ay effect the
final combination of moral and scientific ideas needed for a new
social era, may be inclined to lend a half-complacent ear to the arid
sophisters who assume that the last word of civilisation has been
heard in existing arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage from
history to hope that generations will come, to whom our system of
distributing among a few the privileges and delights that are procured
by the toil of the many, will seem just as wasteful, as morally
hideous, and as scientifically indefensible, as that older system
which impoverished and depopulated empires, in order that a despot or
a caste might have no least wish ungratified, for which the lives or
the hard-won treasure of others could suffice.

FOOTNOTES:

[176] _Cont. Soc._, I. viii.

[177] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi. He had written in much the same sense in
his article on Political Economy in the Encyclopaedia, p. 34.

[178] Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking property, and
took up a position like that of Rousseau--teaching the poor contempt
for the rich, not envy. "I do not want to touch your treasures," he
cried, on one occasion, "however impure their source. It is far more
an object of concern to me to make poverty honourable, than to
proscribe wealth; the thatched hut of Fabricius never need envy the
palace of Crassus. I should be at least as content, for my own part,
to be one of the sons of Aristides, brought up in the Prytaneium at
the public expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes, born in the
mire of royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the abasement of
the people, and glittering with the public misery." Quoted in Malon's
_Expose des Ecoles Socialistes francaises_, 15. Baboeuf carried
Rousseau's sentiments further towards their natural conclusion by such
propositions as these: "The goal of the revolution is to destroy
inequality, and to re-establish the happiness of all." "The revolution
is not finished, because the rich absorb all the property, and hold
exclusive power; while the poor toil like born slaves, languish in
wretchedness, and are nothing in the state." _Expose des Ecoles
Socialistes francaises_, p. 29.

[179] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi.

[180] _Cont. Soc._, I. iv.

[181] _Ib._, II. vii.

[182] Ch. vi. (vol. v. 371; edit. 1801).

[183] Ch. vii. (p. 383.)

[184] Goguet, in his _Origine des Lois, des Arts, et des Sciences_
(1758), really attempted as laboriously as possible to carry out a