"_Man is naturally good_," says Rousseau. Before the frightful words "mine" and "thine" were invented, how could there have been, he asks, any vices or crimes? He denounced all slavery, all inequality, all forms of oppression. His writings were full of exaggeration, but, says the French historian, "no sooner had he opened his lips than he restored earnestness to the world." The same writer, after speaking of the faults of the "Nouvelle Héloïse," adds that nevertheless "a multitude of the letters of his 'Julie' are masterpieces of eloquence, passion, and profundity; and the last portions are signalized by a moral purity, a wisdom of views, and a religious elevation altogether new in the France of the eighteenth century." Concerning "Emile," he says, "It is the profoundest study of human nature in our language; it was an ark of safety, launched by Providence on the waves of skepticism and materialism. If Rousseau had been stricken out of the eighteenth century, whither, we seriously ask, would the human mind have drifted?"[43] The "Social Contract" appeared in 1762. In this work Rousseau swept away by his powerful eloquence the arguments which placed sovereignty elsewhere than in the hands of the people. This fundamental idea was the seed corn which broke from the earth in the first Revolution, and bears its ripe fruit in republican France to-day. D'Alembert, who disliked Rousseau, said of "Emile" that "it placed him at the head of all writers." The "Social Contract," illogical and unsound in many things, yet tore down the whole framework of despotism. Van Laun, a more recent historian, tells us that Rousseau was a man of the people, who knew all their wants; that every vice he attacked was one that they saw really present in their midst; that he "opened the flood-gates of suppressed desires, which gushed forth, overwhelming a whole artificial world." Villemain writes that the words of Rousseau, "descending like a flame of fire, moved the souls of his contemporaries;" and that "his books glow with an eloquence which can never pass away." Morley, to whom Rousseau is essentially antipathic, says of the "Social Contract" that its first words, "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains," thrilled two continents,--that it was the gospel of the Jacobins; and the action of the convention in 1794 can be explained only by the influence of Rousseau. He taught France to believe in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Locke had already taught this doctrine in England, where it produced no such violent outbreak, because it encountered no such glaring abuses. Such is the striking contrast between these two greatest writers in modern French literature. It is singular to observe their instinctive antagonism in every point of belief and character. The merits of one are precisely opposite to those of the other: their faults are equally opposed.