ns.

Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating his
conception of the kind of human creature which it is worth while to
take the trouble to rear, and the only kind which pure nature will
help you in perfecting. Hence Emilius, besides being a manual for
parents, contains the lines of a moral type of life and character for
all others. The old thought of the Discourses revives in full vigour.
The artifices of society, the perverting traditions of use, the feeble
maxims of indolence, convention, helpless dependence on the aid or the
approval of others, are routed at the first stroke. The old regimen of
accumulated prejudice is replaced, in dealing alike with body and
soul, by the new system of liberty and nature. In saying this we have
already said that the exaltation of Spartan manners which runs through
Rousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every trace of the
much-vaunted military and public training has yielded before the
attractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home. Public
instruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no
longer such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer be
citizens. Only domestic education can now help us to rear the man
according to nature,--the man who knows best among us how to bear
the mingled good and ill of our life.

The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after a
return to nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm by
Rousseau's famous exhortations to mothers to nourish their own little
ones. Morelly, as we have seen, had already enjoined the adoption of
this practice. So too had Buffon. But Morelly's voice had no
resonance, Buffon's reasons were purely physical, and children were
still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more passionate moral
entreaties awoke maternal conscience. "Do these tender mothers," he
exclaimed, "who, when they have got rid of their infants, surrender
themselves gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what sort of
usage the child in the village is receiving, fastened in his swaddling
band? At the least interruption that comes, they hang him up by a nail
like a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature remains thus
crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs. Every child found
in this position had a face of purple; as the violent compression of
the chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all went to the
head, and the victim was supposed to be ver