le, and monarch. Our first duty is towards the nation, our second
towards him who governs; it is not his will but his right that we
consider.... We suffer no one in the land to say _God and my sword_,
nor more than this, _God and my right_."[70] All this was only
putting Montesquieu into heroics, it is true, but a great many people
read the romance who were not likely to read the graver book. And
there was a wide difference between the calm statement of a number of
political propositions about government, and their transformation into
dramatic invective against the arrogance of all social inequality that
does not correspond with inequalities of worth.

There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of
other parts of the book. Moral considerations and the paramount place
that they hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once his
contempt for the artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank,
and his contempt for anything like discontent with the conditions of
humble rank. Simplicity of life was his ideal. He wishes us to despise
both those who have departed from it, and those who would depart from
it if they could. So Julie does her best to make the lot of the
peasants as happy as it is capable of being made, without ever helping
them to change it for another. She teaches them to respect their
natural condition in respecting themselves. Her prime maxim is to
discourage change of station and calling, but above all to dissuade
the villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from leaving the true
pleasures of his natural career for the fever and corruption of
towns.[71] Presently a recollection of the sombre things that he had
seen in his rambles through France crossed Rousseau's pastoral
visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in which the
publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that covers
the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the inflexible
rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of his
rural scenes. "Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows they
receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness,
clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins--these things offer a mournful
spectacle to the eye: one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think of
the unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed."[72]

Yet there is no hint in the New Heloisa of the socialism which Morelly
and Mably flung themselves upon, as the rem