it was the noblest
and strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had replaced the
narrower sentiment which had inflamed antique heroism. Rousseau's
exaltation of the Greek and Roman types in all their concentration and
intensity, touches mortals of commoner mould. His theory made the
native land what it had been to the citizens of earlier date, a true
centre of existence, round which all the interests of the community,
all its pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with entire
singleness of convergence, just as religious faith is the centre of
existence to a church. It was the virile and patriotic energy thus
evoked which presently saved France from partition.

We complete the estimate of the positive worth and tendencies of the
Social Contract by adding to this, which was for the time the cardinal
service, of rekindling the fire of patriotism, the rapid deduction
from the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples of the great truth,
that a nation with a civilised polity does not consist of an order or
a caste, but of the great body of its members, the army of toilers who
make the most painful of the sacrifices that are needed for the
continuous nutrition of the social organisation. As Condorcet put it,
and he drew inspiration partly from the intellectual school of
Voltaire, and partly from the social school of Rousseau, all
institutions ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual,
and moral amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class.[272]
This is the People. Second, there gradually followed from the
important place given by Rousseau to the idea of equal association, as
at once the foundation and the enduring bond of a community, those
schemes of Mutualism, and all the other shapes of collective action
for a common social good, which have possessed such commanding
attraction for the imagination of large classes of good men in France
ever since. Hitherto these forms have been sterile and deceptive, and
they must remain so, until the idea of special function has been
raised to an equal level of importance with that of united forces
working together to a single end.

In these ways the author of the Social Contract did involuntarily and
unconsciously contribute to the growth of those new and progressive
ideas, in which for his own part he lacked all faith. Prae-Newtonians
knew not the wonders of which Newton was to find the key; and so we,
grown weary of waiting for the master intelligence who m