PERHAPS if an impartial jury were called upon to decide on the evidence what thousand words of modern prose have made the most history, the verdict would be for (or against!) the sixth chapter of Rousseau’s first book on the “Social Contract.” It is the most definite formulation made, prior to 1776, of the idea that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The problem of government, as Rousseau stated it, is “to find a form of association which may defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, coalescing with all, may, nevertheless, obey only himself and remain as free as before.”

  John Locke in England and Rousseau in France, gave the intellectual impulse to the movement which resulted in the two great revolutions of the eighteenth century. The Republic of America and the Republic of France might have come without them through evolution, had it been possible for evolution to do its work against the obstructive forces of eighteenth-century “Toryism.” With the eighteenth century as it was, however, nothing might have been accomplished except through the power of great intellects moved to radicalism by such uncompromising analyses of fundamental principles as those in which Rousseau swept away the claim that one class of men can rightly assert a title from Heaven to rule. Since the “Social Contract” appeared, “Divine Right,” as a title to govern, has been abandoned by all publicists who make any serious pretension to logic. When “Higher Civilization” is substituted for “Divine Right” in later times, Rousseau’s definition is evaded rather than combated. Indeed, the corollary from his definition, “that governments are instituted to secure rights rather than to support privilege,” and that “they derive their just powers from the governed,” has not been met with any other logic than that of the status quo ante, in the presence of which it remains still to the minds of many practical-minded men what it was called by Rufus Choate,—“a glittering generality.” It is one of those definitions, however, which, when once formulated, become to thousands who do not possess the power of analysis in their own intellectual right, as sacred as a religious creed. The American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution which followed it, and the American Civil War, alike testify the terrible power of a definition which first and finally reduces a great, world-moving idea to its simplest terms. Had Rousseau not impregnated the mind of civilization with the idea that “just government” must be representative in order to be just, the plea that American slavery made the slave contented and happy might have been accepted by the public opinion of the world,—which, however, could not entertain it when Rousseau was represented in the nineteenth century by Garrison and Lincoln, as he had been in the eighteenth by Jefferson, Danton, and Wilberforce. It is singular that this remarkable man should not only dominate thus the politics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but that the theories of education which he formulated in his “Émile” should, at the opening of the twentieth century, still remain the governing impulse in all that is most distinctively modern in the training of youth for citizenship. He inspired Fröbel in Germany, as he did the founders of the public school system in America. It is hard to find in history any one who, by purely intellectual force, has exerted a power over the course of events which can be compared to that attributable with certainty to Rousseau. It is impossible to account for his possession of it on any other theory than that his genuine benevolence overcame weaknesses and vices which otherwise would have vitiated his influence and nullified his work. No life was ever more unequal to the demand of a great intellect than his. The highest benevolence seemed not incompatible in him with moral weakness verging close on depravity,—as when, while writing on Virtue and Philosophy, he sent his own children one after another to the foundling asylum. Perhaps what often verges on “moral idiocy” in him may be accounted for to a very great extent by the circumstances of his birth and early education. At Geneva, where he was born (June 28th, 1712), his father was without social standing, and, as his mother died in giving him birth, he was left without the training which gives intellectual power its stimulus and complement of moral force. His father “mended watches and taught dancing” for a living, and Jean Jacques himself “was successively an engraver’s apprentice, a lackey, a student in a seminary, a clerk, a private tutor, and a music copyist,” before he became a great author. Where the least said about his morals is the soonest mended, this, perhaps, is sufficient to suggest the lack of stability of character which seems to be the radical infirmity of his nature. The astonishing versatility of his genius, the powerful analytical faculty which characterized his intellect, and the incessant activity of his mind,—these are rather to be wondered at than accounted for. Of the scores of books and pamphlets he left behind, his “Confessions” and the “New Héloïse” are the most generally read, while the “Social Contract” and the “Émile” are the most influential. Of the great power both these works have exerted for progress there can be no question. There is a reasonable question, however, if writing in the spirit which comes only of a virtuous life, Rousseau might not have accomplished far greater results through the same intellectual energy exerted in modes which would have made those he influenced more willing to trust the power of demonstrated truth, than to triumph suddenly and violently at the expense of those whose weakness or selfishness made them its opponents.