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one crying in the wilderness. The most paradoxical and enigmatic figure in literary history, he preached the purification of morals while tainted with the corruption of his age, and composed a lofty theory of education after depositing his children in the Foundlings' Hospital. Jean Jacques Rousseau, possessed, perhaps, above all writers, the magnetism of genius, and Madame Roland is an instance of the paramount influence he exercised on the generation which succeeded his. A child of the people, a vagabond of the highways, a citizen of Geneva, he naturally approached the problems of his time by a road different from that of his compeers. As we have seen, it was his inextinguishable hatred of the oppression of the poor that turned his thoughts to politics, and, if in the Contrat Social he seems to reason too much from general à priori principles, it must be remembered that, as a native of Switzerland, he had had experience of a form of government which gave to part of his theories a solid basis of fact. His definition of the State as the social compact of all its members, who, constituting what he calls the sovereign, annually elect in their entirety the prince or executive power, has become proverbial. This single axiom, from which the correlative notions of the Rights of Man—Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality—are natural outcomes, became the lever which helped to set the vast forces of the Revolution in motion, as well as the lode-star of its reconstructive tendencies. Rousseau's leading conception is, that Might is not Right, and that, although the power of the strong may enable him to frame laws which force the weak to obey him, the moment the weak becomes strong enough to refuse, he is justified in doing so. Justice, and not expediency,