r,--a sort of
Julie in a frock-coat, who had never fallen, the incarnation of this
doctrine on the great stage of affairs,--was hailed to power to ward
off the bankruptcy of the state by means of a good heart and moral
sentences, while Turgot with science and firmness for his resources
was driven away as an economist and a philosopher.

At a first glance, it may seem that there was compensation for the
triumph of sentiment over reason, and that if France was ruined by the
dreams in which Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was saved
by the fervour and resoluteness of the aspirations with which he
filled the most generous of her children. No wide movement, we may be
sure, is thoroughly understood until we have mastered both its
material and its ideal sides. Materially, Rousseau's work was
inevitably fraught with confusion because in this sphere not to be
scientific, not to be careful in tracing effects to their true causes,
is to be without any security that the causes with which we try to
deal will lead to the effects that we desire. A Roman statesman who
had gone to the Sermon on the Mount for a method of staying the
economic ruin of the empire, its thinning population, its decreasing
capital, would obviously have found nothing of what he sought. But the
moral nature of man is redeemed by teaching that may have no bearing
on economics, or even a bearing purely mischievous, and which has to
be corrected by teaching that probably goes equally far in the
contrary direction of moral mischief. In the ideal sphere, the
processes are very complex. In measuring a man's influence within it
we have to balance. Rousseau's action was undoubtedly excellent in
leading men and women to desire simple lives, and a more harmonious
social order. Was this eminent benefit more than counterbalanced by
the eminent disadvantage of giving a reactionary intellectual
direction? By commending irrational retrogression from active use of
the understanding back to dreamy contemplation?

To one teacher is usually only one task allotted. We do not reproach
want of science to the virtuous and benevolent Channing; his goodness
and effusion stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did, to
sentimental but humane aspiration. It was this kind of influence that
formed the opinion which at last destroyed American slavery. We owe a
place in the temple that commemorates human emancipation, to every man
who has kindled in his generation a brighte