Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/173



DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE

The whole of Europe and the America of George Washington were conquered, dominated and ruled by the new ideals of social and political life evolved by Jean Jacques Rousseau. The watchmaker’s son from Geneva conceived the life of human society as a mechanical contrivance susceptible to adjustment along the abstract lines of theory; the citizen of a small community, in which a restricted number of privileged persons enjoyed the exclusive right of governing the rest in their Major and Minor Councils, he could nevertheless conceive a state controlled by all its citizens. The master of an infinite number of dialectical subtleties, a powerful and elegant champion in intellectual warfare, a writer of emotional power who carried with him in an artificial world something of the freshness of his native valleys and lake, he exercised, notwithstanding his complete ignorance of history and his deliberate self-estrangement from all practical realities, an influence without parallel in his day.

Rousseau’s democracy, applied to such different forms as the unfortunate Louis XVI’s France, governed by courtiers and a sceptical bourgeoisie, and the English provinces of North America, created by farmers of religious and gentlemanly humour, could not but end in failure. This failure is, in our present day, an ineluctable fact: we shut our eyes in order to avoid seeing the decay of