land, how
after supper he called for a lute, and sang some passably bad verses.
See M. Bougy's _J.J. Rousseau_, p. 179 (Paris: 1853.)

[175] Madame de Verdelin to J.J.R. Streckeisen, ii. 532. The minister
even expressed his especial delight at being able to serve Rousseau,
so little seriousness was there now in the formalities of absolution.
_Ib._ 547.

CHAPTER III.

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

The dominant belief of the best minds of the latter half of
the eighteenth century was a passionate faith in the illimitable
possibilities of human progress. Nothing short of a general overthrow
of the planet could in their eyes stay the ever upward movement of
human perfectibility. They differed as to the details of the
philosophy of government which they deduced from this philosophy of
society, but the conviction that a golden era of tolerance,
enlightenment, and material prosperity was close at hand, belonged to
them all. Rousseau set his face the other way. For him the golden era
had passed away from our globe many centuries ago. Simplicity had fled
from the earth. Wisdom and heroism had vanished from out of the minds
of leaders. The spirit of citizenship had gone from those who should
have upheld the social union in brotherly accord. The dream of human
perfectibility which nerved men like Condorcet, was to Rousseau a sour
and fantastic mockery. The utmost that men could do was to turn their
eyes to the past, to obliterate the interval, to try to walk for a
space in the track of the ancient societies. They would hardly
succeed, but endeavour might at least do something to stay the plague
of universal degeneracy. Hence the fatality of his system. It placed
the centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational
examination of social conditions, and in careful and rational effort
to modify them. As we began by saying, it substituted a retrograde
aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. We can
hardly wonder, when we think of the intense exaltation of spirit
produced both by the perfectibilitarians and the followers of
Rousseau, and at the same time of the political degradation and
material disorder of France, that so violent a contrast between the
ideal and the actual led to a great volcanic outbreak. Alas, the
crucial difficulty of political change is to summon new force without
destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken so many
generations to erect. The Social Contr