and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius.  In either case is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous.  It is our business to fix and root the habit of thinking of that moral union, into which, as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the pathological necessities of situation that first compelled social concert, have been gradually transmuted.  Instead of this, it is exactly the primitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory of education brings first into prominence; as if knowledge of origins were indispensable to a right attachment to the transformed conditions of a maturer system.

It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality upon personal interest, perhaps even more specially than Helvetius himself.  The accusation is just.  Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of that social conscience, which animates a man with all the associations of duty and right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for the future, in face of the great body of which he finds himself a part.  “I observe,” says Rousseau, “that in the modern ages men have no hold upon one another save through force and interest, while the ancients on the other hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of the soul."[310] The reason was that with the ancients, supposing him to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social conscience was so much wider in its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of duty which is supposed to come under the sacred power of conscience in the more complex and less closely contained organisation of a modern state.  The neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times comprehended all the members of his state.  The neighbours of the modern preacher of duty are either the few persons with whom each of us is brought into actual and palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of dwellers on the earth,—­a conception that for many ages to come will remain with the majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic and concentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no further than an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism.

What the young need to have taught to them in this too little cultivated region, is that they are born not mere atoms floating independent and apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, and sucking up as much more than their share of nourishment as they can seize; nor citizens of the world with no more definite duty than to keep their feelings towards all their fellows in a steady simmer of bland complacency; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity whose boundaries are not set down in maps, members of a church the handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the hieroglyphs of idle mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands beyond death.  They need to be taught that they owe a share of their energies to the great