science of government, and even of social life, from their day to ours,
and in their influence really belong to the nineteenth century. One was
the apostle of radicalism; the other of conservatism. The one, more than
any other single man, stimulated, though unwittingly, the French
Revolution; the other opposed that mad outburst with equal eloquence,
and caused in Europe a reaction from revolutionary principles. While one
is far better known to-day than the other, to the thoughtful both are
exponents and representatives of conflicting political and social
questions which agitate this age.

These men were Jean Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke,--one Swiss, and
the other English. Burke I have already treated of in a former volume.
His name is no longer a power, but his influence endures in all the
grand reforms of which he was a part, and for which his generation in
England is praised; while his writings remain a treasure-house of
political and moral wisdom, sure to be drawn upon during every public
discussion of governmental principles. Rousseau, although a writer of a
hundred years ago, seems to me a fit representative of political,
social, and educational ideas in the present day, because his theories
are still potent, and even in this scientific age more widely diffused
than ever before. Not without reason, it is true, for he embodied
certain germinant ideas in a fascinating literary style; but it is hard
to understand how so weak a man could have exercised such far-reaching
influence.

Himself a genuine and passionate lover of Nature; recognizing in his
principles of conduct no duties that could conflict with personal
inclinations; born in democratic and freedom-loving Switzerland, and
early imbued through his reading of German and English writers with
ideas of liberty,--which in those conservative lands were