They do not make gentlemen of them, but peasants or artisans....

They would not know how to dance, or ride on horseback, but they would have strong unwearied legs.

I would neither make authors of them, nor clerks; I would not practise them in handling the pen, but the plough, the file, and the plane, instruments for leading a healthy, laborious, innocent life....

I deprived myself of the delight of seeing them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace.

Alas, as I have already told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, and I deliver them from misery at my own expense."[145] We may see here that Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others, was at least as powerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted that this letter, with its talk of the children of the rich taking bread out of the mouths of the children of the poor, contains the first of those socialistic sentences by which the writer in after times gained so famous a name.