such a man therefore naturally flow away from these, the great of the earth, to those who lead the stoic’s life perforce.  “It is the common people who compose the human race; what is not the people is hardly worth taking into account.  Man is the same in all ranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve most respect.  Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish:  he marks the same passions and the same feelings in the clown as in the man covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, and a varnish more or less elaborately laid on.  Study people of this humble condition; you will perceive that under another sort of language, they have as much intelligence as you, and more good sense.  Respect your species:  reflect that it is essentially made up of the collection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher were cut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the world would go none the worse."[305] As it is, the universal spirit of the law in every country is invariably to favour the strong against the weak, and him who has, against him who has not.  The many are sacrificed to the few.  The specious names of justice and subordination serve only as instruments for violence and arms for iniquity.  The ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are in truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.[306]

This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New Heloisa, as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a gravity and a directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of a fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation.  The only writer who has approached Rousseau, so far as I know, in fulness and depth of expression in proclaiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind crowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant civilisation with its handful of occupants, is the author of the Book of the People.  Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of his pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us like a tale of noble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the tradition.  Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal man was not made truly social.  Emilius is brought up in something of the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature.  He marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed.  Social or political education, that is the training which character receives