Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/783

Rh by a good many people to be the Magna Charta of the human race. "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" is still the war-cry of those, and they are many, who think, with Rousseau, that human sufferings must needs be the consequence of the artificial arrangements of society, and can all be alleviated or removed by political changes.

The intellectual impulse which may thus be fairly enough connected with the name of the Genevese dreamer has by no means spent itself in the century and a half which has elapsed since it was given. On the contrary, after a period of comparative obscurity (at least outside France), Rousseauism has gradually come to the front again, and at present promises to exert once more a very grave influence on practical life. The two essays to which I have referred are, to all appearance, very little known to the present generation of those who have followed in Rousseau's track. None the less is it true that his teachings, filtered through innumerable channels and passing under other names, are still regarded as the foundations of political science by the existing representatives of the classes who were so much attracted by them when they were put forth. My friend Mr. John Morley, who probably knows more about Rousseau and his school than anybody else, must have been entertained (so far as amusement is possible to the subject of the process of "heckling") when Rousseau's plats, the indigestibility of which he exposed so many years ago, were set before him as a wholesome British dish; the situation had a certain piquancy, which no one would appreciate more keenly.

I happened to be very much occupied upon subjects of a totally different character, and had no mind to leave them, when the narrative of this occurrence and some letters to which it gave rise, appeared in the "Times." But I have very long entertained the conviction that the revived Rousseauism of our day is working sad mischief, leading astray those who have not the time, even when they possess the ability, to go to the root of the superficially plausible doctrines which are disseminated among them. And I thought it was my duty to see whether some thirty years' training in the art of making difficult questions intelligible to audiences without much learning, but with that abundance of keen practical sense which characterizes English workmen of the better class,