Rousseau further says that a whole people can never become corrupted,—­a most barefaced assertion.  Have not all nations suffered periods of corruption?  This notion, that the whole people cannot err, opens the door for any license.  It logically leads to that other idea, of the native majesty of man and the perfectibility of society, which this sophist boldly accepted.  Rousseau thought that if society were released from all law and all restraint, the good impulses and good sense of the majority would produce a higher state of virtue and wisdom than what he saw around him, since majorities could do no wrong and the universal reason could not err.  In this absurdity lay the fundamental principle of the French Revolution, so far as it was produced by the writings of philosophers.  This doctrine was eagerly seized upon by the French people, maddened by generations of oppression, poverty, and degradation, because it appealed to the pride and vanity of the masses, at that time congregated bodies of ignorance and wickedness.

Rousseau had an unbounded trust in human nature,—­that it is good and wise, and will do the best thing if left to itself.  But can anything be more antagonistic to all the history of the race?  I doubt if Rousseau had any profound knowledge, or even really extensive reading.  He was a dreamer, a theorist, a sentimentalist.  He was the arch-priest of all sensationalism in the guise of logic.  What more acceptable to the vile people of his age than the theory that in their collective capacity they could not err, that the universal reason was divine?  What more logical than its culmination in that outrageous indecency, the worship of Reason in the person of a prostitute!

Again, Rousseau’s notion of the limitations of law and the prerogative of the people, carried out, would lead to the utter subversion of central authority, and reduce nations to an absolute democracy of small communities.  They would divide and subdivide until society was resolved into its original elements.  This idea existed among the early Greek states, when a state rarely comprised more than a single city or town or village, such as might be found among the tribes of North American Indians.  The great political question in Ancient Greece was the autonomy of cities, which kept the whole land in constant wars and dissensions and quarrels and jealousies, and prevented that centralization of power which would have made Greece unconquerable and the mistress of the world.  Our wholesome American system of autonomy in local affairs, with a common authority in matters affecting the general good, is organized liberty.  But the ancient and outgrown idea of unregulated autonomy was revived by Rousseau; and though it could not be carried out by the French Revolutionists who accepted nearly all his theories, it led to the disintegration of France, and the multiplication of offices fatal to a healthy central power.  Napoleon broke up all this in his centralized despotism, even if, to keep the Revolutionary sympathy, he retained the Departments which were substituted for the ancient Provinces.