NOTE.

Authorities.

1. NEWSPAPERS.-Times; Morning Chronicle; Allgemeine Zeitung; Görres's Rheinischer Merkur; Luden's Nemesis; Oken's Isis; Kotzebue's Literarisches Wochenblatt.

2. MEMOIRS, ETC.—Hardenberg; Stein; Varnhagen; Gentz; Görres; Luden. 3. SEVERAL HISTORIES OF GERMANY SINCE 1815.-Bulle; Büchner; Von Hagen.

The episode of Kotzebue's death and details of Sand's life are to be found in the works quoted before, and in an anonymous account of the murder printed in London in the year 1819.

The history of the university clubs is partly to be found in Haupt's book, called Landsmannschaften und Burschenschaften, while Stourdza's pamphlet quoted above supplies other details. The writings of Heine and Börne give many suggestions of the state of feeling in Germany in 1815-19.

I am indebted also to many German friends for invaluable suggestions.

L. A. M.

SENIOR'S CONVERSATIONS.'

In the month of December 1860, Count Cavour, after speaking very highly of the late Mr. Senior, added: But since he has taken to keeping a kind of journal, he has neglected more serious things.' The remark, which was made to the present writer, struck him as showing how little the great Italo-Genevese, whose personal acquaintance with England was much slighter than many people suppose, really knew about us and our deficiencies. Mr. Senior was no doubt an excellent political economist, and served the public well in many ways, but the other things which he did were things which many could do well, whereas no man of his generation evinced any aptitude for keeping up a constant connection between the most intelligent portion of French and English society, by carefully reporting the conversations of the first for the benefit of the second. His manuscript journals remained, during his life, in what our neighbours call a demi-jour de publicité, but none the less did they exercise considerable influence in forming the opinions of persons who could give effect to their opinions. Since Mr. Senior's death, his journals have for the most part reposed upon their shelves, and sufficient changes have occurred to entitle his daughter to lay a small portion of the valuable materials which she possesses before a wider public. A few years hence many conversations may see the light, which it would not now be proper to publish; but what is at present given to us is so interesting that it may well afford occupation to the reader for some time to come.

It has often been said by persons who had access to Mr. Senior's journals, that their value was much diminished by the fact that his foreign friends knew that their conversation would be reported, and by their having an opportunity of correcting the manuscript before it was circulated. That is true to some extent, but not to a very great extent. Most men usually say what they think, only putting on a mask occasionally, and having heard many of the people whom Mr. Senior used to see, talk, on many occasions, when they were perfectly at their ease, I can affirm that he very well represented the general drift of what they were in the habit of saying. A better founded criticism is that of some other persons, who point out that

Mr. Senior had little dramatic power, and that all the sayings of his friends have passed through the alembic of his own mind, thereby losing a good deal in point and brilliancy. That is true enough, but Mr. Senior's object in recording the conversations which he heard was rather political than literary, and it is as a contribution to political history that the book, of which I am about to speak, should be regarded.

One of the most important parts of it, and the first to which I shall call attention, consists of a series of lectures, 'privatissima' as they would have been called in Berlin, delivered by M. Thiers upon his own history, of which Mr. Senior gives the following account:

London, March 8, 1852.-During the last two months I have seen much of M. Thiers. Allusions are often made to his political life, and he is so disgusted at my ignorance that at last he has undertaken this part of my historical, or rather biographical, education. He thinks that in nine or ten conversations he can give me an outline of it, and of course I am delighted to hear a very interesting story from a very accomplished narrator.'

Under the date of November 30, 1852, we have the following entry, which may be taken as a satisfactory indication that Mr. Senior had succeeded in throwing accurately upon paper the views of the illustrious lecturer.

I called on M. Thiers at eight this morning.

Lady Ashburton had read to him in French the beginning of my report of our conversations in the spring; about, he thought, fifty pages. He admitted its general accuracy.

Thiers: There are some few things that require correction, not because they are important in themselves, but because, the report having passed through my hands, I become responsible for what I am made to say, and inaccuracies in slight points, which would be immaterial if you alone had to answer for them, ought not to be passed over by me.2

We will first look at the evidence which is furnished to us of M. Thiers' ideas of the duties of an administrator. Would it be easy to conceive a higher standard than that which he lays down in the following passage?

Thiers: When I was preparing for war in 1840, I sat every day for eight hours with the Ministers of War, of Marine, and of the Interior. I always began by ascertaining the state of execution of our previous determinations. I never trusted to any assurances if better evidence could be produced. If I was told that letters had been despatched, I required a certificate from the clerk who had posted them or delivered them to the courier. If answers had been received, I required their production. I punished inexorably every negligence, and even every delay. I kept my colleagues and my bureaux at work all day, and almost all night. We were all of us half-killed. Such a tension of mind wearies more than the hardest bodily work. At night my servants undressed me, took me by the feet and shoulders, and placed me in my bed, and I lay there like a corpse till the morning. Even my dreams, when I dreamt, were administrative. To do all this, a man must 1 Vol. i. p. 1. 2 Vol. i. p. 126.

have an iron will, an iron body, and, what is rarer than either, indifference to the likes and dislikes of those about him, for he is sure to be hated; there is only one exception, and that is in the case of a general. A good military administrator is the idol of his troops, because they feel that their comfort and even their safety is the result of his care and of his energy; he is their providence. But the labours of the civilian are unknown to those who profit by them. The sailors at Toulon did not know that it was owing to me that their ships were well stored and victualled.3

There spoke the man of untiring energy who in extreme old age rushed round Europe to try to find allies for France; but in the next few extracts, in which M. Thiers exhibits himself not as an administrator, but as a statesman, we shall see the victim of his own evil teaching, the anti-international man, who asked, quite in good faith, on that celebrated journey, Against whom are you making war in France?' and received from the great German historian to whom he put the question, the terrible answer, Against Louis the Fourteenth!'

If there ever was a cause which should have commanded the sympathies of all intelligent and all generous minds, it was that of the Spanish revolutionists of 1820. They had risen against the very worst of tyrants, and they had conducted themselves with great moderation. If there was a nation in the world on which they had a claim, it was France. And here is the cynical account which a soidisant liberal Frenchman, thirty years after the event, gives of his share in the disgraceful expedition of the Duc d'Angoulême, without being able to plead for his conduct the slightest tincture of religious sympathy with the clerical party, or any regard for the Bourbon family on either side of the Pyrenees :—

In 1822 I was a young man, very poor, supporting myself by writing in the Constitutionnel. Mignet was one of my collaborateurs; La Fayette and Manuel were the political men whom I most consulted. The Spanish expedition was proposed the expedition with respect to which your Canning came forward in the character of Eolus and threatened to scatter the invaders by enchaining the tempests. La Fayette and Manuel declared that the expedition ought to fail and would fail; that a French army would not march to prevent an independent nation from shaking off an intolerable tyranny; and that, if it did attempt such an enormity, the Spanish nation would rise en masse and destroy it, as it had destroyed the more formidable invasions of Napoleon.

I maintained that the government in sending the expedition acted wisely, both for the interests of the throne and the interests of the nation; that it was essential to the safety of France that Spain should be under her control; that if Spain continued constitutional-that is to say, if the feelings of the people were to influence her policy-the antipathy of the Spaniards towards the French would make her a rival or an enemy instead of an ally; that it was the duty, therefore, of every French government to put down every Spanish constitution; that the expedition, instead of being opposed, would be popular with the army, to which it offered both fame and revenge; that it would meet with no serious resistance in Spain, and would establish the Bourbon throne by giving to it the prestige of political success

3 Vol. i. p. 136.

and military glory. And I offered to ascertain the feelings of the troops then forming what was called the sanitary cordon-and that afterwards became the invading army-by travelling to the Pyrenees and mixing with the officers and

men in their tents and cantonments.

My offer was accepted, and I traversed the whole line from Perpignan to Bayonne. I found both officers and men in the disposition which I expecteddelighted with the prospect of a campaign and amused by the niaiserie of those who thought that any ideas of liberty, or of international law, or of moral responsibility, would prevent their marching wherever they were ordered.

Talleyrand heard of my mission and of its results, and wished to see me. I was presented to him at M. Lafitte's; he joined, or professed to join, in La Fayette's fears of a formidable Spanish resistance. He said what, by the bye, was not true— that he had always dissuaded Napoleon's invasion, and had predicted its failure; and he added that he fully expected a similar result now.

I said that the Spaniards would not resist this invasion precisely because they had resisted the former one, that they now knew by experience what it was to fight a disciplined army with guerillas, and that no mere political objects would induce them to suffer again the miseries of insurrectionary war. It was on this occasion that I said: 'L'Espagne est une Vendée éteinte,' un mot qui fit fortune. This conversation was an era in my political life. It procured for me the intimacy of Talleyrand, and, what was of more importance to me, the principal direction of the Constitutionnel, then the greatest political organ in France.

If this frank avowal should obtain for the speaker the hatred of all good Spaniards, the next extract which I shall make should be equally serviceable to the memory of M. Thiers in Italy.

In a conversation on the subject of the expedition to put down the Roman Republic, a transaction hardly less infamous than the expedition of twenty-six years before into Spain, M. Thiers observed to Mr. Senior, who had just returned from Rome:

I do not believe a word that was told you by any Roman. No Italian is to be trusted-least of all an Italian Liberal. . . . It was not for the sake of the Roman people, it was not for the sake of the Pope, it was not for the sake of Catholicism, that we went to Rome. It was for the sake of France; it was to plant the French flag on the Castle of St. Angelo; it was to maintain our right to have one half of Italy if Austria seized the other. Rather than see the Austrian eagle on the flagstaff that rises above the Tiber, I would destroy a hundred constitutions and a hundred religions. I repeat, therefore, that we, the planners of the Roman expedition, acted as statesmen.

His radically wrong conceptions of the causes of national greatness are well shown in the next passage which I shall quote, a passage which will, however, appear to our own Chauvins to be written reason :'

France has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years before her. If her ambition deserts her, if she thinks of nothing but peace and wealth, if she surrenders to others the first place in influence and in arms, and desires merely to be at the head of literature, and art, and civilisation, she will not long preserve that advantage. Military and political superiority carries with it every other pre-eminence.

Three hundred years ago the first power in Europe was Spain. The consequence was that her literature, her habits, and her language were everywhere diffused and copied, She lost her political greatness, and, every other greatness