its goal until men, grown completely self-conscious, can undertake to conduct their lives in view of an all-embracing, freely-set purpose, it is evident that a social contract in Rousseau's sense, a contract extending to all the relations of life, can come only at the end, and by no means at the beginning, of social life. It is the failure to grasp this simple result of historic induction that makes it possible seriously to construct Utopias and, at the same time, makes their failure almost certain. An Utopia is simply a proposal to impose one man's notion of the conditions. that would insure his happiness upon his fellows, an arrangement which, instead of securing their freedom, would completely enthral them. Every Utopian, from Plato down, places himself in the ruling class. Imagine how Rousseau would feel as a member of the warrior class in Plato's Republic, or as an operative in Mr. Bellamy's industrial commonwealth! In all history, we know but of one man who succeeded in imposing his private ideal upon his race and, through it, upon a large portion of the world; and that was Muhammad; but we must not forget that he did so by means of supernatural claims, and that the results have been fanaticism and slavery.1

1 Rousseau has some excellent remarks on the efforts of Peter the Great to force his ideal upon Russia. "The Russians," he says, "will never be truly civilized, because they were so too soon. Peter had an imitative genius: he had not true genius, such as creates and makes everything out of nothing. Some of the things he did were good; the greater part were ill-timed. He saw that his people was barbarian; he did not see that it was not ripe for civilization. He tried to civilize it, when he ought to have inured it to war. He wished at once to make Germans and Englishmen, when he ought to have begun by making Russians. He

next.

No good can ever be done to a people by trying to force it into any mould prepared for it from without. Even if for a time it submits to the mould, it will, sooner or later, either burst it or perish through cramping. In a healthy state, peoples feel their way forward, so to speak, spontaneously, forming new ideals at every step, and freely realizing them at the All that the enthusiastic lover of his kind, the wise reformer, can do, is to hasten this process by diffusing such knowledge and culture as shall give a deeper and wider meaning to experience, and so make possible higher ideals. Any attempt to force the process, or to substitute for its slowly, but freely, attained results, a rigid, unprogressive scheme, such as Utopias are sure to be, can lead to nothing but slavery and death. Equally fatal to liberty and well-being are all attempts to induce a people to alter its whole social system in favor of some scheme that seems to promise greater material prosperity, greater ease, comfort, and dalliance. This is the mistake made by the socialists and many other well-meaning, but illadvised, reformers of the present day. This was the mistake made by Rousseau, whose Social Contract may be said to be the bible of both socialism and anarchism.1 Holding that the bonds of civil society were, or might be, created by a contract, he concluded that they were dissolved when the terms of that contract were violated, and that thereupon the contract

prevented his subjects from becoming what they might have been, by persuading them that they were what they were not. . . . The Russian empire will try to subjugate Europe, and will itself be subjugated."

1 See below, Cap. XI,

ants or their representatives could revert to their original condition of savage individualism, with freedom to slay each other to their heart's content, and, when tired of that, to return a battered remnant to civic life, by making a new contract to suit their tastes. The premise of this argument being false, the conclusion was necessarily so likewise; but this was not the worst. Rousseau forgot three most important things: (1) to state the precise terms of the social contract; (2) to determine what would constitute a violation of these terms; (3) to say who should have the right of declaring authoritatively when they were violated. On his principles it would be entirely competent for any body of men, at any time, to declare the contract broken, and to revert to anarchy.

Thus the Social Contract is mistaken in theory, and pernicious, or impossible, in practice. It rests upon a false conception of human nature and its laws, and places, as a fact, at the beginning of social evolution, what can only be an ideal to be gradually approached as an end. It places the perfection of human nature in a condition of savage isolation, governed by pure caprice, and regards all advance toward moral liberty, through social organization, as a decline and a degeneration. It makes liberty and equality conditions prior and external to civilization, instead of, as they are, the highest results of the social process. It teaches men to regard social restraints and institutions as something artificial and conventional, which it is their duty to cast aside, whenever they can, in favor of savage freedom, with its animal immediateness and spontaneity. If it reluctantly admits the necessity

of a social order, it regards this, not as a means of moral training in conscious self-control, which is true freedom, but as a contrivance for conserving animal spontaneity and caprice.

From Rousseau's views regarding the truly important in life and the value of social organization, we can easily divine the character of his educational system. With that we shall begin to deal in the next chapter.

CHAPTER V

ROUSSEAU'S EDUCATIONAL THEORIES

INFANCY

(Emile, Bk. I.)

To live alone, one must be a god or a beast.

ARISTOTLE, Politics.

An illustrious author says that it is only the bad man that is alone. I say it is only the good man that is alone.

ROUSSEAU, Émile, Bk. II.

The whole universe can be only a point for an oyster.

Ibid.

We have seen that Rousseau's social and political theories had their origin in two things: (1) a group of notions, of naturalistic and individualistic tendency, current in his day; (2) his own sensuous, indolent, dalliant nature, which continually craved a life of bovine satisfaction, unencumbered by thought, or sense of duty. Seizing upon the distinction between natural and civic life, and temperamentally hating the latter, he proceeded, in direct opposition to Hobbes and Locke, to decry it, as slavish and depraved, and to glorify the former, as alone free and healthy. In a word, he set up his own dreams of dalliance as the ideal of human life. Such a course will always be open and tempting to men of his impatient, undisciplined character, so long as we persist in drawing a hard and fast distinction between the life of Nature