has carried marks of a deranged
understanding: for where there is no sound reason, there can be no real
virtue; and madness is ever vicious and malignant.

The Assembly proceeds on maxims the very reverse of these. The Assembly
recommends to its youth a study of the bold experimenters in morality.
Everybody knows that there is a great dispute amongst their leaders,
which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all
resemble him. His blood they transfuse into their minds and into their
manners. Him they study; him they meditate; him they turn over in all
the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day or the
debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his
life he is their canon of Polycletus; he is their standard figure of
perfection. To this man and this writer, as a pattern to authors and to
Frenchmen, the foundries of Paris are now running for statues, with the
kettles of their poor and the bells of their churches. If an author had
written like a great genius on geometry, though his practical and
speculative morals were vicious in the extreme, it might appear that in
voting the statue they honored only the geometrician. But Rousseau is a
moralist or he is nothing. It is impossible, therefore, putting the
circumstances together, to mistake their design in choosing the author
with whom they have begun to recommend a course of studies.

Their great problem is, to find a substitute for all the principles
which hitherto have been employed to regulate the human will and action.
They find dispositions in the mind of such force and quality as may fit
men, far better than the old morality, for the purposes of such a state
as theirs, and may go much further in supporting their power and
destroying their enemies. They have therefore chosen a selfish,
flattering, seductive, ostentatious vice, in the place of plain duty.
True humility, the basis of the Christian system, is the low, but deep
and firm foundation of all real virtue. But this, as very painful in the
practice, and little imposing in the appearance, they have totally
discarded. Their object is to merge all natural and all social sentiment
in inordinate vanity. In a small degree, and conversant in little
things, vanity is of little moment. When full-grown, it is the worst of
vices, and the occasional mimic of them all. It makes the whole man
false. It leaves nothing sincere or trustworthy about him. His best
qualiti