markably bold in their criticism, but he had not been
punished for them because the ministers always looked upon him as a
kind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed to
say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened to
what he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not, and
hence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on French
affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled with a
country that did not concern him. "It surprised me," says Rousseau,
"that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier," but this
coincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with the
discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise nobody versed in study
of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough to
dislike to admit it.

The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint
Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality
of Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show
us, if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to
make to the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre's
fault is said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his views
relative to men, to times, to circumstances; and there is something that
startles us when we think whose words we are reading, in the declaration
that, "whether an existing government be still that of old times, or
whether it have insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally
imprudent to touch it: if it is the same, it must be respected, and if
it has degenerated, that is due to the force of time and circumstance,
and human sagacity is powerless." Rousseau points to France, asking his
readers to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormous
masses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after a
wise general remark on the futility of political machinery without men
of a certain character, he illustrates it by this scornful question:
When you see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit,
and the affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget the
interest of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope
from bringing political affairs close to such a people, and removing
them from the court to the town?[261] Indeed, there is perhaps not one
of these pages which Burke might not well have owned.[262]

A violent and pr