Note 104 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal

Another thinker to whom our empiricists are strangely ungrateful is the author of these words: ‘Consider the danger of one stirring up the enormous masses which form the French nation. Who could restrain the disturbance set up, or foresee all the results it might produce? Even if all the advantages of the new scheme should be indisputable, what man of good sense would dare to undertake to abolish old customs, to change old maxims, and to give a new form to a State other than that it has reached after an existence of 1,300 years?’ (J. J. Rousseau.)