an important bearing on the whole practical drift of the book. If he
had made more room for "the common intellect rough-hewing political
truths at the suggestion of common wants and common experience,"
he would have viewed existing circumstances with a less lively
apprehension.

It is easy to find an apposite illustration of what is meant by
saying that this talk of the influence of speculation is enormously
exaggerated and misleading. When Arthur Young was in France in the
autumn of 1787, he noticed a remarkable revolution in manners in two
or three important respects. One of them was a new fashion that had
just come in, of spending some weeks in the country: everybody who had
a country seat went to live there, and such as had none went to visit
those who had. This new custom, observed the admirable Young, is one
of the best that they have taken from England, and "its introduction
was effected the easier being assisted by the magic of Rousseau's
writings." The other and more generally known change was that women
of the first fashion were no longer ashamed of nursing their own
children, and that infants were no longer tightly bound round by
barbarous stays and swaddling clothes. This wholesome change, too,
was assisted by Rousseau's eloquent pleas for simplicity and the life
natural. Of these particular results of his teaching in France a
hundred years ago the evidence is ample, direct, and beyond denial.
But whenever we find gentlemen with a taste for country life, and
ladies with a fancy for nursing their own children, we surely need not
cry out that here is another proof of the extraordinary influence of
the speculations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We need not treat it as a
survival of a broken-down theory. "Great Nature is more wise than I,"
says the Poet. Great Nature had much more to do with moulding men and
women to these things than all the books that have ever been printed.