ey are the direct opposite and contradictory of one
another.

To clench the matter by chapter and verse, I should like to recall
what, I have said of these theories and principles in their most
perfect and most important literary version. How have I described
Rousseau's _Social Contract_? It placed, I said, the centre of social
activity elsewhere than in careful and rational examination of social
conditions, and careful and rational effort to modify them. It
substituted a retrograde aspiration for direction, and emotion for the
discovery of law. It overlooked the crucial difficulty--namely, how to
summon new force, without destroying the sound parts of a structure
which it has taken many generations to erect. Its method was geometric
instead of being historic, and hence its "desperate absurdity." Its
whole theory was constructed with an imperfect consideration of the
qualities of human nature, and with too narrow a view of society. It
ignored the great fact that government is the art of wisely dealing
with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of
hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces. It "gives us
not the least help towards the solution of any of the problems of
actual government."

Such language as all this is hardly that of a disciple to a master, in
respect of theories and principles which he is making his own for the
use of a lifetime. "There has been no attempt" [in these pages],
I said in winding up, "to palliate either the shallowness or the
practical mischievousness of the _Social Contract_. But there is
another side to its influence. We should be false to our critical
principle, if we do not recognise the historical effect of a
speculation scientifically valueless." Any writer would have stamped
himself as both unfit for the task that I had undertaken, and entirely
below the level of the highest critical standard of the day, if he had
for a moment dreamed of taking any other point of view.

As for historical hero-worship, after Carlyle's fashion, whether
with Jacobin idols or any other, it is a mood of mind that must be
uncongenial to anybody who had ever been at all under the influence
of Mill. Without being so foolish as to disparage the part played by
great men in great crises, we could have no sympathy with the barbaric
and cynical school, who make greatness identical with violence, force,
and mere iron will. Cromwell said, in vindication of himself, that
England ha