At a first glance, it may seem that there was compensation for the triumph of sentiment over reason, and that if France was ruined by the dreams in which Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was saved by the fervour and resoluteness of the aspirations with which he filled the most generous of her children.  No wide movement, we may be sure, is thoroughly understood until we have mastered both its material and its ideal sides.  Materially, Rousseau’s work was inevitably fraught with confusion because in this sphere not to be scientific, not to be careful in tracing effects to their true causes, is to be without any security that the causes with which we try to deal will lead to the effects that we desire.  A Roman statesman who had gone to the Sermon on the Mount for a method of staying the economic ruin of the empire, its thinning population, its decreasing capital, would obviously have found nothing of what he sought.  But the moral nature of man is redeemed by teaching that may have no bearing on economics, or even a bearing purely mischievous, and which has to be corrected by teaching that probably goes equally far in the contrary direction of moral mischief.  In the ideal sphere, the processes are very complex.  In measuring a man’s influence within it we have to balance.  Rousseau’s action was undoubtedly excellent in leading men and women to desire simple lives, and a more harmonious social order.  Was this eminent benefit more than counterbalanced by the eminent disadvantage of giving a reactionary intellectual direction?  By commending irrational retrogression from active use of the understanding back to dreamy contemplation?

To one teacher is usually only one task allotted.  We do not reproach want of science to the virtuous and benevolent Channing; his goodness and effusion stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did, to sentimental but humane aspiration.  It was this kind of influence that formed the opinion which at last destroyed American slavery.  We owe a place in the temple that commemorates human emancipation, to every man who has kindled in his generation a brighter flame of moral enthusiasm, and a more eager care for the realisation of good and virtuous ideals.

III.

The story of the circumstances of the publication of Emilius and the persecution which befell its author in consequence, recalls us to the distinctively evil side of French history in this critical epoch, and carries us away from light into the thick darkness of political intrigue, obscurantist faction, and a misgovernment which was at once tyrannical and decrepit.  It is almost impossible for us to realise the existence in the same society of such boundless license of thought, and such unscrupulous restraint upon its expression.  Not one of Rousseau’s three chief works, for instance, was printed in France.  The whole trade in books was a sort of contraband, and was carried