placed with Voltaire and Montesquieu and Rousseau,
with the Encyclopædists and the economists, with
those who changed the standpoint of the French mind,
who opened to it new fields, revealed to it new con-
ceptions of life, and in so doing helped to bring to an
end the forms of thought and of government which
they found established under Louis XV.

Rousseau was befriended by the coterie of the En-
cyclopædists, and his breach with them was largely
due to his vanity and excessive irritability, yet the
influence of his writings was directly opposed to that
of the philosophers whose enemy he became; between
his views and theirs there was an irrepressible con-
flict.

When Rousseau assumed his rôle as a political
teacher, his tenets were better qualified to find favor
than those of the writers who thus far could be re-
garded as precursors of the Revolution. A belief in
the efficacy of governmental control was deeply im-
planted in the French mind. To regulate the police,
to carry on war, to collect the money needed for the
ordinary expenses of administration, would have been
regarded as a most inadequate statement of the pur-
poses for which government existed. In addition to
such functions, it took charge of men's consciences;
it sought to exterminate heresy and to suppress litera-
ture that might be injurious to religion or authority;
it regulated the relations of the country with foreign
lands and the details of internal industry, decided
who might practice certain trades, what goods should
be made and how they should be made, with what
crops the field should be planted and in what manner
its produce should be sold; it assisted the father who
wished his son to be reformed, and the husband who

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