recepts suited for the immediate
wants of the day the doctrines which found their first utterance in the
glow of his voluminous eloquence; and the fall of the Bastille showed
the first vibrations of the earthquake which is still shaking the soil
of Europe.

It is easy, then, to give a logical meaning to Rousseau's return to
nature. The whole inanimate world, so ran his philosophy, is perfect,
and shows plainly the marks of the Divine workmanship. All evil really
comes from man's abuse of freewill. Mountains, and forests, and seas,
all objects which have not suffered from his polluting touch, are
perfect and admirable. Let us fall down and worship. Man, too, himself,
as he came from his Creator's hands, is perfect. His 'natural'--that is,
original--impulses are all good; and in all men, in all races and
regions of the earth, we find a conscience which unerringly
distinguishes good from evil, and a love of his fellows which causes man
to obey the dictates of his conscience. And yet the world, as we see it,
is a prison or a lazar-house. Disease and starvation make life a burden,
and poison the health of the coming generations; those whom fortune has
placed above the masses make use of their advantages to harden their
hearts, and extract means of selfish enjoyment from the sufferings of
their fellow-creatures. What is the source of this heartrending discord?
The abuse of men's freewill; that is, of the mysterious power which
enables us to act contrary to the dictates of nature. What is the best
name for the disease which it generates? Luxury and corruption--the two
cant objects of denunciations which were as popular in the
pre-revolutionary generation as attacks upon sensationalism and
over-excitement at the present day. And what, then, is the mode of
cure? The return to nature. We are to make history run backwards, to
raze to its foundations the whole social and intellectual structure that
has been erected by generations of corrupt and selfish men. Everything
by which the civilised man differs from some theoretical pretension is
tainted with a kind of original sin. Political institutions, as they
exist, are conveniences for enabling the rich to rob the poor, and
churches contrivances by which priests make ignorance and superstition
play into the hands of selfish authority. Level all the existing order,
and build up a new one on principles of pure reason; give up all the
philosophical and theological dogmas, which have been