but nothing more. When we point to him, at the present time, as the master of future legislation, we commit the same error as when we make poor Machiavelli the guardian of the cradle of reborn Italy - Machiavelli, who anatomized the dead body of old Italy and showed the wounds that caused her death; when we take Adam Smith-who was but the wise exponent of the laws that governed the economic phenomena of his time-and make him the founder of an immutable science, the teacher of an age in which the economic relations between class and class are hastening to an inevitable change.

Rousseau, the inspirer of the Convention, followed another road, but without passing the confines of the age that France was preparing to summarize. A poor plebeian, without deep study of the past, abhorring the times in the consciousness of his own superiority, and for the exaggerated demands of society as he found it, he, on the great political questions of the day, questioned only his own intelligence and the intuitions of the heart. His intelligence was more powerful than that of Montesquieu; his heart was led astray by a leaven of egotism that too often soured his natural inclination to good; and both together drove him to the principle that takes its birth, if not its consecration, from him -the principle of popular sovereignty. A true principle, if considered as the best method of interpreting a supreme moral law which a nation has accepted as its guide, which is solemnly declared in its contract and transmitted by national education; but a false and anarchical principle if proclaimed in the name of force, or in the name of a convention, and abandoned to the caprice of majorities, uneducated, and corrupted by a false conception of life.

For Rousseau, the popular sovereignty remained in these last terms, uncertain, ineffective, shifting. He, too, had no conception of the collective life of humanity, of its tradition, of the law of progress appointed for the generations, of a common end towards which we ought to strive, of association that can alone attain it step by step. Starting from the philosophy of the ego end of individual liberty, he robbed that principle of fruit by basing it, not on a duty common to all, not on a definition of man as an essentially social creature, not on the conception of a divine authority and a providential design, not on the bond that unites the individual to humanity of which he is a factor, but on a simple convention, avowed or understood. All Rousseau's teaching pro

ceeds from the assertion "that social right is not derived from nature, but is based upon conventions." He drives this doctrine so far as to comprehend the family itself within it. "Sons," he says, "do not remain united to their fathers except so long as they have need of them for their preservation.

From that time forth the family is only maintained in virtue of a convention."

From the doctrine that recognizes the rights of the contracting individuals as the only source of social life, nothing could result but a political system capable of protecting, within the limits of a narrow possibility, the liberty and equality of each citizen; and Rousseau has no other program. "The aim of every system of legislation"- these are his very words - "reduces itself to two principal objects, liberty and equality; and to find a form of society that shall defend and protect with all the collective forces the person and the property of each associate, and in which each one, uniting himself to all, shall obey only himself and remain. as free as he was before; this is the fundamental problem." Stated in these terms, the problem contains neither the elements of normal progress, nor the possibility of solving the social economic question that is so prominently agitating men's minds in our time. An isolated sentence in the book seems to lay down the principle that "no citizen ought to be rich enough to be in a position to buy another; none poor enough to be constrained. to sell himself "; this is just, but it does not connect itself with the general bearing of the principles he expounds, nor is there any indication how it may be reduced to fact. It is of little importance that in many particulars he is superior to every other thinker of that period. The Society of Rousseau, like that of Montesquieu, is a mutual insurance society, and nothing more.

That first statement, the key of the whole system, is by now proven to be false; and, because false, fatal to the development of the principle of popular sovereignty. It is not by the force of conventions or of aught else, but by a necessity of our nature, that societies are founded and grow. Each of us is a part of humanity, each of us lives its life, each is called upon to live for it, to aid the attainment of the end assigned to it, to realize, as far as possible in each one of us, the ideal type, the divine thought that guides it. Law is one and the same for individual and collective life, both of which are the expression of a single universal phenomenon, differently modified by space and time.

And life, we know now, is progress. If you throw over moral authority, our natural tendencies, our mission, and substitute the merely human authority of conventions as the source of social development, you risk arresting that development, or subjecting it to arbitrary caprice. And since you need the consent of all the contracting parties to dissolve these conventions and make a change for the better, you are threatened, on the one hand by the power of every minority, logically indeed of every individual, to stop you; on the other hand, inasmuch as the prolonged existence of a fact pre-supposes, at all events, a tacit convention, you are threatened by the necessity of perpetuating rights and powers that are not founded on justice, or conducive to the common good. No "man has, you say, "natural authority over his fellows; might cannot create right; therefore conventions are left as the only basis of legitimate authority." But is there not an authority higher than any man, in the True, the Just, the end which we have set before us and which we are bound above all things to discover? Is not some of that authority passed on to the people or to that fraction of the people which is its best interpreter? And, to discover that end, do we not possess the double criterion supplied when the tradition of humanity and the conscience of our times both harmonize? And for a method of practical verification, can we not examine whether this item of discovered truth profits or not the common progress? Rousseau believed in God, but in his study of human phenomena he continually forgot him.

Rousseau believed in God. He believed and it is well to remind of this those republican materialists who venerate the "Contrat Social "— that a State could not be established without having religion for its foundation. And he pushed this belief to the fanaticism of intolerance, declaring that the sovereign power could exile from the State all who disbelieved in God and immortality, and condemn any citizen to death who, after publicly confessing his belief in those dogmas, by his subsequent conduct convicted himself of deliberate falsehood. But he confined himself within a narrow deism that placed God far off in heaven, and never understood his universal, never-dying life manifested in creation; he was ignorant of the law of progress—the sole but potent and living mediator between God and humanity; he was fettered by the individualist's philosophy; he had no glimpse of any religion besides Christianity, and so he was incapable of

deducing and applying the logical consequences of his faith to society.

Like Voltaire and Montesquieu, Rousseau was not the intellectual herald of the age. His conception, though more daring, more explicit, more advanced than theirs, never passes the limits of the individualist world, elaborated by the Pagan-Christian age. The influence of the three schools with which these names are associated could not push the Revolution beyond those limits to the world of progress and association for which we are noW fighting.

Complete.

M

MENCIUS (MENG-TSE)

(c. 372-289 B. C.)

ENCIUS, who is generally ranked as the greatest of the disciples of Confucius, is in a most important respect greater than his master. Confucius saw that civilization would develop of itself, if men would merely refrain from oppression, each making his own feelings the test of what he ought not to do to others. Mencius went beyond this to search for the efficient cause through which civilization develops when oppression ceases. He found it in the spirit of mutual helpfulness made operative through love. His definitions, as we have them in Doctor Legge's translation, represent intellect on its highest plane. Plato himself did not reach a higher. Indeed, no higher system of ethics is conceivable by the human intellect than that which would necessarily develop from a genuine attempt to put in practice the principles of the chapters on "Universal Love" by Mencius; but as he says with remarkable insight it is "the most difficult thing in the world" because "the scholars and superior men do not understand the advantageousness of the law, and to conduct their reasonings upon that." Mencius, whose real name was Meng or Mang ("Meng-tse" the Master Meng) was born, according to some authorities, in 372 B. C., while others place his birth in the year 385. He was an ardent admirer and deep student of Confucius, like whom he went from court to court as a political and ethical reformer, hoping to find a ruler who would attempt to base government on right principles. Like Confucius he failed, but after his death his countrymen erected statues and temples to him and they still honor his spirit as that of one of their tutelary demigods. "The great man," he said, "is he who does not lose his child heart," - paralleling in this the Christian Gospels in a most striking way, as he does in making love "the fulfilling of the law" of civilization.

IT

UNIVERSAL LOVE

T IS the business of the sages to effect the good government of the empire. They must know, therefore, whence disorder and confusion arise, for without this knowledge their object cannot be effected. We may compare them to a physician who