eloquence on that which Burke treats as a triumph of irony. He
believed, and many thousands of Frenchmen came to a speculative
agreement with him, that artificial society had marked a decline in
the felicity of man, and there are passages in the Discourse in which
he demonstrates this, that are easily interchangeable with passages
in the _Vindication_. Who would undertake to tell us from internal
evidence whether the following page, with its sombre glow, is an
extract from Burke, or an extract from the book which Rousseau begins
by the sentence that man is born free, yet is he everywhere in
chains?--

There are in Great Britain upwards of a hundred thousand people
employed in lead, tin, iron, copper, and coal mines; these unhappy
wretches scarce ever see the light of the sun; they are buried in
the bowels of the earth; there they work at a severe and dismal
task, without the least prospect of being delivered from it; they
subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort of fare; they have their
health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being
perpetually confined in the close vapour of these malignant
minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without
remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant
drudgery, necessary in refining and managing the products of those
mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent
persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should
we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would be our just
indignation against those who inflicted so cruel and ignominious
a punishment!... But this number, considerable as it is, and the
slavery, with all its baseness and horror, which we have at home,
is nothing to what the rest of the world affords of the same
nature. Millions daily bathed in the poisonous damps and