generations, was not in the naked mental state which the Jacobins postulated.  It was not prepared to accept free divorce, the substitution of friendship for marriage, the displacement of the family by the military school, and the other articles in Saint Just’s programme of social renovation.  The twelve apostles went among people who were morally swept and garnished, and they went armed with instruments proper to seize the imagination of their hearers.  All moral reformers seek the ignorant and simple, poor fishermen in one scene, labourers and women in another, for the good reason that new ideas only make way on ground that is not already too heavily encumbered with prejudices.  But France in 1793 was in no condition of this kind.  Opinion in all its spheres was deepened by an old and powerful organisation, to a degree which made any attempt to abolish the opinion, as the organisation appeared to have been abolished, quite hopeless until the lapse of three or four hundred years had allowed due time for dissolution.  After all it was not until the fourth century of our era that the work of even the twelve apostles began to tell decisively and quickly.  As for the Lycurgus of whom the French chattered, if such a personality ever existed out of the region of myth, he came to his people armed with an oracle from the gods, just as Moses did, and was himself regarded as having a nature touched with divinity.  No such pretensions could well be made by any French legislator within a dozen years or so of the death of Voltaire.

Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as the desperate absurdity of the assumptions of the Social Contract, which constituted the power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the hands of men who surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts.  The Social Contract is worked out precisely in that fashion which, if it touches men at all, makes them into fanatics.  Long trains of reasoning, careful allegation of proofs, patient admission on every hand of qualifying propositions and multitudinous limitations, are essential to science, and produce treatises that guide the wise statesman in normal times.  But it is dogma that gives fervour to a sect.  There are always large classes of minds to whom anything in the shape of a vigorously compact system is irresistibly fascinating, and to whom the qualification of a proposition, or the limitation of a theoretic principle is distressing or intolerable.  Such persons always come to the front for a season in times of distraction, when the party that knows its own aims most definitely is sure to have the best chance of obtaining power.  And Rousseau’s method charmed their temperament.  A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarily slow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance with a speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has a magical potency over men who insist on having politics and theology drawn out in exact theorems like those of Euclid.