n end. Agriculture entailed the
origin of property in land. Moral and social inequality were introduced
by the man who first enclosed a piece of land and said, This is mine,
and found people simple enough to believe him. He was the founder of
civil society.

The general argument amounts to this: Man's faculty of improving himself
is the source of his other faculties, including his sociability, and
has been fatal to his happiness. The circumstances of his primeval life
favoured the growth of this faculty, and in making man sociable they
made him wicked; they developed the reason of the individual and thereby
caused the species to deteriorate. If the process had stopped at
a certain point, all would have been well; but man's capacities,
stimulated by fortuitous circumstances, urged him onward, and leaving
behind him the peaceful Arcadia where he should have remained safe and
content, he set out on the fatal road which led to the calamities of
civilisation. We need not follow Rousseau in his description of those
calamities which he attributes to wealth and the artificial conditions
of society. His indictment was too general and rhetorical to make much
impression. In truth, a more powerful and comprehensive case against
civilised society was drawn up about the same time, though with a very
different motive, by one whose thought represented all that was opposed
to Rousseau's teaching. Burke's early work, A Vindication of Natural
Society, [Footnote: A.D. 1756.] was written to show that all the
objections which Deists like Bolingbroke urged against artificial
religion could be brought with greater force against artificial society,
and he worked out in detail a historical picture of the evils of
civilisation which is far more telling than Rousseau's generalities.
[Footnote: In his admirable edition of The Political Writings of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1915), p. 89, Vaughan suggests that in Rousseau's
later works we may possibly detect "the first faint beginnings" of
a belief in Progress, and attributes this to the influence of
Montesquieu.]

3.

If civilisation has been the curse of man, it might seem that the
logical course for Rousseau to recommend was its destruction. This was
the inference which Voltaire drew in Timon, to laugh the whole theory
out of court. But Rousseau did not suggest a movement to destroy all
the libraries and all the works of art in the world, to put to death or
silence all the savants, to pull down t