"There is a history in all men's lives Figuring the nature of the times deceased; Such things become the hatch and brood of time." MEN AND THOUGHT IN MODERN HISTORY CHAPTER I. JR ROUSSEAU AND HUMAN RIGHTS. EAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU was not the first philosopher to expound doctrines concerning human equality, the fundamental rights of mankind, and the contractual nature of human society, which are the three principal political ideas associated with his name. There are more persuasive statements of those doctrines than are to be found in his writings. But he may be taken as the most famous, and perhaps by reason of the wide influence of his works the most important, of those who have penetrated beneath law, government, custom, morals, religion, to determine what it is that man in society is justified in claiming by virtue of his humanity, and what is the nature of his relation to the political organism of which he is a part. Sir Henry Maine was of opinion that "the world has not seen more than once or twice in all the course of history a literature which has exercised such prodigious influence over the minds of men, over every caste and shade of intellect, as that which emanated from Rousseau between 1749 and 1762." Born at Geneva in 1712, Rousseau was by turns an engraver, a footman, a music teacher, an ambassador's secretary, a playwright and an author of books; at heart he was always a vagabond; he was, moreover, a lover of the beautiful in nature, of not a few women, and, theoretically at least, of all mankind. He made little money out of his writings, though they gained him great reputation in his own lifetime. His philosophical romance Emile was denounced by the Archbishop of Paris as containing "abominable doctrine, erroneous, blasphemous and heretical," and to avoid arrest Rousseau fled from France and threw himself on the indulgence of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Men of education who were not affected by theological bias perceived that this thin, bent man, with refined features and eyes full of fire, who spoke with such sensitiveness about plants, flowers, mountains, rivers, waterfalls and birds, and who discussed the deepest problems of the universe with such profound conviction, was worthy of their esteem. The reigning Duke of Würtemberg consulted him about a plan for the education of his daughter. He was beloved by those of his friends who learnt to overlook his waywardness. His happiest hours were spent in the woods and fields, gathering plants, for he was a devoted botanist; and he wrote about the things of nature with intense delight. In such passages he is a Wordsworth of French prose; and indeed the poetry of Wordsworth owed very much to Rousseau's influence. He himself wrote in his declining months, "my whole life has been nothing but one long reverie divided into chapters by my daily walks." But his deistical views, which were much misrepresented, evoked mob passions and official condemnation, and he found it to be expedient to take refuge in England. There the influence of David Hume procured for him a pension from George III., which, however, he did not take for more than one year he even refused to accept the accumulated arrears long afterwards, when he was very poor-because a violent quarrel broke out between him and Hume, and Rousseau angrily spurned a benefaction obtained through one whom he now regarded as his enemy. The incident was not, in fact, to the discredit of Hume, who did not deserve the fierce onslaught which Rousseau made upon him. At this period of his life he was morbidly sensitive, over-fond of solitary brooding, suspicious to the point of misanthropy, and quite frantically egotistical. Edward Gibbon called him "an extraordinary man with imagination enough for twelve and without common sense enough for one." In England he wrote a large part of his Confessions, one of the nakedest pieces of self-revelation ever penned by a man. Returning to France, he lived for ten years in sickness and poverty, copying music for a few sous per page, dreaming, writing, arranging and poring over his botanical specimens. He died in 1778. The purely political writings of Rousseau fill two substantial volumes in the edition edited by Dr. C. E. Vaughan, and published in 1915. His earliest effort of the kind was a Discourse on Human Equality; but the principal piece was his Social Contract, which came from the press in 1762. That compact little treatise, in its forty-eight very short chapters-some of which consist of only a few oracular paragraphs, whilst one is complete in three sentencesexpounds his mature views on government and questions relative to it. When he was old and his book had earned celebrity for him he professed to be dissatisfied with it. He then said that "those who boast that they understand the whole of it are cleverer than I am. It is a book that ought to be re-written, but I have no longer the time and strength." But even the author of the Contrat Social might have spoilt it by further revision. Rousseau took pains with his work, and wrote slowly. To have elaborated the crisp, precise, well-meditated sentences might have made the book more voluminous but could hardly have added to its force. Great little books should not be minimised by inflation. If there are obscure passages it is the business of the commentators to make them plain. We may hope that they have done it; for there have been many more writers on Rousseau than there are paragraphs in the Contrat Social. Rousseau commences with a proposition and a question. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is enslaved. Many a one believes himself to be the master of others, and yet he is the greater slave than they. How has this change come about?" No man, acting compatibly with his own nature, voluntarily surrenders his liberty; a slave is only a slave because another man, or a political society, has by superior force established mastery over him. But this superior force constitutes no moral sanction. The possession of power does not confer any right upon a man to exercise authority over his fellow men. True, a man sacrifices something of what Rousseau assumes to have been the primitive freedom of his race when he lives in a community. He has to obey laws and accept conventions. But |