Yet there is no hint in the New Heloisa of the socialism which Morelly and Mably flung themselves upon, as the remedy for all these desperate horrors.  Property, in every page of the New Heloisa, is held in full respect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal duty; the servant the not less honourable burden of industry and faithfulness; disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal rigour and more than paternal inflexibility.  The insurrectionary quality and effect of Rousseau’s work lay in no direct preaching or vehement denunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the one hand and sodden misery on the other.  It lay in pictures of a social state in which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries save those which are inseparable from humanity.  The contrast between the sober, cheerful, prosperous scenes of romance, and the dreariness of the reality of the field life of France,—­this was the element that filled generous souls with an intoxicating transport.

Rousseau’s way of dealing with the portentous questions that lay about that tragic scene of deserted fields, ruined hamlets, tottering brutes, and hunger-stricken men, may be gathered from one of the many traits in Julie which endeared her to that generation, and might endear her even to our own if it only knew her.  Wolmar’s house was near a great high-road, and so was daily haunted by beggars.  Not one of these was allowed to go empty away.  And Julie had as many excellent reasons to give for her charity, as if she had been one of the philosophers of whom she thought so surpassingly ill.  If you look at mendicancy merely as a trade, what is the harm of a calling whose end is to nourish feelings of humanity and brotherly love?  From the point of view of talent, why should I not pay the eloquence of a beggar who stirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who makes me shed tears over imaginary sorrows?  If the great number of beggars is burdensome to the state, of how many other professions that people encourage, may you not say the same?  How can I be sure that the man to whom I give alms is not an honest soul, whom I may save from perishing?  In short, whatever we may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to the beggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay honour to suffering humanity or to its image.[73] Nothing could be more admirably illustrative of the author’s confidence that the first thing for us to do is to satisfy our fine feelings, and that then all the rest shall be added unto us.  The doctrine spread so far, that Necker,—­a sort of Julie in a frock-coat, who had never fallen, the incarnation of this doctrine on the great stage of affairs,—­was hailed to power to ward off the bankruptcy of the state by means of a good heart and moral sentences, while Turgot with science and firmness for his resources was driven away as an economist and a philosopher.