At the congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at the enormous place taken by the hardly visible Geneva in the midst of negotiations involving momentous issues for the whole habitable globe, called out that it was after all no more than a grain of sand.  But he was not wrong who made bold to reply, “Geneva is no grain of sand; ’tis a grain of musk that perfumes all Europe."[202] We have to remember that it was at all events as a grain of musk ever pervading the character of Rousseau.  It happened in later years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but however bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood, and Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin.  We may perhaps conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant spectacle and memory of a community, free, energetic, and prosperous, whose institutions had been shaped and whose political temper had been inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully than what he had picked up about Lycurgus and Lacedaemon, to give him a turn for Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy modifiableness of the social structure.  This, however, is less certain than that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the circumstances of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to freedom, order, citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part of him on the reflective side, and which made themselves visible whenever he exchanged the life of beatified sense for moods of speculative energy, “Never,” he says, “did I see the walls of that happy city, I never went into it, without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, due to excess of tender emotion.  At the same time that the noble image of freedom elevated my soul, those of equality, of union, of gentle manners, touched me even to tears."[203] His spirit never ceased to haunt city and lake to the end, and he only paid the debt of an owed acknowledgment in the dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to the republic of Geneva.[204] It was there it had its root.  The honour in which industry was held in Geneva, the democratic phrases that constituted the dialect of its government, the proud tradition of the long battle which had won and kept its independence, the severity of its manners, the simplicity of its pleasures,—­all these things awoke in his memory as soon as ever occasion drew him to serious thought.  More than that, he had in a peculiar manner drawn in with the breath of his earliest days in this theocratically constituted city, the vital idea that there are sacred things and objects of reverence among men.  And hence there came to him, though with many stains and much misdirection, the most priceless excellence of a capacity for devout veneration.