292 OX THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF MEN VII 



naturally welcomed Rousseau's brilliant develop- 

 ments of plausible first principles by the help of 

 that a priori method which saves so much trouble- 

 some investigation. 1 It just suited the " philo- 

 Bophes," male and female, interchanging their airy 

 epigrams in salons, which had about as much 

 likeness to the Academy or to the Stoa, as the 

 " philosophes " had to the philosophers of antiquity. 

 I do not forget the existence of men of the type 

 of Montesquieu or D'Argenson in the France of 

 the eighteenth century, when I take this as a fail- 

 representation of the enlightened public of that 

 day. The unenlightened public, on the other 

 hand, the people who were morally and physically 

 debased by sheer hunger ; or those, not so far 

 dulled or infuriated by absolute want, who yet 

 were maddened by the wrongs of every description 

 inflicted upon them by a political system, which 

 so far as its proper object, the welfare of the 



1 In his famous work on Ancient Law the late Sir Henry 

 Maine has remarked, \vitli great justice, that Rousseau's philo- 

 sophy "still possesses singular fascination for the looser thinkers 

 of every country ;" that "it helped most powerfully to bring 

 about the grosser disappointments of which the first French 

 Revolution was fertile," and that "it gave birth, or intense 

 stimulus, to the vices of mental habit all but universal at the 

 time, disdain of positive law, impatience of experience, and 

 the preference of ii priori to all other reasoning " (pp. 89-92). I 

 shall often have to quote Ain'iriit Liitr. The first edition of 

 this admirable book was published in 1861, but now, after twenty- 

 nine years of growing influence on thoughtful men, it seems 

 to be forgotten, or wilfully ignored, by the nick of political 

 speculators. It is enough to make one despair of the future 

 that Demos and the liourbons seem to lie much alike in their 

 want of capacity for either learning or forgetting. 



