ontract and the law of
resistance, and owes his influence to what was extreme and systematic,
his later writings are loaded with sound political wisdom. He owes
nothing to the novelty or the originality of his thoughts. Taken
jointly or severally, they are old friends, and you will find them in
the school of Wolf that just preceded, in the dogmatists of the Great
Rebellion and the Jesuit casuists who were dear to Algernon Sidney, in
their Protestant opponents, Duplessis Mornay, and the Scots who had
heard the last of our schoolmen, Major of St. Andrews, renew the
speculations of the time of schism, which decomposed and dissected the
Church and rebuilt it on a model very propitious to political
revolution, and even in the early interpreters of the Aristotelian
Politics which appeared just at the era of the first parliament.

Rousseau's most advanced point was the doctrine that the people are
infallible. Jurieu had taught that they can do no wrong: Rousseau
added that they are positively in the right. The idea, like most
others, was not new, and goes back to the Middle Ages. When the
question arose what security there is for the preservation of
traditional truth if the episcopate was divided and the papacy vacant,
it was answered that the faith would be safely retained by the masses.
The maxim that the voice of the people is the voice of God is as old
as Alcuin; it was renewed by some of the greatest writers anterior to
democracy, by Hooker and Bossuet, and it was employed in our day by
Newman to prop his theory of development. Rousseau applied it to the
State.

The sovereignty of public opinion was just then coming in through the
rise of national debts and the increasing importance of the public
creditor. It meant more than the noble savage and the blameless South
Sea islander, and distinguished the instinct that guides large masses
of men from the calculating wisdom of the few. It was destined to
prove the most serious of all obstacles to representative government.
Equality of power readily suggests equality of property; but the
movement of Socialism began earlier, and was not assisted by Rousseau.
There were solemn theorists, such as Mably and Morelly, who were
sometimes quoted in the Revolution, but the change in the distribution
of property was independent of them.

A more effective influence was imported from Italy; for the Italians,
through Vico, Giannone, Genovesi, had an eighteenth century of their
own. Sardi