It is therefore illogical to conclude that travel is useless because we travel ill.  But granting the usefulness of travel, does it follow that it is good for all of us?  Far from it; there are very few people who are really fit to travel; it is only good for those who are strong enough in themselves to listen to the voice of error without being deceived, strong enough to see the example of vice without being led away by it.  Travelling accelerates the progress of nature, and completes the man for good or evil.  When a man returns from travelling about the world, he is what he will be all his life; there are more who return bad than good, because there are more who start with an inclination towards evil.  In the course of their travels, young people, ill-educated and ill-behaved, pick up all the vices of the nations among whom they have sojourned, and none of the virtues with which those vices are associated; but those who, happily for themselves, are well-born, those whose good disposition has been well cultivated, those who travel with a real desire to learn, all such return better and wiser than they went.  Emile will travel in this fashion; in this fashion there travelled another young man, worthy of a nobler age; one whose worth was the admiration of Europe, one who died for his country in the flower of his manhood; he deserved to live, and his tomb, ennobled by his virtues only, received no honour till a stranger’s hand adorned it with flowers.

Everything that is done in reason should have its rules.  Travel, undertaken as a part of education, should therefore have its rules.  To travel for travelling’s sake is to wander, to be a vagabond; to travel to learn is still too vague; learning without some definite aim is worthless.  I would give a young man a personal interest in learning, and that interest, well-chosen, will also decide the nature of the instruction.  This is merely the continuation of the method I have hitherto practised.

Now after he has considered himself in his physical relations to other creatures, in his moral relations with other men, there remains to be considered his civil relations with his fellow-citizens.  To do this he must first study the nature of government in general, then the different forms of government, and lastly the particular government under which he was born, to know if it suits him to live under it; for by a right which nothing can abrogate, every man, when he comes of age, becomes his own master, free to renounce the contract by which he forms part of the community, by leaving the country in which that contract holds good.  It is only by sojourning in that country, after he has come to years of discretion, that he is supposed to have tacitly confirmed the pledge given by his ancestors.  He acquires the right to renounce his country, just as he has the right to renounce all claim to his father’s lands; yet his place of birth was a gift of nature, and in renouncing it, he renounces what is his own.  Strictly speaking, every man remains in the land of his birth at his own risk unless he voluntarily submits to its laws in order to acquire a right to their protection.