ed in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love of
law and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he had
been accidentally removed to a strange city that was in active ferment
with ideas that were the direct abnegation of all these. In Paris the
idea of a God was either repudiated along with many other ancestral
conceptions, or else it was fatally entangled with the worst
superstition and not seldom with the vilest cruelties. The idea of
freedom was unknown, and the idea of law was benumbed by abuses and
exceptions. The idea of country was enfeebled in some and displaced in
others by a growing passion for the captivating something styled
citizenship of the world. If Rousseau could have ended his days among
the tranquil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva might possibly never have
come back to him. For it depends on circumstance, which of the chances
that slumber within us shall awake, and which shall fall unroused with
us into the darkness. The fact of Rousseau ranking among the greatest of
the writers of the French language, and the yet more important fact that
his ideas found their most ardent disciples and exploded in their most
violent form in France, constantly make us forget that he was not a
Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the spirit of his native
city. He was thirty years old before he began even temporarily to live
in France: he had only lived there some five or six years when he wrote
his first famous piece, so un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas of
the Social Contract were in germ before he settled in France at all.

There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva
has a fundamental association with each of them. The first was that
against the paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and of this
Calvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the materialism
of the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau. The
diplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth part of the world. At
the congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at the enormous place taken by
the hardly visible Geneva in the midst of negotiations involving
momentous issues for the whole habitable globe, called out that it was
after all no more than a grain of sand. But he was not wrong who made
bold to reply, "Geneva is no grain of sand; 'tis a grain of musk that
perfumes all Europe."[202] We have to remember that it was at all events
as a grain of mus