Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating his conception of the kind of human creature which it is worth while to take the trouble to rear, and the only kind which pure nature will help you in perfecting.  Hence Emilius, besides being a manual for parents, contains the lines of a moral type of life and character for all others.  The old thought of the Discourses revives in full vigour.  The artifices of society, the perverting traditions of use, the feeble maxims of indolence, convention, helpless dependence on the aid or the approval of others, are routed at the first stroke.  The old regimen of accumulated prejudice is replaced, in dealing alike with body and soul, by the new system of liberty and nature.  In saying this we have already said that the exaltation of Spartan manners which runs through Rousseau’s other writings has vanished, and that every trace of the much-vaunted military and public training has yielded before the attractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home.  Public instruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no longer such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer be citizens.  Only domestic education can now help us to rear the man according to nature,—­the man who knows best among us how to bear the mingled good and ill of our life.

The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after a return to nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm by Rousseau’s famous exhortations to mothers to nourish their own little ones.  Morelly, as we have seen, had already enjoined the adoption of this practice.  So too had Buffon.  But Morelly’s voice had no resonance, Buffon’s reasons were purely physical, and children were still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau’s more passionate moral entreaties awoke maternal conscience.  “Do these tender mothers,” he exclaimed, “who, when they have got rid of their infants, surrender themselves gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what sort of usage the child in the village is receiving, fastened in his swaddling band?  At the least interruption that comes, they hang him up by a nail like a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature remains thus crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs.  Every child found in this position had a face of purple; as the violent compression of the chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all went to the head, and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just because it had not strength enough to cry out."[278] But in Rousseau, as in Beethoven, a harsh and rugged passage is nearly always followed by some piece of exquisite and touching melody.  The force of these indignant pictures was heightened and relieved by moving appeal to all the tender joys of maternal solicitude, and thoughts of all that this solicitude could do for the happiness of the home, the father, and the young.  The attraction of domestic life is pronounced the best antidote to the ill living of the time.  The bustle of children, which you now think so importunate, gradually becomes delightful; it brings father and mother nearer to one another; and the lively animation of a family added to domestic cares, makes the dearest occupation of the wife, and the sweetest of all his amusements to the husband.  If women will only once more become mothers again, men will very soon become fathers and husbands.[279]