are only as flowers in comparison with the other evils that have deluged the earth.  “It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who contrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely surnamed Augustus.  It was not Marot who produced the St. Bartholomew massacre, nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the wars of the Fronde.  What really makes, and always will make, this world into a valley of tears, is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable insolence of men, from Kouli Khan, who did not know how to read, down to the custom-house clerk, who knows nothing but how to cast up figures.  Letters nourish the soul, they strengthen its integrity, they furnish a solace to it,”—­and so on in the sense, though without the eloquence, of the famous passage in Cicero’s defence of Archias the poet.[169] All this, however, in our time is in no danger of being forgotten, and will be present to the mind of every reader.  The only danger is that pointed out by Rousseau himself:  “People always think they have described what the sciences do, when they have in reality only described what the sciences ought to do."[170]

What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau’s piece has a positive as well as a negative side, and presents, in however vehement and overstated a way, a truth which the literary and speculative enthusiasm of France in the eighteenth century, as is always the case with such enthusiasm whenever it penetrates either a generation or an individual, was sure to make men dangerously ready to forget.[171] This truth may be put in different terms.  We may describe it as the possibility of eminent civic virtue existing in people, without either literary taste or science or speculative curiosity.  Or we may express it as the compatibility of a great amount of contentment and order in a given social state, with a very low degree of knowledge.  Or finally, we may give the truth its most general expression, as the subordination of all activity to the promotion of social aims.  Rousseau’s is an elaborate and roundabout manner of saying that virtue without science is better than science without virtue; or that the well-being of a country depends more on the standard of social duty and the willingness of citizens to conform to it, than on the standard of intellectual culture and the extent of its diffusion.  In other words, we ought to be less concerned about the speculative or scientific curiousness of our people than about the height of their notion of civic virtue and their firmness and persistency in realising it.  It is a moralist’s way of putting the ancient preacher’s monition, that they are but empty in whom is not the wisdom of God.  The importance of stating this is in our modern era always pressing, because there is a constant tendency on the part of energetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate their energies on a minute specialty, leaving public affairs and interests to their own