as the theory of the most rigorous capitalist could do; it gives no encouragement, as the Discourse did, to the notion of an equality in being without property.  There is no element of communism in a principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea, based on the moral claim of men to have equality of opportunity.  This ideal stamped itself on the minds of Robespierre and the other revolutionary leaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the Church and other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market to buy in.  The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to work in the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known that the most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of the revolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the two extreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-class freeholders.  This state is not equality, but gradation, and there is undoubtedly an immense difference between the two.  Still its origin is an illustration on the largest scale in history of the force of legislation being exerted to counteract an irregularity that had become unbearable.[178]

Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more extravagant elements of the old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of the fundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors.  “If the sea,” he says in one place, “bathes nothing but inaccessible rocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will live all the more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more happily."[179] Apart from an outburst like this, the central idea remained the same, though it was approached from another side and with different objects.  The picture of a state of nature had lost none of its perilous attraction, though it was hung in a slightly changed light.  It remained the starting-point of the right and normal constitution of civil society, just as it had been the starting-point of the denunciation of civil society as incapable of right constitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal.  Equally with the Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historic method which traces the present along a line of ascertained circumstances, and seeks an improved future in an unbroken continuation of that line.  The opening words, which sent such a thrill through the generation to which they were uttered in two continents, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” tell us at the outset that we are as far away as ever from the patient method of positive observation, and as deeply buried as ever in deducing practical maxims from a set of conditions which never had any other than an abstract and phantasmatic existence.  How is a man born free?  If he is born into isolation, he perishes instantly.  If he is born into a family, he is at the moment of his birth committed to a state of social relation, in however rudimentary a form; and the more or less