The whole country groaned under a misrule, and commerce and agriculture were crippled by the system of taxation.

It seemed that France was impoverished to maintain a civilisation that only a few, and they not the most useful members of the community, could enjoy.
How mankind had passed from primitive freedom to civilised slavery neither Locke nor Rousseau inquired.

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," cries Rousseau, in sublime disregard of facts.

For man was not born free in the ancient republics of Greece and Rome that Rousseau revered; children were not born free in his day any more than they are in ours; and any assembly or community of people necessarily involves mutual consideration and forbearance which are at once restrictive.
The truth is, of course, that man is not born free, but is born with free will to work out political freedom or to consent to servitude.

He is not born with "natural" political rights, but born to acquire by law political rights.
The fiction of primitive man's happiness and of the natural goodness and freedom of man did little harm in England, for Locke was not a popular author, and Wesley's religious revival in the eighteenth century laid awful stress on man's imperfections.