We should, however, be false to our critical principle, if we did not recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless.  There has been no attempt to palliate either the shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract.  But there is another side to its influence.  It was the match which kindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe.  Not in France merely, but in Germany as well, its phrases became the language of all who aspired after freedom.  Schiller spoke of Rousseau as one who “converted Christians into human beings,” and the Robbers (1778) is as if it had been directly inspired by the doctrine that usurped sovereignty restores men to their natural rights.  Smaller men in the violent movement which seized all the youth of Germany at that time, followed the same lead, if they happened to have any feeling about the political condition of their enslaved countries.

There was alike in France and Germany a craving for a return to nature among the whole of the young generation.[271] The Social Contract supplied a dialect for this longing on one side, just as the Emilius supplied it on another.  Such parts in it as people did not understand or did not like, they left out.  They did not perceive its direction towards that “perfect Hobbism,” which the author declared to be the only practical alternative to a democracy so austere as to be intolerable.  They grasped phrases about the sovereignty of the people, the freedom for which nature had destined man, the slavery to which tyrants and oppressors had brought him.  Above all they were struck by the patriotism which shines so brightly in every page, like the fire on the altar of one of those ancient cities which had inspired the writer’s ideal.

Yet there is a marked difference in the channels along which Rousseau’s influence moved in the two countries.  In France it was drawn eventually into the sphere of direct politics.  In Germany it inspired not a great political movement, but an immense literary revival.  In France, as we have already said, the patriotic flame seemed extinct.  The ruinous disorder of the whole social system made the old love of country resemble love for a phantom, and so much of patriotic speech as survived was profoundly hollow.  Even a man like Turgot was not so much a patriot as a passionate lover of improvement, and with the whole school of which this great spirit was the noblest and strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had replaced the narrower sentiment which had inflamed antique heroism.  Rousseau’s exaltation of the Greek and Roman types in all their concentration and intensity, touches mortals of commoner mould.  His theory made the native land what it had been to the citizens of earlier date, a true centre of existence, round which all the interests of the community, all its pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with entire singleness of convergence, just as religious faith is the centre of existence to a church.  It was the virile and patriotic energy thus evoked which presently saved France from partition.