a slightly changed
light. It remained the starting-point of the right and normal
constitution of civil society, just as it had been the starting-point
of the denunciation of civil society as incapable of right
constitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally with
the Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historic
method which traces the present along a line of ascertained
circumstances, and seeks an improved future in an unbroken
continuation of that line. The opening words, which sent such a thrill
through the generation to which they were uttered in two continents,
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," tell us at the
outset that we are as far away as ever from the patient method of
positive observation, and as deeply buried as ever in deducing
practical maxims from a set of conditions which never had any other
than an abstract and phantasmatic existence. How is a man born free?
If he is born into isolation, he perishes instantly. If he is born
into a family, he is at the moment of his birth committed to a state
of social relation, in however rudimentary a form; and the more or
less of freedom which this state may ultimately permit to him, depends
upon circumstances. Man was hardly born free among Romans and
Athenians, when both law and public opinion left a father at perfect
liberty to expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive the
circumstances, the later the period at which he gains freedom. A child
was not born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the
_patria potestas_ was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back,
was he born free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abraham
had full right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing his
daughter.

But to speak thus is to speak what we do know. Rousseau was not open
to such testimony. "My principles," he said in contempt of Grotius,
"are not founded on the authority of poets; they come from the nature
of things and are based on reason."[180] He does indeed in one place
express his reverence for the Judaic law, and administers a just
rebuke to the philosophic arrogance which saw only successful
impostors in the old legislators.[181] But he paid no attention to
the processes and usages of which this law was the organic expression,
nor did he allow himself to learn from it the actual conditions of the
social state which accepted it. It was Locke, whose essay on civil
government h