Digitized by VjjOOQIC



180 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
that this is one of the temporary conditions of a vast
process, working forwards through the impulse and
agency of the finer human spirits, hut needing much
blood, many tears, uncounted myriads of lives, and
immeasurable geologic periods of time, for its high
and beneficent consummation. There is nothing sur-
prising, perhaps nothing deeply condemnable, in the
burning anger for which this acquiescence is often
changed in the more impatient natures. As against*
the ignoble host who think that the present ordering
of men, with all its prodigious inequalities, is in
foundation and substance the perfection of social
blessedness, Eousseau was almost in the right. If,
the only alternative to the present social order remain-
ing in perpetuity were a retrogression to some such
condition as that of the islanders of the South Sea,
a lover of his fellow-creatures might look upon the
result, so far as it affected the happiness of the bulk
of them, with tolerably complete indifference. It is
only the faith that we are moving slowly away from
the existing order, as our ancestors moved slowly
away from the old want of order, that makes the
present endurable, and makes any tenacious effort to
raise the future possible.
