to repress all anti-social feelings. He aims at order
and symmetry, oblivious that human nature does not easily and rapidly bend
to such treatment. It is his inability to discover the true mode of
investigation that accounts for much of Rousseau's sophistry. His truisms
and verbal propositions, his dogmatic assertions and unreal demonstrations,
savour more of theology than of political science, while his
quasi-mathematical method of reasoning from abstract formulae, assumed to be
axiomatic, gives a deceptive air of exactness and cogency which is apt to
be mistaken for sound logic. He supports glaring paradoxes with an array of
ingenious arguments, and with fatal facility and apparent precision he
deduces from his unfounded premises a series of inconsequent conclusions,
which he regards as authoritative and universally applicable. At times he
becomes less rigid, as when (under the influence of Montesquieu) he studies
the relations between the physical constitution of a nation, its territory,
its customs, its form of government, and its deep-rooted opinions, or avows
that there has been too much dispute about the forms of government. But
such considerations are not prominent. In certain cases his inconsistencies
may be due to re-handling, but he is said to have observed that those who
boasted of understanding the whole contract were more clever than he."[74]

This may sound very severe, but it is entirely just. The "Social Contract"
consists of four books: (1) The founding of the civilized state by a social
pact. (2) The theory of the sovereignty of the people. (3) and (4). The
different forms of government; the indestructible character of the general
will of the community; and civil religion.

The whole work teems with generalisations, mostly ill-founded, and the
details are not in agreement. The one thing of permanent value is the
conception that the State represents the "general will" of the community.
How that "general will" finds expression and gets its way is of great
importance to democracy. Even more important is the nature of that "general
will." Individualist as Rousseau was in his views about personal property
(following Locke in an apparent ideal of peasant proprietorship), he
insisted on the subjection of personal rights to the safety of the
Commonwealth.

AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

The resistance of the American colonies to the British Government did not
commence with any spirit of independence. The tea incid