from out of the vague and cavernous shadow in which the
common people move. Science has to feel the way towards light and
solution, to prepare, to organise. But the race owes something to one
who helped to state the problem, writing up in letters of flame at the
brutal feast of kings and the rich that civilisation is as yet only a
mockery, and did furthermore inspire a generation of men and women with
the stern resolve that they would rather perish than live on in a world
where such things can be.

CHAPTER II.

YOUTH.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712. He was of old
French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris to the famous city of
refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before Farel came thither to
establish the principles of the Reformation, and seven years before the
first visit of the more extraordinary man who made Geneva the mother
city of a new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome was the mother
city of the old. Three generations in a direct line separated Jean
Jacques from Didier Rousseau, the son of a Paris bookseller, and the
first emigrant.[1] Thus Protestant tradition in the Rousseau family
dates from the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have
exerted the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunction
with the rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens
of the ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the historians
that out of three thousand families who composed the population of
Geneva towards the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardly
fifty who before the Reformation had acquired the position of
burgess-ship. The curious set of conditions which thus planted a colony
of foreigners in the midst of a free polity, with a new doctrine and
newer discipline, introduced into Europe a fresh type of character and
manners. People declared they could recognise in the men of Geneva
neither French vivacity, nor Italian subtlety and clearness, nor Swiss
gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a vigorous energy in government,
a passion for freedom, a devotion to ingenious industries, which marked
them with a stamp unlike that of any other community.[2] Towards the
close of the seventeenth century some of the old austerity and rudeness
was sensibly modified under the influence of the great neighbouring
monarchy. One striking illustration of this tendency was the rapid
decline of the Savoyard patois in popular