we may wish that the shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some of them had faded away from memory, and left us nothing to think of in connection with their names but the alertness, courage, tenacity, self-sacrifice, and faith with which they defended the cause of human emancipation and progress.  Happily the mutual hate of the Christian factions, to which liberty owes at least as much as charity owes to their mutual love, prevented a common union for burning the philosophers as well as their books.  All torments short of this they endured, and they had the great merit of enduring them without any hope of being rewarded after their death, as truly good men must always be capable of doing.

Rousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any intention of courting it in even its slightest forms.  Holland was now the great printing press of France, and when we are counting up the contributions of Protestantism to the enfranchisement of Europe, it is just to remember the indispensable services rendered by the freedom of the press in Holland to the dissemination of French thought in the eighteenth century, as well as the shelter that it gave to the French thinkers in the seventeenth, including Descartes, the greatest of them all.  The monstrous tediousness of printing a book at Amsterdam or the Hague, the delay, loss, and confusion in receiving and transmitting the proofs, and the subterranean character of the entire process, including the circulation of the book after it was once fairly printed, were as grievous to Rousseau as to authors of more impetuous temper.  He agreed with Rey, for instance, the Amsterdam printer, to sell him the Social Contract for 1000 francs.  The manuscript had then to be cunningly conveyed to Amsterdam.  Rousseau wrote it out in very small characters, sealed it carefully up, and entrusted it to the care of the chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be a native of Vaud.  In passing the barrier, the packet fell into the hands of the officials.  They tore it open and examined it, happily unconscious that they were handling the most explosive kind of gunpowder that they had ever meddled with.  It was not until the chaplain claimed it in the name of ambassadorial privilege, that the manuscript was allowed to go on its way to the press.[79] Rousseau repeats a hundred times, not only in the Confessions, but also in letters to his friends, how resolutely and carefully he avoided any evasion of the laws of the country in which he lived.  The French government was anxious enough on all grounds to secure for France the production of the books of which France was the great consumer, but the severity of its censorship prevented this.[80] The introduction of the books, when printed, was tolerated or connived at, because the country would hardly have endured to be deprived of the enjoyment of its own literature.  By a greater inconsistency the reprinting of a book which had once found admission into the country, was also