This is what separates Rousseau here and throughout from Senancour, Byron, and the rest.  He consummates the triumph of will, while their reigning mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence of will, the little worth of common aims, the fretting triviality of common rules.  Franklin or Cobbett might have gloried in the regularity of Madame de Wolmar’s establishment.  The employment of the day was marked out with precision.  By artful adjustment of pursuits, it was contrived that the men-servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants, except at their repasts.  The women, namely, a cook, a housemaid, and a nurse, found their pastime in rambles with their mistress and her children, and lived mainly with them.  The men were amused by games for which their master made regulated provision, now for summer, now for winter, offering prizes of a useful kind for prowess and adroitness.  Often on a Sunday night all the household met in an ample chamber, and passed the evening in dancing.  When Saint Preux inquired whether this was not a rather singular infraction of puritan rule, Julie wisely answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe duties, that if you add to them the further burden of indifferent forms, it must always be at the cost of the essential.[62] The servants were taken from the country, never from the town.  They entered the household young, were gradually trained, and never went away except to establish themselves.

The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian, that such households do not generally exist, because neither masters nor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations of unbroken order and friendliness.  Perhaps not; and masters and servants will be more and more removed from the possession of such qualities, and their relations further distant from such order and friendliness, if writers cease to press the beauty and serviceableness of a domesticity that is at present only possible in a few rare cases, or to insist on the ugliness, the waste of peace, the deterioration of character, that are the results of our present system.  Undoubtedly it is much easier for Rousseau to draw his picture of semi-patriarchal felicity, than for the rest of us to realise it.  It was his function to press ideals of sweeter life on his contemporaries, and they may be counted fortunate in having a writer who could fulfil this function with Rousseau’s peculiar force of masterly persuasion.  His scornful diatribes against the domestic police of great houses, and the essential inhumanity of the ordinary household relations, are both excellent and of permanent interest.  There is the full breath of a new humaneness in them.  They were the right way of attacking the decrepitude of feudal luxury and insolence, and its imitation among the great farmers-general.  This criticism of the conditions of domestic service marks a beginning of true democracy, as distinguished from the mere pulverisation of aristocracy.  It rests on the claim of the common people to an equal consideration, as equally useful and equally capable of virtue and vice; and it implies the essential priority of social over political reform.