nd poor, powerful and weak, master and servant,
peasant and peer. Rousseau's conception of the primitive state of
nature, and the origin of society by a contract, may not be
historically exact--this he admits; nevertheless, it serves well,
he urges, as a working hypothesis to explain the present state of
things, and to point the way to a happier state. It exhibits property
as the confiscation of natural rights; it justifies the sacred cause
of insurrection; it teaches us to honour man as man, and the simple
citizen more than the noble, the scientific student, or the artist.
Plain morals are the only safe morals. We are told that the theatre
is a school of manners, purifying the passions; on the contrary, it
irritates and perverts them; or it offers to ridicule the man of
straightforward virtue, as Moliere was not ashamed to do in his
_Misanthrope_.

Having developed his destructive criticism against society as it is,
Rousseau would build up. In the _Contrat Social_ he would show how
freedom and government may be conciliated; how, through the
arrangements of society, man may in a certain sense return to the
law of nature. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains;"
yet social order, Rousseau declares, is sacred. Having resigned his
individual liberty by the social pact, how may man recover that
liberty? By yielding his individual rights absolutely to a
self-governing community of which he forms a part. The _volonte
generale_, expressing itself by a plurality of votes, resumes the
free-will of every individual. If any person should resist the general
will, he thereby sacrifices his true freedom, and he must be "forced
to be free." Thus the dogma of the sovereignty of the people is
formulated by Rousseau. Government is merely a delegation of power
made by the people as sovereign for the uses of the people as subjects.
In Rousseau's system, if the tyranny of the majority be established
without check or qualification, at least equality is secured, for,
in the presence of the sovereign people and its manifested will, each
individual is reduced to the level of all his fellows.

_La Nouvelle Heloise_, in the form of a romance, considers the
purification of domestic manners. Richardson's novels are followed
in the epistolary style of narration, which lends itself to the
exposition of sentiment. The story is simple in its incidents.
Saint-Preux's crime of passion against his pupil Julie resembles that
of Abelard agains