instant, like the walls of Jericho, at the blast of Rousseau's trumpet. On the contrary, in this country at any rate, it still remained the dominant theory for the next century to come. But, from the moment when this resounding blow was struck, the balance of argument was shifted from the theory which centres round the individual to that which rests upon the corporate being of the State. And a long line of thinkers, from Burke to Mazzini, deepened and strengthened —often, it must be admitted, cruelly distorted—the principles which the Contrat social had proclaimed.

This is the first and, when all is said, the most signal service which Rousseau, as political thinker, rendered to the world the overthrow of a one-sided and ill-considered theory. But that theory was rich in practical consequences : some of them, it may readily be admitted, almost wholly good; others a blend of good and evil; others again entirely mischievous. Of the first, the strong impulse it gave to individual energy may serve for an example; of the second, the doctrine of abstract rights a doctrine which, amid much wild work, did undoubtedly ring the death-knell of many odious abuses; of the third,/that total divorce between politics and morals which, from the first a glaring defect in the individualist system, became more and more mischievous as the need of reforms, affecting the moral life of the community, became more and more insistent. Of Rousseau's position towards the two first of these matters enough has been said already. On the third point a few words must be added.

Of all the practical consequences which flowed from the individualist theory, the denial of all moral functions to the State was the most fatal and the most shameful. The result is writ large in the slums of our industrial cities, in the hovels which still disgrace many of our villages. It was writ larger yet in the monstrous conditions under which our whole industrial system was allowed to grow up, and which, after a well-meaning effort on the part of Pitt-an effort

significantly defeated by the cold-blooded criticisms of Bentham-were allowed to remain unchecked and unreproved for half a century: and all this under the 'allatoning name of liberty,' of the sacred right of the master to buy his labour in the cheapest market, of parents and 'guardians' to sell the labour of their children for what it would fetch in a market which they themselves had artificially flooded.

To their honour it must be said that not a few individualists were, on certain points and at some moments, better than their creed. But to violate a principle is not to defend it; and a principle which can be made tolerable only by exceptions is no principle at all. Directly a theory is brought to this pass, the only way is to throw it over altogether.

That, on the practical side, is the historical importance of Rousseau. From beginning to end, the Contrat social, to say nothing of his other writings, is fired by the conviction that the whole duty of the State towards its members is not discharged when it has established formal equality for all before the Law. Such an equality-even assuming it to be, what in fact it never is, not merely a nominal but a real equality is little better than a mockery. It is no more than a polite way of saying that the State undertakes to keep the ring, while all its members-strong and weak, rich and poorfight it out for the survival of the fittest': and, under these conditions, the fittest' means the craftiest or the richest. Accordingly, it is Rousseau's firm conviction that the equality in question must be not merely an abstract and formal equality, but operative and real. And by this he explains himself to mean not that all citizens are to be 'absolutely equal either in power or in riches'-given the inequalities of human nature, that is an impossibility—but that none shall be so powerful as to be able to 'do violence to' either the physical, or the moral, freedom of his fellows; 'none so rich as to be able to buy another, none so poor as

to be under the necessity of selling himself to another': in a word, as he says elsewhere, that there shall be neither millionaires, nor beggars.' It is the constant tendency of things to destroy equality; it should be the constant tendency of the Law to uphold it.'

In the technical sense of the term, Rousseau was not a socialist. But, from this and other utterances, it is clear that there was in him a strong vein of socialism. And that vein appears still more plainly in the Project of a Constitution for Corsica, which was written some three or four years after the Contrat social was published. Some of his contemporaries— in particular, Morelly and Mably, both of them pronounced communists-held more extreme views than he did about property. But it may be doubted whether any of them stands so directly in the line of social reformers, whether any of them has had so deep an influence upon the course which social reform has actually followed. And the reason is that none of them had so firm a grasp of the moral aspect of the question, none of them saw so clearly how inseparable is the connexion between politics and morals. That, with the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people-but, to him, the two things went hand in hand-is his chief contribution to the political life of Europe.

Such are some of the chief debts, speculative and practical, which the world owes to the Contrat social. It is true that Rousseau's argument is often marred by inconsistencies, by exaggerations, by omissions. One instance of each shortcoming must suffice. As for inconsistencies, the very conception of Contract is a legacy from the individualist theory, and fits ill enough with the doctrine of the corporate self and the general will which it was Rousseau's mission to drive home. Again, by a gross exaggeration, the 'total surrender' of the individual is too often interpreted in such a way as to reduce him not merely, as the author claims, to a 'fraction' of the community, but to a cypher of no account

1 C.S. II. xi.; Gouvernement de Pologne, Chap. xi.

whatever in an infinitely powerful machine. Lastly, the most glaring omission is the absence, it would be more correct to say the negation, of the very idea of progress. The State is founded by one miracle, that of a Contract, which suddenly converts a herd of 'stupid and limited animals into reasoning beings and men.' It is cemented by another, that of the heaven-sent Lawgiver, who induces men, still more than half in the bondage of nature, to accept restrictions which cut athwart the first instincts of nature at every turn; who can only succeed in his task therefore, as Rousseau himself admits, on the assumption that his charges are already that which they could not become until after a long course of the discipline which he persuades them to undergo.1 Thus the only advances which Rousseau recognises are the result not of slow and ordered progress, but of sudden leaps and bounds. They are due not to the inward promptings of men's nature, but to a goad applied by some unseen power from without. And from the moment these first steps are taken, the whole subsequent history of man is a record of degeneration and decay.

To say that the above account represents Rousseau's whole mind upon these matters, that the Contract and the Lawgiver stand for nothing else in his system, or that the individual is to him nothing more than an automaton, would be a grievous injustice. So much, in fact, is plain from what has been previously said. Yet it cannot be denied that he does expose himself to these criticisms; and in particular that his views on the matter of progress are radically unsound. And this is the more disconcerting, because his hearty acceptance of the 'empire of circumstance' and historical tradition might naturally have been expected to lead to a more rational result: to exclude, at the very least, that element of the inexplicable and the miraculous which is among the first things to strike us in his theory of origins. Yet, in spite of these and other omissions, inconsistencies, 1 C.S. II. vii.

and exaggerations, the Contrat social remains the greatest work on political philosophy that had appeared since the Politics of Aristotle-the most original in conception, the richest in speculative ideas and the most fruitful in results. Such defects as have been pointed out are almost inseparable from the work of a pioneer; and it is as a pioneer that, in this as in so many other fields, we must first think of Rousseau.

Did Rousseau have any vision of the future? Did he foresee the part that the ideas for which he pleaded would play in the new birth of Europe? With his naturally despondent temperament, with no faith in progress to correct it, we may be tolerably certain that he did not. Yet, to judge from his words and acts, he did hold that western Europe was the natural home of freedom; he did hold that the small States had, at least in some measure, preserved their birthright; and, in his more exalted moments, he did look forward, with mingled hope and fear, to an era of revolutions,' in which the larger communities also, in which even France herself, might not impossibly throw off the yoke of bondage, and recover some portion at any rate of the spirit which had given undying glory to Sparta and to Rome. Within a dozen years of his death the dream had come true, though after a fashion very different, it may be, from what he had either expected or desired. What is certain is that, when that great upheaval came, friend and foe were alike agreed in hailing Rousseau as the leading figure among those who had prepared the way for the Revolution, the Contrat social as the most authentic record of its spirit.2 Who shall say that they were wrong?

1 'Nous approchons de l'état de crise et du siècle des révolutions.' Émile, Book III. (Œuvres, ii. p. 166).

2 See above, pp. xii-xiii. The pamphlet, J. J. Rousseau, Aristocrate (referred to in the note to C.S. II. ii.), should be cited as an instance to the contrary. But few books are so unconvincing: though true to the letter, it is grotesquely false to the spirit of Rousseau's teaching. It carefully suppresses all the more vital parts of his argument.