the most enlightened, the best informed, the wisest, the bravest in Europe.  That being so, I don’t care to ask whether it is the oldest or not.  We are not, it is true, the slaves of the prince, but his friends; nor the tyrants of the people, but their leaders.  We hold the balance true between people, and monarch.  Our first duty is towards the nation, our second towards him who governs; it is not his will but his right that we consider....  We suffer no one in the land to say God and my sword, nor more than this, God and my right."[70] All this was only putting Montesquieu into heroics, it is true, but a great many people read the romance who were not likely to read the graver book.  And there was a wide difference between the calm statement of a number of political propositions about government, and their transformation into dramatic invective against the arrogance of all social inequality that does not correspond with inequalities of worth.

There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of other parts of the book.  Moral considerations and the paramount place that they hold in Rousseau’s way of thinking, explain at once his contempt for the artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank, and his contempt for anything like discontent with the conditions of humble rank.  Simplicity of life was his ideal.  He wishes us to despise both those who have departed from it, and those who would depart from it if they could.  So Julie does her best to make the lot of the peasants as happy as it is capable of being made, without ever helping them to change it for another.  She teaches them to respect their natural condition in respecting themselves.  Her prime maxim is to discourage change of station and calling, but above all to dissuade the villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from leaving the true pleasures of his natural career for the fever and corruption of towns.[71] Presently a recollection of the sombre things that he had seen in his rambles through France crossed Rousseau’s pastoral visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in which the publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that covers the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the inflexible rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of his rural scenes.  “Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows they receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness, clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins—­these things offer a mournful spectacle to the eye:  one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think of the unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed."[72]