ROUSSEAU 



ROWELL 



a number of these towers, and a few are to 

 be found in Scotland and other European coun- 

 tries. It is supposed that they wore r 

 places of refuge in times of danger, and they 

 may havi - bell towers. 



ROUND TOWERS 



( 1 ) Round church tower at Little Saxham, 

 Scotland ; ( 2 ) round tower on Devenish Island, 



rid. 



ROUSSEAU, roo so', JEAN JACQUES (1712- 

 1778), the man of whom Napoleon said, "With- 

 out him the French Revolution would not have 

 occurred." It was the special work of Rous- 

 seau to preach democratic ideals and the equal- 

 ity of man, and 

 the great up- 

 heaval in French 

 social conditions 

 little more than 

 a decade after his 

 death was in part 

 the result of the 

 spread of these 

 doctrines. Rous- 

 seau was born of 

 Huguenot parents 

 in G< : 



zerland. His 

 mother died when 

 he was so young 

 that he retained 

 no recollection of Perful 'actors in history, 

 her, and his education was fragmentary and of 

 little value. When a mere lad he was appren- 

 ticed to an engraver, but at the age of sixteen 

 he ran away and went to the Duchy of Savoy, 

 where he made the acquaintance of Madame de 

 Warens, a lady of culture, wealth and refine- 

 ment. For the next ten years Rousseau spent 

 most of his time in the home of Madame de 



JEAN JACQUES 



ROUSSEAU 



The son of a watchmaker 

 who became one of the most 



Warens, where he came in contact with some 

 of the most brilliant intellects of Europe. 



In 1741 Rousseau went to Paris, where his 

 introduction of a new method of writing mu- 

 sic before the Royal Academy of Sciences 

 gained him admission to the houses of the most 

 intellectual families of the city. He became 

 secretary to the French minister at Venice, but 

 the condescending attitude of his employer so 

 wrought upon Rousseau's sensitive nature that 

 he gave up his position and returned to Paris, 

 where he attempted to bring suit against the 

 minister. He soon learned, however, that a 

 common man could not obtain redress from the 

 aristocracy. 



This was the turning point in Rousseau's 

 career. He now began to give attention to the 

 philosophy of government and to social con- 

 ditions, and during the next fifteen years he 

 produced a series of works which revolution- 

 ized the thought of Europe. They included 

 Discourse on Inequality; Julie, or the New 

 Heloise; The Social Contract, and Emile, the 

 last an epoch-making work on education. 



Rousseau was a man of marked contrasts, 

 a character "in whom probably beyond all 

 others, is to be found the greatest mixture of 

 strength and weakness, of truth and falsity, of 

 that which is attractive and that which is de- 

 testable." He possessed the highest ideals and 

 a remarkable power of embodying them in 

 action. In an age boastful of its intellectual 

 brilliancy and dominated by artificial life he 

 sounded the call "Back to Nature" with such 

 force that his cry was heard and heeded. Emile 

 was one of the great books in the field of edu- 

 cation, and many of the principles set forth 

 in it were adopted by Pestalozzi and Froebel. 

 The story of Rousseau's life is told in his 

 Confessions, a remarkable work in twelve vol- 

 umes. E.D.F. 



Consult Boyd's Educational Theory of Jean 

 Jacques Rousseau; Davidson's Rousseau and 

 Education According to Nature. 



ROWELL, rou'el, NEWTON WESLEY (1867- 

 ), a Canadian barrister and statesman, 

 long one of the leaders of the legal profession 

 in Ontario, and since the chief of the Liberal 

 party in the province. Rowell was born in 

 Middlesex County, Ontario. After studying 

 law he was called to the bar in 1891, and for 

 twenty years practiced with increasing success. 

 His eminence at the bar, added to his ability 

 us a speaker, brought him into political af- 

 fairs, and in 1911 he was asked to lead the 

 Ontario Liberals, who were in need of a strong 



