he
Lycurgus of whom the French chattered, if such a personality ever
existed out of the region of myth, he came to his people armed with an
oracle from the gods, just as Moses did, and was himself regarded as
having a nature touched with divinity. No such pretensions could well
be made by any French legislator within a dozen years or so of the
death of Voltaire.

Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as the
desperate absurdity of the assumptions of the Social Contract, which
constituted the power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the
hands of men who surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts.
The Social Contract is worked out precisely in that fashion which, if
it touches men at all, makes them into fanatics. Long trains of
reasoning, careful allegation of proofs, patient admission on every
hand of qualifying propositions and multitudinous limitations, are
essential to science, and produce treatises that guide the wise
statesman in normal times. But it is dogma that gives fervour to a
sect. There are always large classes of minds to whom anything in the
shape of a vigorously compact system is irresistibly fascinating, and
to whom the qualification of a proposition, or the limitation of a
theoretic principle is distressing or intolerable. Such persons always
come to the front for a season in times of distraction, when the party
that knows its own aims most definitely is sure to have the best
chance of obtaining power. And Rousseau's method charmed their
temperament. A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarily
slow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance with
a speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has a
magical potency over men who insist on having politics and theology
drawn out in exact theorems like those of Euclid.

Rousseau traces his conclusions from words, and develops his system
from the interior germs of phrases. Like the typical schoolman, he
assumes that analysis of terms is the right way of acquiring new
knowledge about things; he mistakes the multiplication of propositions
for the discovery of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contract
are mere logical deductions from verbal definitions: the slightest
attempt to confront them with actual fact would have shown them to be
not only valueless, but wholly meaningless, in connection with real
human nature and the visible working of human affairs. He looks into
the word