ginary primitive
happiness of mankind, the glorification of an ideal of simplicity and
innocence,--supposed to have been the ideal of early politics--the
restoration of a popular sovereignty built up on natural rights alleged to
have been lost: these were the articles of faith Rousseau preached with
passionate conviction in his "Discourses" and in the "Social Contract."
Individual man was born naturally "free," and had become debased and
enslaved by laws and civilisation. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is
in chains," is the opening sentence of the "Social Contract." This liberty
and equality of primitive man was acclaimed as a law of nature by
eighteenth century writers in France, and to some extent in England too.
Pope could write, "The state of nature was the reign of God." Instead of a
forward movement the business of man was to recover the lost happiness of
the childhood of the world, to bring back a golden age of liberty and
equality. Locke's "state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and
preservation" is to be the desire of nations, and with wistful yearning
Rousseau's disciples gazed on the picture painted by their master.

It was all false, all a fiction, all mischievous and misleading, this
doctrine of a return to an ideal happiness of the past, and it was the most
worthless portion of Locke's work. To-day it is easy for us to say this,
when we have learnt something of the struggle for existence in nature,
something of the habits and customs of primitive man, and something of
man's upward growth. But Locke and Rousseau were born before our limited
knowledge of the history of man and his institutions had been learnt;
before science, with patient research, had revealed a few incidents in the
long story of man's ascent. Even the history of Greece and Rome, as
Rousseau read it, was hopelessly inaccurate and incomplete. Therefore,
while we can see the fallacy in all the eighteenth century teaching
concerning the natural happiness of uncivilised man, we must at the same
time remember it as a doctrine belonging to a pre-scientific era. The
excuse in France, too, for its popularity was great. Civilisation weighed
heavily on the nation. The whole country groaned under a misrule, and
commerce and agriculture were crippled by the system of taxation. It seemed
that France was impoverished to maintain a civilisation that only a few,
and they not the most useful members of the community, could enjoy.

How mankind ha