children and trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, it
was Rousseau who first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note for
one more of the great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud,
it was truly said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein of
thought, as we shall see, and he was only continuing work which others
had prepared. But he alone had the gift of the golden mouth. It was in
Rousseau that polite Europe first hearkened to strange voices and faint
reverberation from out of the vague and cavernous shadow in which the
common people move. Science has to feel the way towards light and
solution, to prepare, to organise. But the race owes something to one
who helped to state the problem, writing up in letters of flame at the
brutal feast of kings and the rich that civilisation is as yet only a
mockery, and did furthermore inspire a generation of men and women with
the stern resolve that they would rather perish than live on in a world
where such things can be.




CHAPTER II.

YOUTH.


Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712. He was of old
French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris to the famous city of
refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before Farel came thither to
establish the principles of the Reformation, and seven years before the
first visit of the more extraordinary man who made Geneva the mother
city of a new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome was the mother