The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint Pierre’s essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality of Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show us, if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to make to the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract.  Saint Pierre’s fault is said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his views relative to men, to times, to circumstances; and there is something that startles us when we think whose words we are reading, in the declaration that, “whether an existing government be still that of old times, or whether it have insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally imprudent to touch it:  if it is the same, it must be respected, and if it has degenerated, that is due to the force of time and circumstance, and human sagacity is powerless.”  Rousseau points to France, asking his readers to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormous masses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after a wise general remark on the futility of political machinery without men of a certain character, he illustrates it by this scornful question:  When you see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit, and the affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget the interest of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope from bringing political affairs close to such a people, and removing them from the court to the town?[261] Indeed, there is perhaps not one of these pages which Burke might not well have owned.[262]

A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful effort after sober and laborious meditation.  Rousseau was now to find that if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there is evil in frivolous complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that is only a little serious, so there is evil in a passionate tenderness for phantoms of an imaginary world that is not serious at all.  To the pure or stoical soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the imagination must know the yoke.  Rousseau’s imagination, in no way of the strongest either as receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of his sensations.  The undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually rose within him, like a slowly welling flood.  The spectacle does not either brighten or fortify the student’s mind, yet if there are such states, it is right that those who care to speak of human nature should have an opportunity of knowing its less glorious parts.  They may be presumed to exist, though in less violent degree, in many people whom we meet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but danger in allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness, viciousness being conventionally banished to the remoter region of the third person, as to forget the presence of “the brute brain within the man’s.”  In Rousseau’s case, at any rate, it was no wicked