iously meets the current idea, which he adopted
with a few idyllic decorations of his own, of the type of the
relations between men and women. That type practically reduces
marriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorous
parody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other cause
to keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members of
a society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus it
produces a waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it is
deplorable, and besides rearing these creatures of mutilated faculty
to be the intellectually demoralising companions of the remaining half
of their own generation, makes them the mothers and the earliest and
most influential instructors of the whole of the generation that comes
after.[322] Of course, if any one believes that the existing
arrangements of a western community are the most successful that we
can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not complain of
Rousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that a
considerable portion of the change will be effected in the hitherto
neglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of the
family, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightly
sought after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, was
essentially impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornment
of a semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between the
frowzy ideal of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of a
Parisian gallant. Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake in
defending the free gratification of sensual passion, as one of the
conditions of happiness and making the most of our lives.[323] But
even this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order of
the family, than Rousseau's enervating notion of keeping women in
strict intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family as
the true school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitful
seed-ground of wise activities and new hopes for each fresh
generation.

This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary tendencies. Fortunately
for the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated the
gallery of heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his
power was in this respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in
the general spirit of the age. The aristocracy of sex was subjected to
the same destructive criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The sam