ced to set in order a huge mass of boundlessly
varied, intricate, and unmanageable facts. It is not, however, at all
worth while to extend such criticism further than suffices to show how
little his piece can stand the sort of questions which may be put to it
from a scientific point of view. Nothing that Rousseau had to say about
the state of nature was seriously meant for scientific exposition, any
more than the Sermon on the Mount was meant for political economy. The
importance of the Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehement
denunciation of the existing social state. To the writer the question
of the origin of inequality is evidently far less a matter at heart,
than the question of its results. It is the natural inclination of one
deeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in his own time and country,
to extol some other time or country, of which he is happily ignorant
enough not to know the drawbacks. Rousseau wrote about the savage state
in something of the same spirit in which Tacitus wrote the Germania. And
here, as in the Discourse on the influence of science and art upon
virtue, there is a positive side. To miss this in resentment of the
unscientific paradox that lies about it, is to miss the force of the
piece, and to render its enormous influence for a generation after it
was written incomprehensible. We may always be quite sure that no set of
ideas ever produced this resounding effect on opinion, unless they
contained something which the social or spiritual condition of the men
whom they inflamed made true for the time, and true in an urgent sense.
Is it not tenable that the state of certain savage tribes is more
normal, offers a better balance between desire and opportunity, between
faculty and performance, than the permanent state of large classes in
western countries, the broken wreck of civilisation?[194] To admit this
is not to conclude, as Rousseau so rashly concluded, that the movement
away from the primitive stages has been productive only of evil and
misery even to the masses of men, the hewers of wood and the drawers of
water; or that it was occasioned, and has been carried on by the
predominance of the lower parts and principles of human nature. Our
provisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank absence of outlook
or hope of the millions who come on to the earth that greets them with
no smile, and then stagger blindly under dull burdens for a season, and
at last are shovelled silently back u