Rousseau exerts himself to prove, that all WAS right originally: a
crowd of authors that all IS now right: and I, that all WILL BE
right.
But, true to his first position, next to a state of nature,
Rousseau celebrates barbarism, and, apostrophizing the shade of
Fabricius, he forgets that, in conquering the world, the Romans
never dreamed of establishing their own liberty on a firm basis, or
of extending the reign of virtue. Eager to support his system, he
stigmatizes, as vicious, every effort of genius; and uttering the
apotheosis of savage virtues, he exalts those to demigods, who were
scarcely human--the brutal Spartans, who in defiance of justice and
gratitude, sacrificed, in cold blood, the slaves that had shown
themselves men to rescue their oppressors.
Disgusted with artificial manners and virtues, the citizen of
Geneva, instead of properly sifting the subject, threw away the
wheat with the chaff, without waiting to inquire whether the evils,
which his ardent soul turned from indignantly, were the consequence
of civilization, or the vestiges of barbarism. He saw vice
trampling on virtue, and the semblance of goodness taking place of
the reality; he saw talents bent by power to sinister purposes, and
never thought of tracing the gigantic mischief up to arbitrary
power, up to the hereditary distinctions that clash with the mental
superiority that naturally raises a man above his fellows.
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