The eloquence with which he represented the evils of civilisation, and the blessings of a state of nature, as he called it, fascinated every reader. The freshness and energy of his style charmed; the heart he put into his arguments served instead of reason, and convinced. The opponents of his system were sufficiently in the wrong, to make him appear absolutely in the right. Yet, in point of fact, nothing can be more unnatural than his natural man. The most characteristic part of man's nature is his affections. The protection he affords to woman--the cares required by children; yet Rousseau describes his natural man as satisfying his desires by chance,--leaving the woman on the instant; while she, on her side, goes through child-bearing, child-birth, and child-nurture alone. Much may be granted to the strength that human beings enjoy in savage life; much to the little needed by the inhabitants of those happy isles where food grows beneath their feet; but, in all, man has ever been found (except in one or two cases, where the human animal descends below brutes), the protector of women, and the source of his children's subsistence; and among all societies, however barbarously constituted, the gentler and nobler individuals among them have loved their wives and their offspring with constant and self-sacrificing passion. Let us advance civilisation to its highest pitch, or retrograde to its origin,--and let both bring freedom from political and social slavery; but in all let us hold fast by the affections: the cultivation of these ought to be the scope of every teacher of morality, every well-wisher to the improvement of the human race. Poor Rousseau, who had thrust his offspring from parental care to the niggard benevolence of a public charity, found some balm to the remorse that now and then stung him, by rejecting the affections out of his scheme of the state of natural man.