In his "Emile" he outlines our so-called pedagogic new-thought methods. Birds' nests, bumblebees, hornets' nests, leaves, buds, flowers, grasses, mosses, are schoolroom properties to which he often refers. To a great degree he replaced the ferule, cat-o'-nine-tails, dunce-cap, musty, dusty books, tear-stained slates, awful examples and punishments of a hundred lines of Vergil, by wholesome good-cheer and limpid forgetfulness of self in drawing pictures of spiders and noting the difference between a wasp and a bee, a butterfly and a moth, a frog and a toad, a mushroom and a toadstool. And so the reason Rousseau is read is because there is much in his work that is essentially modern. No thinker writes on political economy without quoting the "Social Contract," either for the sake of bolstering his own argument, or to show the folly of Jean Jacques. And I submit that as long as we feel it necessary to refute an author, Andrew Lang may expect letters from him any time, for, although dead, he yet lives.
SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT REFORMERS," BEING VOLUME NINE OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD; EDITED AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, AND PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE IN EAST AURORA, ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK. MCMXXII