of an outer world in his life; he was fain to hurry back from it to the real world of his dreams.  If any man called practical is tempted to despise this dreaming creature, as he fares in his chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one making that journey through France less than thirty years later might have seen the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from the land to which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of improvement, and inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of toilers with eyes blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with passionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thought of as justice and right.  And this was what Rousseau both partially foresaw and helped to prepare,[98] while the common politicians, like Choiseul or D’Aiguillon, played their poor game—­the elemental forces rising unseen into tempest around them.

He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at the house of an old friend at Yverdun,[99] where native air, the beauty of the spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired all weariness and fatigue.[100] Friends at Geneva wrote letters of sincere feeling, joyful that he had not followed the precedent of Socrates too closely by remaining in the power of a government eager to destroy him.[101] A post or two later brought worse news.  The Council at Geneva ordered not only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to be publicly burnt, and issued a warrant of arrest against their author, if he should set foot in the territory of the republic (June 19).[102] Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the free Government which he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could have condemned him unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristic manner to chide severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken his part.[103] Within a fortnight this blow was followed by another.  His two books were reported to the senate of Berne, and Rousseau was informed by one of the authorities that a notification was on its way admonishing him to quit the canton within the space of fifteen days.[104] This stroke he avoided by flight to Motiers, a village in the principality of Neuchatel (July 10), then part of the dominions of the King of Prussia.[105] Rousseau had some antipathy to Frederick, both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, and because his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under foot respect for the natural law and not a few human duties.  He had composed a verse to the effect that Frederick thought like a philosopher and acted like a king, philosopher and king notoriously being words of equally evil sense in his dialect.  There was also a passage in Emilius about Adrastus, King of the Daunians, which was commonly understood to mean Frederick, King of the Prussians.  Still Rousseau was acute enough to know that mean passions usually only rule the weak,