There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of other parts of the book. Moral considerations and the paramount place that they hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once his contempt for the artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank, and his contempt for anything like discontent with the conditions of humble rank. Simplicity of life was his ideal. He wishes us to despise both those who have departed from it, and those who would depart from it if they could. So Julie does her best to make the lot of the peasants as happy as it is capable of being made, without ever helping them to change it for another. She teaches them to respect their natural condition in respecting themselves. Her prime maxim is to discourage change of station and calling, but above all to dissuade the villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from leaving the true pleasures of his natural career for the fever and corruption of towns.[71] Presently a recollection of the sombre things that he had seen in his rambles through France crossed Rousseau's pastoral visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in which the publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that covers the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the inflexible rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of his rural scenes. "Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows they receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness, clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins--these things offer a mournful spectacle to the eye: one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think of the unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed."[72] Yet there is no hint in the New Heloïsa of the socialism which Morelly and Mably flung themselves upon, as the remedy for all these desperate horrors. Property, in every page of the New Heloïsa, is held in full respect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal duty; the servant the not less honourable burden of industry and faithfulness; disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal rigour and more than paternal inflexibility. The insurrectionary quality and effect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct preaching or vehement denunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the one hand and sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a social state in which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries save those which are inseparable from humanity. The contrast between the sober, cheerful, prosperous scenes of romance, and the dreariness of the reality of the field life of France,--this was the element that filled generous souls with an intoxicating transport.