eached. Had the discussion of the
theory and of its consequences continued to be exclusively the
employment of the legal profession, there would possibly have been an
abatement of the respect which it commanded; for by this time the
_Esprit des Lois_ had appeared. Bearing in some exaggerations the
marks of the excessive violence with which its author's mind had
recoiled from assumptions usually suffered to pass without scrutiny,
yet showing in some ambiguities the traces of a desire to compromise
with existing prejudice, the book of Montesquieu, with all its
defects, still proceeded on that Historical Method before which the
Law of Nature has never maintained its footing for an instant. Its
influence on thought ought to have been as great as its general
popularity; but, in fact, it was never allowed time to put it forth,
for the counter-hypothesis which it seemed destined to destroy passed
suddenly from the forum to the street, and became the key-note of
controversies far more exciting than are ever agitated in the courts
or the schools. The person who launched it on its new career was that
remarkable man who, without learning, with few virtues, and with no
strength of character, has nevertheless stamped himself ineffaceably
on history by the force of a vivid imagination, and by the help of a
genuine and burning love for his fellow-men, for which much will
always have to be forgiven him. We have never seen in our own
generation--indeed the world has not seen more than once or twice in
all the course of history--a literature which has exercised such
prodigious influence over the minds of men, over every cast and shade
of intellect, as that which emanated from Rousseau between 1749 and
1762. It was the first attempt to re-erect the edifice of human belief
after the purely iconoclastic efforts commenced by Bayle, and in part
by our own Locke, and consummated by Voltaire; and besides the
superiority which every constructive effort will always enjoy over one
that is merely destructive, it possessed the immense advantage of
appearing amid an all but universal scepticism as to the soundness of
all foregone knowledge in matters speculative. Now, in all the
speculations of Rousseau, the central figure, whether arrayed in an
English dress as the signatory of a social compact, or simply stripped
naked of all historical qualities, is uniformly Man, in a supposed
state of nature. Every law or institution which would misbeseem this
i