Matters would not be so bad if it were possible to point to one class, one stratum of society in England, in which language was treated with more respect. Unfortunately this is no longer possible. Even among speakers of good education this misuse of language is all too common. The present writer once heard the Bishop of London address a cultivated audience on the subject of Reconstruction, and was compelled to take exception at least a dozen times to that dignitary’s illegitimate use of the word “Democracy.”[1] The reality of the danger, its imminence, will perhaps strike the most incredulous when it is pointed out to them that the [p17] French Revolution itself was the outcome of a confusion of language; nor can there be any doubt that the Russian Revolution had a similar origin. The French Revolution can be traced, and has been traced, even by writers quite friendly to “democracy,” to the radical misunderstanding of three words--Nature, Freedom, and Man--by Jean Jacques Rousseau. This writer, as is well known, after having formed a totally fantastic and false concept of Nature, began to speculate upon the unhappy contrast that human civilisation presented in comparison with this fairylike figment of his mind. He compared man in the state of Nature--Rousseau’s “Nature”--with civilised man in the 18th century, and then proceeded to show how impure, immoral and corrupt, was the second kind of man as compared with the former. The fact that the whole comparison was vitiated by the absurd impossibility of this so-called “thinker’s” arbitrary definition of Nature, was only discovered scores of years later, when the untold damage to which his insane misunderstanding led, had long been past repair. For the “Nature” of Rousseau was the Nature of our most successful Victorian poets--all smiling meadows, babbling brooks, nodding flowers and innocence. He had neither the profundity nor the honesty to see Nature as she really is--immoral, hard, merciless and tasteless.[2] Like our Victorian poets when Rousseau gazed upon a rustic scene, he thought neither of the stoat in the hedge quietly devouring its field mouse, nor of the starling in the coppice solemnly and methodically hammering a snail to a pulp before swallowing it. He gave no thought either to the pitiless and eternal conflict of all the vegetation at his feet, or to the struggle probably going on in the adjoining village between a beautiful child and the microbe of tuberculosis. He dwelt only on that something which was not Man and proceeded to endow that something, which was not Man, with all the qualities that his feverish imagination regarded as desirable. When, therefore, he proceeded to plant his “natural man” down in this utterly fanciful scenario of Rousseau-esque “Nature,” he perforce drew a picture even more distorted of humanity than he had already drawn of Nature, and thus proceeded to his ultimate fatuous conclusion that “Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”