor, of positive law and law divine. The famous civil constitution of the clergy (1790), which was the expression of Rousseau's principle as formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the revolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose most melodramatic episode had been the scene in the courtyard of Canossa.

Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all who should not believe in God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments for the deeds done in the body, and putting to death any who, after subscribing to the required profession, should seem no longer to hold it, has naturally created a very lively horror in a tolerant generation like our own, some of whose finest spirits have rejected deliberately and finally the articles of belief, without which they could not have been suffered to exist in Rousseau's state. It seemed to contemporaries, who were enthusiastic above all things for humanity and infinite tolerance, these being the prizes of the long conflict which they hoped they were completing, to be a return to the horrors of the Holy Office. Men were as shocked as the modern philosopher is, when he finds the greatest of the followers of Socrates imposing in his latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five years, to be followed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not believe in the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker.[255] And we can hardly comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws which no city ever yet received, and "fed his fancy with making many edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him, wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an academic night-sitting."[256] Rousseau's ideas fell among men who were most potent and corporeal burgomasters. In the winter of 1793 two parties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic, Voltairean party of the Commune, named improperly after Hebert, but whose best member was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party, led by Robespierre. The first had industriously desecrated the churches, and consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the public worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set up for deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries of the Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism as the crime of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed. Chaumette was not directly implicated in the proceedings which led to their fall, but he was by and by accused of conspiring with Hebert, Clootz, and the rest, "to destroy all notion of Divinity and base the government of France on atheism." "They attack the immortality of the soul," cried Saint Just, "the thought which consoled Socrates in his dying moments, and their dream is to raise atheism into a worship." And this was the offence, technically and officially described, for which Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine (April 1794), strictly on the principle which had been laid down in the Social Contract, and accepted by Robespierre.[257]

It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with the infallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should not have seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditions of human nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to the three or four articles which happened to constitute his own belief. Having once granted the general position that a citizen may be required to profess some religious faith, there is no speculative principle, and there is no force in the world, which can fix any bound to the amount or kind of religious faith which the state has the right thus to exact. Rousseau said that a man was dangerous to the city who did not believe in God, a future state, and divine reward and retribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous who did not believe both that there is only one God, and also that there are three Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and Servetus to the stake, on the one common principle that the civil magistrate is concerned with heresy. And Hebert was only following out the same doctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on preventing the publication of a book in which the author professed his belief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference with opinion leads you the whole way.

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. Prae-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 Encyclopaedia, 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 Expose des Ecoles Socialistes francaises, 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." Expose des Ecoles Socialistes francaises, 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 Considerations 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 corvee. 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] Melanges, 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 Reformateurs 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 vitae sufficientiam consequendam, et opposita declinandum. Quae 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 Encyclopaedia, 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 ecrites 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 Societes Politiques (1767). By Mercier de la Riviere. One episode in the life of Mercier de la Riviere 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 Riviere'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 Thiebault'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. Sec. 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 negatif, 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 ecrites 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. Considerations 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 emigre), 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 caeteris 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 Caesar the things that are Caesar's, but seems to discourage any inquiry whether Caesar 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 Heloisa (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 Rev. Francaise, Bk. x. c. xiv.

[258] Considerations sur le gouvernement ancien et present 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 quae 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 Declaration des droits de l'homme, Sec. 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." Sec. 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 Abbe 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] Helvetius 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.