sight of happiness, and if he can help to bring it about, this is an additional reason for sharing it.  I do not assume that when he sees the unhappy he will merely feel for them that barren and cruel pity which is content to pity the ills it can heal.  His kindness is active and teaches him much he would have learnt far more slowly, or he would never have learnt at all, if his heart had been harder.  If he finds his comrades at strife, he tries to reconcile them; if he sees the afflicted, he inquires as to the cause of their sufferings; if he meets two men who hate each other, he wants to know the reason of their enmity; if he finds one who is down-trodden groaning under the oppression of the rich and powerful, he tries to discover by what means he can counteract this oppression, and in the interest he takes with regard to all these unhappy persons, the means of removing their sufferings are never out of his sight.  What use shall we make of this disposition so that it may re-act in a way suited to his age?  Let us direct his efforts and his knowledge, and use his zeal to increase them.

I am never weary of repeating:  let all the lessons of young people take the form of doing rather than talking; let them learn nothing from books which they can learn from experience.  How absurd to attempt to give them practice in speaking when they have nothing to say, to expect to make them feel, at their school desks, the vigour of the language of passion and all the force of the arts of persuasion when they have nothing and nobody to persuade!  All the rules of rhetoric are mere waste of words to those who do not know how to use them for their own purposes.  How does it concern a schoolboy to know how Hannibal encouraged his soldiers to cross the Alps?  If instead of these grand speeches you showed him how to induce his prefect to give him a holiday, you may be sure he would pay more attention to your rules.

If I wanted to teach rhetoric to a youth whose passions were as yet undeveloped, I would draw his attention continually to things that would stir his passions, and I would discuss with him how he should talk to people so as to get them to regard his wishes favourably.  But Emile is not in a condition so favourable to the art of oratory.  Concerned mainly with his physical well-being, he has less need of others than they of him; and having nothing to ask of others on his own account, what he wants to persuade them to do does not affect him sufficiently to awake any very strong feeling.  From this it follows that his language will be on the whole simple and literal.  He usually speaks to the point and only to make himself understood.  He is not sententious, for he has not learnt to generalise; he does not speak in figures, for he is rarely impassioned.