where are the games and holidays of my youth?  Where is the concord of the townsmen, where the public brotherhood?  Where is pure joy and true mirth?  Where are peace, freedom, equity?  Let us hasten to seek all these.  With the heart of a Genevese, with a city as smiling, a landscape as full of delight, a government as just, with pleasures so true and so pure, and all that is needed to be able to relish them, how is it that we do not all adore our birth-land?  It was thus in old times that by modest feasts and homely games her citizens were called back by that Sparta which I can never quote often enough as an example for us; thus in Athens in the midst of fine art, thus in Susa in the very bosom of luxury and soft delights, the wearied Spartan sighed after his coarse pastimes and exhausting exercises” (p. 211).[354]

Any reference to this powerfully written, though most sophistical piece, would be imperfect which should omit its slightly virulent onslaught upon women and the passion which women inspire.  The modern drama, he said, being too feeble to rise to high themes, has fallen back on love; and on this hint he proceeds to a censure of love as a poetic theme, and a bitter estimate of women as companions for men, which might have pleased Calvin or Knox in his sternest mood.  The same eloquence which showed men the superior delights of the state of nature, now shows the superior fitness of the oriental seclusion of women; it makes a sympathetic reader tremble at the want of modesty, purity, and decency, in the part which women are allowed to take by the infatuated men of a modern community.

All this, again, is directed against “that philosophy of a day, which is born and dies in the corner of a city, and would fain stifle the cry of nature and the unanimous voice of the human race” (p. 131).  The same intrepid spirits who had brought reason to bear upon the current notions of providence, inspiration, ecclesiastical tradition, and other unlighted spots in the human mind, had perceived that the subjection of women to a secondary place belonged to the same category, and could not any more successfully be defended by reason.  Instead of raging against women for their boldness, their frivolousness, and the rest, as our passionate sentimentalist did, the opposite school insisted that all these evils were due to the folly of treating women with gallantry instead of respect, and to the blindness of refusing an equally vigorous and masculine education to those who must be the closest companions of educated man.  This was the view forced upon the most rational observers of a society where women were so powerful, and so absolutely unfit by want of intellectual training for the right use of social power.  D’Alembert expressed this view in a few pages of forcible pleading in his reply to Rousseau,[355] and some thirty-two years later, when all questions had become political (1790), Condorcet ably extended the same line of argument so as to make