Our wants are so numerous, the necessity of satisfying them occurs so frequently, engages so much of our attention,- continued sensations occupying us in such a manner, by the mere images of objects, or tyrannizing over us so much by their presence, that it is still surprising that we can employ ourselves about so many things. What a considerable portion of time lost to the mind! In representing to ourselves the species as a great individual being, ought we to be astonished at the slowness of its progress in every way, and at the almost eternal infancy in which it seems to remain? I am frightened at the immensity of time that has been required to bring us only where we are.

Enter into details: see every man, always confused by varied and successive impressions,- he acquires without enjoying, adopts without examining, and judges mechanically. Inattention and habit maintain and encourage ignorance and error; every thing counteracts the discovery of truth, and dilatory experience cannot cause it to be admitted but in the process of time.

3275

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

(1712-1778)

ERHAPS if an impartial jury were called upon to decide on the evidence what thousand words of modern prose have made the most history, the verdict would be for (or against!) the sixth chapter of Rousseau's first book on the "Social Contract." It is the most definite formulation made, prior to 1776, of the idea that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." The problem of government, as Rousseau stated it, is "to find a form of association which may defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, coalescing with all, may, nevertheless, obey only himself and remain as free as before."

John Locke in England and Rousseau in France, gave the intellectual impulse to the movement which resulted in the two great revolutions of the eighteenth century. The Republic of America and the Republic of France might have come without them through evolution, had it been possible for evolution to do its work against the obstructive forces of eighteenth-century "Toryism." With the eighteenth century as it was, however, nothing might have been accomplished except through the power of great intellects moved to radicalism by such uncompromising analyses of fundamental principles as those in which Rousseau swept away the claim that one class of men can rightly assert a title from Heaven to rule. Since the "Social Contract » appeared, "Divine Right," as a title to govern, has been abandoned by all publicists who make any serious pretension to logic. When "Higher Civilization" is substituted for "Divine Right" in later times, Rousseau's definition is evaded rather than combated. Indeed, the corollary from his definition, "that governments are instituted to secure rights rather than to support privilege,» and that "they derive their just powers from the governed,” has not been met with any other logic than that of the status quo ante, in the presence of which it remains still to the minds of many practicalminded men what it was called by Rufus Choate,-"a glittering gen

erality." It is one of those definitions, however, which, when once formulated, become to thousands who do not possess the power of analysis in their own intellectual right, as sacred as a religious creed. The American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution which followed it, and the American Civil War, alike testify the terrible power of a definition which first and finally reduces a great, worldmoving idea to its simplest terms. Had Rousseau not impregnated the mind of civilization with the idea that "just government » must be representative in order to be just, the plea that American slavery made the slave contented and happy might have been accepted by the public opinion of the world,-which, however, could not entertain it when Rousseau was represented in the nineteenth century by Garrison and Lincoln, as he had been in the eighteenth by Jefferson, Danton, and Wilberforce. It is singular that this remarkable man should not only dominate thus the politics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but that the theories of education which he formulated in his "Émile" should, at the opening of the twentieth century, still remain the governing impulse in all that is most distinctively modern in the training of youth for citizenship. He inspired Fröbel in Germany, as he did the founders of the public school system in America. It is hard to find in history any one who, by purely intellectual force, has exerted a power over the course of events which can be compared to that attributable with certainty to Rousseau. It is impossible to account for his possession of it on any other theory than that his genuine benevolence overcame weaknesses and vices which otherwise would have vitiated his influence and nullified his work. No life was ever more unequal to the demand of a great intellect than his. The highest benevolence seemed not incompatible in him with moral weakness verging close on depravity,— as when, while writing on Virtue and Philosophy, he sent his own children one after another to the foundling asylum. Perhaps what often verges on "moral idiocy" in him may be accounted for to a very great extent by the circumstances of his birth and early education. At Geneva, where he was born (June 28th, 1712), his father was without social standing, and, as his mother died in giving him birth, he was left without the training which gives intellectual power its stimulus and complement of moral force. His father "mended watches and taught dancing" for a living, and Jean Jacques himself "was successively an engraver's apprentice, a lackey, a student in a seminary, a clerk, a private tutor, and a music copyist," before he became a great author. Where the least said about his morals is the soonest mended, this, perhaps, is sufficient to suggest the lack of stability of character which seems to be the radical infirmity of his nature.

The astonishing versatility of his genius, the powerful analyt

ical faculty which characterized his intellect, and the incessant activity of his mind,- these are rather to be wondered at than accounted for. Of the scores of books and pamphlets he left behind, his "Confessions" and the "New Héloïse" are the most generally read, while the "Social Contract » and the "Émile » are the most influential. Of the great power both these works have exerted for progress there can be no question. There is a reasonable question, however, if writing in the spirit which comes only of a virtuous life, Rousseau might not have accomplished far greater results through the same intellectual energy exerted in modes which would have made those he influenced more willing to trust the power of demonstrated truth, than to triumph suddenly and violently at the expense of those whose weakness or selfishness made them its opponents.

W. V. B.

MAN

THAT MEN ARE BORN FREE

AN is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a one believes himself the master of others, and yet he is a greater slave than they. How has this change come about? I do not know. What can render it legitimate? I believe that I can settle this question.

If I considered only force and the results that proceed from it, I should say that so long as a people is compelled to obey and does obey, it does well; but that, so soon as it can shake off the yoke and does shake it off, it does better; for, if men recover their freedom by virtue of the same right by which it was taken away, either they are justified in resuming it, or there was no justification for depriving them of it. But the social order is a sacred right which serves as a foundation for all others. This right, however, does not come from nature. It is, therefore, based on conventions. The question is to know what these conventions "Social Contract,» Book I., Chap. i.

are.

I

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

ASSUME that men have reached a point at which the obstacles that endanger their preservation in the state of nature overcome by their resistance the forces which each individual can exert with a view to maintaining himself in that state. Then

this primitive condition can no longer subsist, and the human race would perish unless it changed its mode of existence.

Now, as men cannot create any new forces, but only combine and direct those that exist, they have no other means of selfpreservation than to form by aggregation a sum of forces which may overcome the resistance, to put them in action by a single motive power, and to make them work in concert.

The sum of forces can be produced only by the combination of many; but the strength and freedom of each man being the chief instruments of his preservation, how can he pledge them without injuring himself, and without neglecting the cares which he owes to himself? This difficulty, applied to my subject, may be expressed in these terms:

"To find a form of association which may defend and protect, with the whole force of the community, the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, coalescing with all, may, nevertheless, obey only himself, and remain as free as before." Such is the fundamental problem of which the social contract furnishes the solution.

The clauses of this contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would render them vain and ineffectual; so that, although they have never perhaps been formally enunciated, they are everywhere the same, everywhere tacitly admitted and recognized, until, the social pact being violated, each man regains his original rights and recovers his natural liberty, whilst losing the conventional liberty for which he renounced it.

These clauses, rightly understood, are reducible to one only, viz., the total alienation to the whole community of each associate with all his rights; for, in the first place, since each gives himself up entirely, the conditions are equal for all; and, the conditions being equal for all, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.

Further, the alienation being made without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and an individual associate can no longer claim anything; for, if rights were left to individuals, since there would be no common superior who could judge between them and the public, each, being on some point his own judge, would soon claim to be so on all; the state of nature would still subsist, and the association would necessarily become. tyrannical or useless.