edy for all these desperate
horrors. Property, in every page of the New Heloisa, is held in full
respect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal duty; the
servant the not less honourable burden of industry and faithfulness;
disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal rigour and
more than paternal inflexibility. The insurrectionary quality and
effect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct preaching or vehement
denunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the one
hand and sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a social
state in which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries save
those which are inseparable from humanity. The contrast between the
sober, cheerful, prosperous scenes of romance, and the dreariness of
the reality of the field life of France,--this was the element that
filled generous souls with an intoxicating transport.

Rousseau's way of dealing with the portentous questions that lay about
that tragic scene of deserted fields, ruined hamlets, tottering
brutes, and hunger-stricken men, may be gathered from one of the many
traits in Julie which endeared her to that generation, and might
endear her even to our own if it only knew her. Wolmar's house was
near a great high-road, and so was daily haunted by beggars. Not one
of these was allowed to go empty away. And Julie had as many excellent
reasons to give for her charity, as if she had been one of the
philosophers of whom she thought so surpassingly ill. If you look at
mendicancy merely as a trade, what is the harm of a calling whose end
is to nourish feelings of humanity and brotherly love? From the point
of view of talent, why should I not pay the eloquence of a beggar who
stirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who makes me shed tears
over imaginary sorrows? If the great number of beggars is burdensome
to the state, of how many other professions that people encourage, may
you not say the same? How can I be sure that the man to whom I give
alms is not an honest soul, whom I may save from perishing? In short,
whatever we may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to the
beggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay honour to suffering
humanity or to its image.[73] Nothing could be more admirably
illustrative of the author's confidence that the first thing for us to
do is to satisfy our fine feelings, and that then all the rest shall
be added unto us. The doctrine spread so far, that Necke