Having developed his destructive criticism against society as it is, Rousseau would build up. In the _Contrat Social_ he would show how freedom and government may be conciliated; how, through the arrangements of society, man may in a certain sense return to the law of nature. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains;" yet social order, Rousseau declares, is sacred. Having resigned his individual liberty by the social pact, how may man recover that liberty? By yielding his individual rights absolutely to a self-governing community of which he forms a part. The _volonte generale_, expressing itself by a plurality of votes, resumes the free-will of every individual. If any person should resist the general will, he thereby sacrifices his true freedom, and he must be "forced to be free." Thus the dogma of the sovereignty of the people is formulated by Rousseau. Government is merely a delegation of power made by the people as sovereign for the uses of the people as subjects. In Rousseau's system, if the tyranny of the majority be established without check or qualification, at least equality is secured, for, in the presence of the sovereign people and its manifested will, each individual is reduced to the level of all his fellows. _La Nouvelle Heloise_, in the form of a romance, considers the purification of domestic manners. Richardson's novels are followed in the epistolary style of narration, which lends itself to the exposition of sentiment. The story is simple in its incidents. Saint-Preux's crime of passion against his pupil Julie resembles that of Abelard against Eloisa. Julie, like Eloisa, has been a consenting party. Obedient to her father's will, Julie marries Wolmar. In despair Saint-Preux wanders abroad. Wolmar offers him his friendship and a home. The lovers meet, are tried, and do not yield to the temptation. Julie dies a victim to her maternal devotion, and not too soon--"Another day, perhaps, and I were guilty!" In 1757 Rousseau conceived the design of his romance. It might have been coldly edifying had not the writer's consuming passion for Madame d'Houdetot, awakening all that he had felt as the lover of Madame de Warens, filled it with intensity of ardour. In the first part of the romance, passion asserts the primitive rights of nature; in the second part, those rights are shown to be no longer rights in an organised society. But the ideal of domestic life exhibited is one far removed from the artificialities of the world of fashion: it is a life of plain duties, patriarchal manners, and gracious beneficence. Rousseau the moralist is present to rebuke Rousseau the sentimentalist; yet the sentimentalist has his own persuasive power. The emotion of the lovers is reinforced by the penetrating influences of the beauty of external nature; and both are interpreted with incomparable harmonies of style and poignant lyrical cries, in which the violin note outsoars the orchestra.