uld listen even to the
appeals of justice and compassion, we suppose our prophets would grow
quite cheerful at last. But to justice and compassion men listen only at
a distance, and the prophet is near.

Nevertheless, in his address as Chancellor of Manchester University in
June 1912, Lord Morley, who has himself often sounded the prophetic
note, asserted that "a score of books in political literature rank as
acts, not books." He happened to be speaking on the anniversary of
Rousseau's birth, two hundred years ago, and in no list of such books
could Rousseau's name be forgotten. "Whether a score or a hundred," Lord
Morley went on, "the _Social Contract_ was one," and, as though to rouse
his audience with a spark, he quoted once more the celebrated opening
sentence, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." That
sentence is not true either in history or in present life. It would be
truer to say that man has everywhere been born in chains and, very
slowly, in some few parts of the world, he is becoming free. The
sentence is neither scientific as historic theory nor true to present
life, and yet Lord Morley rightly called it electrifying. And the same
is true of the book which it so gloriously opens. As history and as
philosophy, it is neither original nor exact. It derived directly from
Locke, and many aspects of the world and thought since Darwin's time
confute it. But, however much anticipated, and however much exposed to
scientific ridicule, it remains one of the burning books of the
world--one of those books which, as Lord Morley said, rank as acts, not
books.

"Let us realise," he continued, "with what effulgence such a book burst
upon communities oppressed by wrong, sunk in care, inflamed by passions
of religion or of liberty, the two eternal fields of mortal struggle."
So potent an influence depends much upon the opportunity of time--the
fulfilment of the hour's need. A book so abstract, so assertive of
theory, and standing so far apart from the world's actual course, would
hardly find an audience now. But in the eighteenth century, so gaily
confident in the power of reason, so trustful of good intentions, so
ready to acclaim noble phrase and generality, and so ignorant of the
past and of the poor--in the midst of such a century the _Social
Contract_ was born at the due time. Add the vivid imagination and the
genuine love for his fellow-men, to which Lord Morley told us Maine
attributed Rousseau's ineff