KOUSSEAU. 171 



manuscript to persons of distinction, such as the 

 Marechal de Luxembourg, and the Marechale who 

 how had the Chateau de Montmorency, and with whom 

 he formed a great intimacy, insomuch that they 

 gave him a convenient summer-house, near their 

 orangery, where he lived occasionally. The avidity 

 with which the work was at first read may be judged of 

 from this, that it was lent out by the booksellers at 

 twelve sous an hour ; and instances are cited of prin- 

 cesses ordering their carriages at night to attend an 

 opera or ball, and being found absorbed in the book at 

 two in the morning so as to send their carriages away. 

 The ' Emile' was published in the spring of 1762, 

 and the ' Contrat Social' a few weeks before it. The 

 ' Contrat,' which he appears, with the wonted soundness 

 of an author's judgment on himself, to have valued be- 

 yond all his other works, and to have elaborated the 

 most, is an irrefragable proof of his unfitness for all poli- 

 tical discussion, as his ' Discourse on Political Economy' 

 for the ' Encyclopedic' proves his equal unfitness for 

 economical studies. It is not that he bewilders him- 

 self in all the ^rrors and inconsistencies of an original 

 compact, for Locke and Somers had done so before 

 him, though he flounders in the mire very differently 

 from Locke; but he, who pretends to write in 

 modern times upon government, denies all virtue 

 to the great improvement of modern policy, the repre- 

 sentative system, declaring that the people are slaves, 

 and the state is near its ruin, when the rights and 

 duties of rulers are performed by any but the whole 

 body of the citizens (lib. iii. ch. 15); that the Eng- 

 lish "are slaves, are nothing, except a few days in 



