y established," he
wrote, "then I see unequal fortunes; and from these unequal fortunes
must there not necessarily result different and opposed interests, all
the vices of riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation of
intelligence, the corruption of civil manners?" and so forth.[196] In
his most important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's notions
developed, with a logic from which their first author shrunk, either
from fear, or more probably from want of firmness and consistency as a
reasoner. "It is to equality that nature has attached the preservation
of our social faculties and happiness: and from this I conclude that
legislation will only be taking useless trouble, unless all its
attention is first of all directed to the establishment of equality in
the fortune and condition of citizens."[197] That is to say not only
political equality, but economic communism. "What miserable folly, that
persons who pass for philosophers should go on repeating after one
another that without property there can be no society. Let us leave
illusion. It is property that divides us into two classes, rich and
poor; the first will alway prefer their fortune to that of the state,
while the second will never love a government or laws that leave them in
misery."[198] This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau's diffuse
and rhetorical exposition of social necessity had prepared France some
twenty years before. After powerfully helping the process of general
dissolution, it produced the first fruits specifically after its own
kind some twenty years later in the system of Baboeuf.[199]

The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men
who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems to
exhaust one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of the
subversion of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis.
Within a few months of his profession of profound lament that the first
man who made a claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as the
arch foe of the race, he speaks most respectfully of property as the
pledge of the engagements of citizens and the foundation of the social
pact, while the first condition of that pact is that every one should be
maintained in peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him.[200] We need
not impute the apparent discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was always
apt to think in a slipshod manner. He sensibly though illogically
accepted