As a fact

great lord and migrate to the towns. their numbers steadily and rapidly declined from the Revolution all through the eighteenth century. The new farming class, with considerable capital, took their place in the rural social economy, and for a long time prospered; while the class of agricultural labourers for scanty but customary wages, who had no land-unless perhaps their share in the steadily decreasing village common-was constantly increasing in relative numbers throughout the century.

IV.

A NEW stage in the history of Communism and Socialism and a new era in the history of human society begins with the works of Rousseau, the first of which was published in 1750, a hundred years after Hobbes' "Leviathan," and some sixty after Locke's treatise on "Civil Government."

Rousseau belongs to the same general class of political thinkers as Hobbes and Locke. Like them, he believes that men lived in a State of Nature before they entered into Civil Society; that they emerged from this state by a social compact; that in this presocial state they were free and equal; that though there was physical or natural inequality, there was no political inequality, or inequality of condition coming merely from convention. He differs from Hobbes in believing that men were peaceful and happy in the State of Nature, and he differs from both Hobbes and Locke in the conclusions he reaches, in particular as to the best and the right form of government or

political constitution, which with him is a democracy, and not, as with Hobbes, an absolute monarchy, or as with Locke, a limited one. The rightful sovereign is the people, the collective body of citizens; and the people, though everywhere dethroned, despoiled, and cast into slavery, has an inalienable right to retake when it may its rightful inheritance, of which it had been stripped by the strong and crafty, who now plead law and prescription in favour of their usurpations.

In his "Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inégalité" (1754) we have the story of the fall of man socially; in his other works, the "Contrat Social" in particular, the way by which the former happy state may be best regained.

According to Rousseau, man lived for uncounted ages in the State of Nature before he attained to Civil Society. He distinguishes several stages, each of which was prolonged. At first he lived solitary, like the lower animals, and not much superior to them save in possessing two arms, superfluous for locomotion, but useful in many ways, while the brutes had to go on all fours. He lived on the fruits and other spontaneous products of nature; slept under a tree or in a cavern; was without clothing, without a house, without langu ge or ideas, without a companion; but strong, robust, and healthy; and, as far as so low a being had faculties of enjoyment, was happy and contented. After a time difficulties roused his dormant genius. With sharp stones and with the branches of trees he combated the ferocious animals or his fellows, or he

secured fruit before inaccessible. As numbers increased he had to acquire new arts. He invented a hook and line, ensnared fish, and became ichthyophagous. He invented rude bows and arrows, and became a hunter. He discovered fire, and lived more easily through the rigours of winter. In cold regions he clothed himself with skins of beasts he had slain.

As yet man lived solitary; by degrees he learned the advantage of a certain association with others of his kind, which, however, only endured "so long as the passing need which had occasioned it." Here he acquired the first rude idea of a mutual engagement, of an inchoate contract in fact, and the advantages to all of fulfilling his part. Here, too, he acquired the art or developed the dormant faculty of speech, which at first consisted only of inarticulate or imitative cries and gestures. With the hardest and sharpest stones fashioned into axes, he cut wood, hollowed the ground, and, with the help of clay and mud, made the branches of trees into rude huts - an important epoch, because the first rude huts, according to Rousseau, were the first rude form of private property, and first permitted a true family life. In fact, private property and the family, now threatened by advanced Communists, are natural, are older than Civil Society, and not mere creatures of Law and the State. Husband and wife, father and infant, are united in one natural society, in one home, from which follow the two "sweetest sentiments known to men, conjugal and paternal love." And now the functions of the sexes begin to differentiate; the woman becomes more sedentary, and remains to look after the home and the

infants, while the man goes abroad to search for the common subsistence.

In such a simple and solitary life, with few wants and improved instruments for their supply, the men would enjoy much leisure, which they employed partly in procuring commodities better dispensed with because such, at first unnecessary, in time gave rise to real wants, the supply of which was a less gratification than the privation was a pain.

Such is the fancy picture of man in the first two stages of his career. It is objected that the picture is too idyllic, and does not agree with what we know of savages in the state most nearly corresponding to that described. Further, it is not confirmed by historical research into the earliest times, which has never discovered the solitary individual man, but only groups, generally groups of kindred. Nor has Darwinism or pre-historic research given confirmation of the view, except in so far as the remains of the cave-man, with the stone hatchets found near him, may be so regarded. What follows is less disputable, though not all confirmed. There is, in fact, a mixture of doubtful hypothesis, ingenious reasoning, and general truth.

By degrees, he tells us, men, hitherto nomad, settled down in fixed places, united themselves into groups (he does not say groups of kindred, which was the true state of the case); finally, in each country they formed an individual nation, whose units were like in manners and character, not by rules or laws, but by similarity of life and food and the common influence of climate. They lived in aggregations of cabins, and in village societies; and here new

qualities of soul and spirit were born, new sentiments were evoked. First was born love between the sexes, as distinct from what he before called conjugal affection. With love came into the world the dark twinborn passion of jealousy. All the troop of virtues and vices that have reference to society, all, save only those relating to property, came into being. Inequality of conditions now first appears, because natural differences first manifest themselves-differences in beauty, eloquence, skill, strength, courage, and whoso has most of these gains most regard, secures in virtue of the superior excellence a larger share, not of material things, but of what is more valued-praise, esteem, and consideration, so early and necessarily does inequality of natural gift bring its natural complement of unequal reward.

These unequal natural gifts and unequal benefits as the result of them, gave birth to bad qualities, vanity and contempt on the one side, and on the other envy and shame, as they were likewise the sources of pains, heart-burnings, and humiliations, to be set over against the pleasures of praise and esteem.

But on the whole this was the stage at which our species should have arrested itself. It was the happiest state, just as there is a happiest period in the life of the individual, at which he would, if he could, remain always, and arrest the flight of time. This is the state at which the savages have stopped. It was the least subject to revolutions; the best for the individual man, who in it was independent, free, equal, or nearly so, to his fellows, ready for any fortune, with no care for the morrow, such as troubles so many of us,