was only effective for a time, and the roots of division were still full of vitality.  The lawfulness of the authority and the regularity of the procedure by which Rousseau had been condemned, offered convenient ground for carrying on the dispute, and its warmth was made more intense by the suggestion on the popular side that perhaps the religion of the book which the oligarchs had condemned was more like Christianity than the religion of the oligarchs who condemned it.

Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved in its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were engaged in it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his ears.  If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to fancy, they would have gone for very little in the life of the day.  But Rousseau never stood on the heights whence a strong man surveys with clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or furious moods of the world.  Such achievement is not hard for the creature who is wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the passions of men about him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not because he has measured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among the elements in which a man’s destiny is cast.  It is only hard for one who is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his fellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and self-sufficience true.  The task was too hard for Rousseau, though his patience under long persecution far surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachers of the time.  In the spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in all due forms his rights of burgess-ship and citizenship in the city and republic of Geneva.[161] And at length he broke forth against his Genevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain (1764), a long but extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas which his enemies had put forth in Tronchin’s Letters from the Country.  If any one now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal the treatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authorities of his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcible letters.  The second part of them may interest the student of political history by its account of the working of the institutions of the little republic.  We seem to be reading over again the history of a Greek city; the growth of a wealthy class in face of an increasing number of poor burgesses, the imposition of burdens in unfair proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual usurpation of legislative and administrative function (including especially the judicial) by the oligarchs, and the twisting of democratic machinery to oligarchic ends; then the growth of staseis or violent factions, followed by metabole or overthrow of the established constitution, ending in foreign intervention.  The Four Hundred at Athens would have treated any Social Contract that should have appeared in their day, just as sternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five treated the Social Contract that did appear, and for just the same reasons.