Rousseau’s “Return” was a _sentimental_ one, for sentimentality often attends materialism. The best side of Rousseau was that he did undoubtedly leaven the irreverence of his generation with some feeling for God. But Rousseau invented a past on which he founded his hopefulness of sensibility--an inverted optimism. He cried aloud in hysterics, “Man is born free; everywhere he is in chains.” To what freedom was man born? The freedom of confusion. The order that he evolves is the parent of his true freedom--the freedom to work and serve, and to receive justice. The real “Rights of Man” are the rights to justice that order creates. And if that order belies its name, and injustice, disorder, masquerade as divine government, why then Fifth-Monarchy men, French Revolutions, ruining cataclysm, witness to the heavenly destinies, and order is born once more. Rousseau’s sobs resembled those of the hero of French melodrama, who under stage moonshine and stage misfortune, always ejaculates, “Ma mère!” His mere emotion worked on nerves of sterner fibre and facts of harder quality. Since Disraeli’s death, Nietzsche has propounded a physical “Return to Nature,” which, however, excludes the humanitarian side of the French “Equality.” He has sighed for a gigantic brood of antediluvian anarchs. He has tried to make anarchy heroic. But a monster is not even a man, still less a hero. All such systems must fail, because, as Disraeli has finely said, “Man is born to adore and to obey.” They contradict the spiritual facts of our structure. For the true Right of Man is to lead wisely and be led loyally in public affairs; neither to steal nor be stolen from in private. These are what Carlyle terms his “correctly articulated _mights_.” Leadership, loyalty, and social honesty belong to no “state of nature” of which record or even guess is possible. And Disraeli agreed with Carlyle when the latter wrote, after the former had in effect said the same: “... ‘Supply and demand’ we will honour also; and yet how many ‘demands’ are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops!” But Nietzsche’s theories are luckily untranslatable into action, and inconsistent with any form of the “state.” Rousseau’s theories, on the other hand, are the more dangerous because they are feasible. The “Rights of Man” is a doctrine absolutely at issue with the “Rights of Nations.” The abstract notion of universal “rights” is also at variance with the pressing impulses of physical “wants.” Low wages and long hours are not redressed by the apparatus of ballot-boxes or the cant of independence. Physical needs due to economical causes, which can be modified only by the earnest statesmanship of leaders rising to their responsibilities, are not to be dismissed by the vague generalities of “moral force.” This aspect is powerfully emphasised in _Sybil_.