1

does not wish." And so, says Émile, "the days of my slavery were the days of my sovereignty, and I had never more authority over myself than when I was wearing the chains of the barbarians."

Émile comes into the possession of several masters, and is at first treated kindly, his owners hoping that friends will ransom him; but, as no efforts are made in his behalf, he is sent to work, and works cheerfully and well, while his companions, reared to be gentlemen and philosophers, and not to be men, only suffer and bewail their lot, many of them dying off from ill treatment. At last, Émile himself comes under a brutal overseer, who, observing him attempt to help his weaker comrades, so overloads him with work that he feels he must soon succumb under it. Seeing that, at the worst, he can only die, he foments a rebellion among his fellows, which the overseer vainly tries to lash down. This brings the owner upon the scene. Émile explains the facts to him, and appeals to his interest in such a way that the cruel overseer and Émile are made to exchange places. The latter proves an excellent overseer, and his conduct, getting noised abroad, comes to the ears of the Dey of Algiers, who desires to see him. This dey, a sensible man, who has worked his way up from the ranks, having taken a liking to him, receives him, as a gift, from his master. Thus, in every relation of life, even the most difficult and trying, Émile finds the value of

1 Here we have the germs of the Schopenhauerian doctrine that true freedom consists in renouncing all will, even the "will to live," which means that to be happy is not to be at all-the last conclusion of pessimism.

his education, and its superiority to that of other

men.

not know this.

The work breaks off at this point; but its aim and outcome are obvious enough. The providential tutor, who has evidently foreseen everything, now goes to work to bring good out of evil. Thanks to the memory of a Genevese pastor, who was on friendly terms with Rousseau in his closing years, we know, in a general way, the close. "A succession of events brings Émile to a desert island. He finds on the shore a temple adorned with flowers and delicious. fruits. He visits it every day, and every day he finds it decked out. Sophie is the priestess. Émile does What events can have brought her to these regions? The consequences of her fault and the actions which efface it. Sophie finally reveals herself. Émile learns the tissue of fraud and violence to which she has succumbed. But, unworthy henceforth to be his mate, she desires to be his slave and to serve her rival. This rival is a young person whom other events have joined to the lot of the former husband and wife. This rival marries Émile; Sophie is present at the wedding. Finally, after some days spent in the bitterness of repentance, and the torments of ever-renewed pain, all the more keen that Sophie makes it a duty and a point of honor to dissemble it, Émile and Sophie's rival confess that their marriage was only a make-believe. This pretended rival has a husband of her own, who is introduced to Sophie, and Sophie gets back her own, who not only forgives her involuntary fault, atoned for by the most cruel sufferings and redeemed by repentance, but

P

values and honors, in her, virtues of which he had had but a faint notion, before they had found opportunity to unfold to their full extent."

Thus Rousseau has proved, to his satisfaction, two things: (1) that his education according to Nature will enable men and women to stand the test of the severest adversity, defying not only suffering, but also public opinion, and (2) that the life of cities is altogether corrupt and corrupting.

What becomes of Émile and Sophie, after their reconciliation, we are not told; but perhaps we may conclude that, finding themselves self-sufficient, they conclude to end their days, living after the fashion of Robinson Crusoe, or, rather, of Franz von Kleist's Zamori and his mate, on their desert island, thus returning to a state of Nature, whose charms are heightened by the bitter experiences of civilization.1 It is just possible, however, that we have in the later books of The New Héloïse a picture of their conjugal happiness. Julie and Sophie have much in common, even their fall.

1 See Emerson's poem, The Adirondacks.

CHAPTER XI

CONCLUSION.-ROUSSEAU'S INFLUENCE

The history of the world is the judgment of the world.

Let him, the wiser man who springs
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape;
But I was born for other things.

SCHILLER.

TENNYSON, In Memoriam, cxx.

The history of mankind is a progress in the consciousness of freedom. HEGEL.

HAVING followed Rousseau's educational scheme from its beginning to its last effects upon manhood and womanhood, we have now to consider its value, to estimate its moral bearings, and to see whether it could properly lead to the results claimed for it.

That the influence of Rousseau's ideas upon educational theory and practice was, and is, great, no one will deny. In education, as in other things, his passionate rhetoric and his scorn for the conventional existent, as contrasted with the ideal simplicity of Nature, roused men from their slumbers, and made them reconsider all that they had so long blindly taken for granted and bowed before. And in so far his work was invaluable. His bitter, sneering condemnation of the corrupt, hypocritical, fashionable life of his time, with its distorting, debasing, and

dehumanizing notions of education, and his eloquent plea for a return to a life truly and simply human, and to an education based upon the principles of human nature and calculated to prepare for such a life, were righteous and well timed. His purpose was thoroughly right, and he knew how to make himself heard in giving expression to it. But, when he came to inform the world in detail how this purpose was to be carried out, he undertook a task for which he was not fitted either by natural endowment or by education. passionate, sensuous, dalliant, and immoral nature prevented him from seeing wherein man's highest being and aim consist, while his ignorance and his contempt for study, science, and philosophy closed his eyes to the historic process by which men have not only come to be what they now are, but by which their future course must be freely determined, and made him substitute for it a spurious scheme, put together out of certain vague notions of history afloat in his time and certain fancies of his own vivid imagination.

Thus, his own temperament and the reminiscences of his own capricious, undisciplined childhood led him to think that the child is a mere sensuous being, swayed by purely sensuous instincts, and inaccessible to reason or conscience, and that these, when called forth by social demands, are marks of depravation and badges of unfreedom. His utter inability to conceive of moral life, as a thoughtful adjustment of the individual to the universe, and as a self-sufficient end, for the attainment of which every sacrifice, intelligently and voluntarily made, is a gain, and ought to be a