on of essential
national qualities in the document of the constitution has affected
our subsequent history little or not at all.

But such was not the case in a society still under feudal oppression.
Fictions like the contract theory of government, exploded by the sound
sense of Burke; political generalizations like certain paragraphs of
the French Declaration of Rights, every item of which now and here
reads like a platitude but was then and there a vivid revolutionary
novelty; emotional yearnings for some vague Utopia--all fell into
fruitful soil and produced a rank harvest, mostly of straw and stalks,
although there was some sound grain. The thought of the time was a
powerful factor in determining the course and the quality of events
throughout all Europe. No nation was altogether unmoved. The center of
agitation was in France, although the little Calvinistic state of
Geneva brought forth the prophet and writer of the times.

Rousseau was a man of small learning but great insight. Originating
almost nothing, he set forth the ideas of others with incisive
distinctness, often modifying them to their hurt, but giving to the
form in which he wrote them an air of seductive practicability and
reality which alone threw them into the sphere of action. Examining
Europe at large, he found its social and political institutions so
hardened and so unresponsive that he declared it incapable of movement
without an antecedent general crash and breaking up. No laws, he
reasoned, could be made because there were no means by which the
general will could express itself, such was the rigidity of
absolutism and feudalism. The splendid studies of Montesquieu, which
revealed to the French the eternal truths underlying the
constitutional changes in England, had enlightened and captivated the
best minds of his country, but they were too serious, too cold, too
dry to move the quick, bright temperament of the people at large. This
was the work of Rousseau. Consummate in his literary power, he laid
the ax at the root of the tree in his fierce attack on the prevailing
education, sought a new basis for government in his peculiar
modification of the contract theory, and constructed a substitute
system of sentimental morals to supplant the old authoritative one
which was believed to underlie all the prevalent iniquities in
religion, politics, and society.

His entire structure lacked a foundation either in history or in
reason. But the popular f