doubt that the present EMPEROR Would prefer a war to a revolution, yet there are no signs that the war, if it comes, will be his doing. He is not pushing on France to war; it is France that is pushing on him. The semi-official article just published in the Constitutionnel states probably what is the simple truth, that the French Government did not think Prussia would object to the cession of Luxemburg or the evacuation of the fortress. It seemed as if Prussia had nothing to lose by this, and might be expected to be glad of showing in a graceful way that she was pleased that the wishes of France should be gratified. The EMPEROR may not unnaturally think that he has given no ground for suspecting that he wants to take the left bank of the Rhine, or that he considers a new war necessary for the maintenance of his power. He showed himself last year much more moderate than his subjects; and when war was in some measure pressed on him, he seemed to appeal to the good sense of the country, and to lean for support on the growing dislike with which war is regarded in France by those who most suffer from taxes and have to shed their blood most freely in battle. Even at this eleventh hour the language of the French Government is studiously courteous and conciliatory. Since Prussia unfortunately is not so accommodating as was expected, and asserts that she holds Luxemburg under a general European arrangement which is not to be disturbed by bargains between France and Holland, France is ready to accept this view, and to invite the other great Powers to consider what should be the destiny of the fortress of Luxemburg now that the territory of Luxemburg is no longer a part of the German Confederation. It is undoubtedly open to Prussia to reply that the other Powers have nothing to do with the matter, and that Germany, having had this fortress entrusted to her for the protection, not only of Europe, but of Germany, cannot be dispossessed at the pleasure of other Powers. But it is obvious that, so far as Europe was concerned, it was because the province of Luxemburg was made a part of the German Confederation that the fortress was handed over to the safekeeping of German troops. The two things went together. In 1839 the Great Powers forced Belgium to give up Luxemburg to Holland on the express ground that, as it was a part of Germany, the Belgians could not be allowed to retain it as a portion of the territory which they had succeeded in wresting from Holland. But now Luxemburg is no longer a part of Germany. The Germans do not wish tha it should be so. It is a possession of the King of HOLLAND, who wants to be rid of it, and it is a most glaring anomaly that Prussia should retain the right of garrisoning a fortress in the midst of a territory that is entirely alien to her. If she chooses to say that, having got the fortress, she will keep it whether she is right or not, and whether her position is anomalous or not, she can do so, and it is possible she may do so successfully. But she certainly, in doing this, abdicates her claim to hold Luxemburg by a European title. If she says that she must hold it for the protection of Germany, this does not really alter her position, for she still occupies new ground. She is assuming more than the European settlement gave her. She is, in fact, holding a non-German town for the protection of Germany, and the Powers that placed her there never meant that this should be so. If the cession of Luxemburg is looked upon as a compensation to France, or as a sign that Germany will yield to claims made for the purposes of French politics, it is impossible to conceive that the Prussian garrison will be withdrawn. But ifit is looked at with reference to the general politics of Europe, the case is very different. For, as between Europe and Prussia, the continuance of a Prussian garrison in non-German territory is a sort of usurpation. But Prussia cannot be expected to admit that the fortress which she is asked to give up shall be given to France. If it is contrary to the spirit of the European settlement that she should hold Luxemburg now that Luxemburg is no longer German, it is still more contrary to the spirit of that settlement that the fortress she holds as against France should be given to France. But then it is urged that, if she withdraws, France, on the first opportunity, will be sure to seize it, and that to withdraw is virtually to give it to France. To this there is only one answer. If Luxemburg is placed under the same guarantee as Belgium, France can never seize it except by risking a war with the guarantors. Prussia may be persuaded to consider this guarantee a sufficient security; and this is, we imagine, almost the only hope of peace being preserved. It is not a solution of the difficulty at all agreeable to us, for Englishmen view with the utmost dislike all projects for extending our engagements to defend foreign soil. But, as we have guaranteed Belgium, we should not be running a new risk. Or if, in a remote way, our risk is increased, this perhaps is not too great a sacrifice to make in order to preserve peace. From the Saturday Review. THE PRIVACY OF THE DEAD. of the literary harpies of the next age. Nobody thinks it wrong or indecorous to study the minutiae of his appetite, or his personal habits. The slaves of the lamp of one gen affairs of their predecessors, the slaves of the lamp of the generation before. Not to know the chronological order of Lord Byron's intrigues, the secret history of Mr. Shelley's marriages, or the authentic details of Mr Coleridge's opium-eating, is a sort of blot upon one's literary cultivation. The thoroughly educated man is as much at home at Mr. Fox's dinner-table as at his own. It is the aim and object of our early studies to teach us to be able to button-hole all the illustrious dead to call Tommy Moore by his Christian name, and to be facetious and omniscient about Mr. Wordsworth's stout coarse shoes. For the slave of the lamp, when he is buried, there is no more privacy. The more secluded has been his life, the greater the crowd which flocks to him when he is dead, and inquisitive biographers think no more of taking up their permament quarters among his papers than the active tourist does of picnicking at the Pyramids or on the site of Veii. It MOST persons who have read the autobiog-eration are always busy over the private raphy of Goethe will remember the passage in which he describes the anxiety of his acquaintances, after the publication of Werther, to discover the lady from whom he borrowed the character of Charlotte. Tormenting inquiries upon the subject pursued him all through his life. And, looking back on them, the author of Werther wanders into a slight digression about the way in which the public treats those whose mission it is to write for public instruction and amusement. Perhaps a man who publishes his own autobiography is not the person to complain of intrusions on his privacy. Those who, like Goethe or Rousseau, deliberately choose to "pose" in public, and to invite the microscopic attention of the curious, ought not to object to being stared at or even jostled by a crowd. In general, famous people are supposed at any rate to have a right to shut out the world from their drawing-rooms and their dinner-tables. Princes and princesses are believed to be an exception. Like the lions in the Zoological Gardens, they are national characters; and the public, which pays for them, wishes as far as possible to watch them even at their meals. Whether one Royal personage is on the best of terms with another, what is the exact level of matrimonial felicity among the princes and princesses who are grown up, and what the little princes and princesses who are not grown up say to the doctor who attends them for the measles, are topics of conversation at every village tea-table in the country. But, apart from such exceptional cases, a modified sort of privacy is permitted to great men during their lifetime. Occasionally the "Flâneur" of a daily paper hunts them down at a club or an evening party, and regales his readers on the length of one hero's hair and the whiteness of another hero's teeth; but such impertinences are blamed and discountenanced by educated men and women. As soon, however, as a hero dies he loses his claim to the protection of good manners. Naked the literary giant came into this world, and naked he goes out of it. He leaves behind, for the inspection of the world at large, his character and his clothes, his manners and conversation, the cut of his coat and the colour of his hair, his acquaintances, his amours, and the exact shade of his theological opinions. All that he has had or enjoyed in life becomes the property An eminent Lord Chancellor is said to have once told the late Lord Campbell that his Lives of the Chancellors had succeeded in adding an additional terror to death. may perhaps reasonably be doubted whether contemporary fame is an adequate compensation for the prospect of having one's life and letters subjected to the curious scrutiny of posterity. The two greatest poets that the world has ever known are singular in being an exception to the lot of their fraternity. Nobody knows anything about Shakspeare and Homer-if there ever was a Homer may at all events lay claim to the proud distinction of having successfully baffled the erudite efforts of biographers. But, with few exceptions, most great writers have been so dug over and explored that any privacy which they may have desired during their lives is utterly lost and sacrificed at their decease. The question is whether posthumous fame is worth this. One can well conceive of a great genius who calmly considered the matter in all its bearings, and who fully understood the eternal fuss that would be made by future ages about his neck handkerchiefs, and his juvenile indiscretions, coming deliberately to the conclusion that he preferred dying in obscurity. To be called Tommy to all time, and to have one's conjugal affection, and one's capacity for toadyism canvassed by coming ages, is a prospect which would have made Mr. Moore think twice about writing Lalla Rookh. Even | most people investigate all the mysteries of Dr. Johnson might have hesitated about the past without the faintest scruple, but also the wisdom of compassing Rasselas and of without having definitely asked themselves conversing familiary with Boswell, if he had whether in so doing they are acting on a been forewarned that his voracious way of justifiable principle. There must be some eating, his difficulty about early rising, and rational and sound argument one way or his admiration of Mrs. Thrale would have other upon the subject, and it is as well to been as immortal as Rasselas itself. The consider what it is. truth is that glory and immortality are by no means unmixed blessings. They entail upon defunct heroes a long course of literary persecution. The Stellas and Vanessas of a great author haunt him long after they and he are gone. There is no corner appropriated to the dead in which they can hide their precious secrets, and every lock of hair that the poet or the satirist conceals among his most cherished treasures before many years are past, will inevitably be exposed upon the housetop. It is a consolation to be able to believe that the dead whose privacy we overhaul so unceremoniously have usually died in profound ignorance of all the honourable publicity that was to be conferred on them. The most sanguine of them anticipated perhaps that their compositions or their achievements would endure, but they never dreamed of the zealous curiosity with which people would inquire into all their domestic affairs. Lord Nelson possibly expected that his fame would survive together with the history of the battle of the Nile or Trafalgar. He hoped for Westminster Abbey, but he did not know that Lady Hamilton's name would cling to him as closely as if it were his own epitaph. It is, however, one of the undoubted misfortunes of celebrity that it sheds a briliant light, not merely on the hero, but on the hero's foibles, on the follies he has committed, and the false idols he has worshipped. Briseis lives as long as Achilles, and Frederika as long as Goethe. When we are all dead and buried, future antiquarians will rumage the historian's house at Chelsea, and the Poet Laureate's garden in the Isle of Wight. The question, therefore, cannot but suggest itself occasionally, whether it is desirable that the dead should never be protected. Nobody of course can claim any rights except as far as they are consistent with the interests of society. As the rights of property are subordinate to the welfare of the community at large, the rights of individual privacy depend upon the ultimate advantage of the world, and it may be that the interests of mankind and of literature demand that all the secret history of famous people should ultimately be laid bare to the noonday. The question, however, is one well worth settling. As it is, Keserved and sensitive writers who object to this system of posthumous exploration must recollect, in the first place, that the system is one introduced by literary genius itself, not forced upon genius by a prying and inquisitive world. The fault rests with literature rather than with society. The bones of authors might sleep in peace but for the activity of other authors who come after them. But the past, as far as literature is concerned, seems so deeply interesting to the present, that writers are never satisfied with letting it alone, and a large percentage of the volumes published in one age are devoted to exhuming the memory of writers who have published volumes in the age before. The smallest anecdotes about one literary man supply materials for the pen of another, and thus literature is protected against running dry at the expense of the privacy of the dead. At the first blush of the matter, of course it seems hard that, because a man has composed a great poem or compiled a great history, his wife, his menage, and even his cuisine, should be destined to be common possessions for all subsequent literature to deal with as it pleases. Give the world an inch and it asks an ell. Contribute to its progress a book, an invention, or a feat of arms, and it straightway drags from you, and devours with greedy curiosity, all that you did not propose to contribute to it, the story of your inner life and the secrets of your most private memoranda. So common and universal a custom cannot be without a good plea in its own defence; and the limitations imposed by common opinion upon such publicity help to throw light on the reasons why in general the privacy of the dead should be so little respected. As long as there are those living whose personal feelings are involved, the memory of the dead, by general consent, is regarded as a sacred thing. A deceased man's children are thought to have a claim to be considered, and any one who can honestly say that the violation of the privacy of the dead will wound or annoy the living invariably commands attention. Accordingly, private paders are often withheld from publication until the generation whose reputation or sensitiveness they might offend is gone, and no biographer who was not a brute would divulge the confidential secrets of any human being who might be injured by his disclosures. This sweeping exception to the rule of publicity shows on what principle the line is drawn. The dead as such, and except so far as they share their biography with those who are not yet dead, are considered to be the property of society. They have been transferred into the domain of history, and history recognises no right paramount to its own. The axiom on which its views rests is that it is a good thing for mankind that it should find out all it can about the past, and that no one should be able to cover up under a cloak of secresy his most hidden motives. Human prejudice may be offended by such a law, but it is not easy to point out anything in it inconsistent with the best and highest interests of humanity. The only use of which a man can be to his fellow-creatures, when once he is no more, is to furnish them with the truth about himself. If he is not able to be either an exemplar or a warning, he can be a specimen and a study one more contribution to the natural history of poets or philosophers, or whatever else his line in life may be. When we ask ourselves what just cause or impediment there is why this should not be so, there is really nothing to urge except a sort of blind and selfish instinct within us, that tells us it would be pleasanter to have some reminiscences at any rate burried with us in the grave. Pleasanter for the individual it certainly would be, but this is no proof at all that it would be better for the race. It may perhaps be said that, by a parallel course of reasoning, one might show that it was the duty of every good citizen to bequeath his body to the dissecting-room, in order that he might be of some service to science, when he could no longer be of service to anybody besides. The analogy, however, is not complete. First of all, such a destination of the remains of the dead would often be a shock and an outrage to the feelings of the living. But secondly, apart from all questions of private sensibilities, it must be taken to be an accepted fact that civilized communities find it more to their advantage to treat the remains of the deceased with pious reverence than to deal with them for purposes of science. There are cases in which the claims of science are ordinarily admitted; but most moralists will allow that experience and argument are in favour of the custom which at present obtains. If that custom were merely founded oa individual caprice or instinct, it would not be worth much, but the instinct or caprice happens to be one which it is desirable and useful to preserve and foster. It is different with regard to the dead who by lapse of time have become disconnected with the current affairs of the living. It is not what they would have liked that is to be considered, but what upon the whole is best for all of us. And reason tells us that it is best that the dead should have no vested interest at all in what they leave behind them, whether it be their money or their name and fame. It is therefore a misnomer to talk of the privacy, of the dead. The dead have no privacy, no secrecy no reserve. They bring nothing into the world, and they must take nothing out. On the whole, we do not doubt that this principle is a sound and moral one. Above all other considerations the welfare of society ought to predominate; but if there ever was a case in which society has the first claim, it is where her cause and that of truth are identical. It is not for the good of the world that the motives and inner characters of famous men should perish with them. Every effort made by them to obtain some protection against the curiosity of the future is either a proof of weakness or morbidity, or worse. Human instinct is on their side, but human reason is not. It is by having their inmost confidences laid bare to future ages that great men, despite. of themselves, are compelled to destroy the illusions they have fomented about themselves, to give up the deceptions_behind which they have taken refuge, and to repair something of the harm they have done. As far as the living are concerned, bypocrisy has been said to be the tribute vice pays to virtue. When we come to deal with the dead, be they good or be they bad, the best tribute they can pay to virtue is, not hypocrisy, but truth. From The Saturday Review. DEMOCRACY AND COURT-DRESS. AN extremely curious debate is reported to have recently taken place in the House of Representatives at Washington, on the subject of clothes. A distinguished writer in our own country has taught us the emblematic significance of clothes, and has in a manner based an entire philosophy of life and human nature upon them. Nobody who has studied the close connexion which exists between each element of conduct and This, however, is a mistaken view of the matter. The speaker, himself a man of low origin, did not mean what he said as a taunt, but as a joke and bit of humour. Even from this point of view it is bad and rude enough. The joke is a specimen of that sort of fun which consists in throwing yourself ironically and for the moment among a set of ideas which are not your own, and measuring an object by an alien standard. Mr. Covode may have tried to realize the feelings of the aristocratic Courts, and may for the time have identified himself, in a moment of grim jocosity, with their way of looking at a Chief Magistrate who had once been a tailor. To our notions, of course, the humour is a shade too grim to be decent. But American irony sticks at nothing. Some of the most characteristic of American jests, though they do not often get into print, turn upon feeling and every other element, can be in in a democratic country that a man could the least surprised to find that a democratic be taunted with the lowness of his origin. polity seems to lead to democratic manners and costume. All one's ideas move together, with varying degrees of intensity, but at the bidding of a common impulse. Emancipation from imaginary slavery to one of those typical tyrants whom excited poets accuse of devouring the earth leads to a vast number of results which have no immediately political connexion. In a State founded on the conception that all men are equal, all sorts of social consequences flow from what at first seems an exclusively political idea. You must not have different classes of railway carriages for different orders in a country where, theoretically at least, there are no orders. You may expectorate at your own sweet will in a free country. You may go to dinners and to balls in a frock-coat, or a shooting-jacket, or anything else you like, among a people where one man's idea of what is becoming is quite as respectable and authoritative a peculiarly daring treatment of things of as another's. The debate, however, to which we have referred, and the resolution which was carried in consequence, implies an extension of these free social principles for which one was hardly prepared. For the future no representative of the great Republic at a foreign Court is to wear the Court-dress of the country to which he is accredited. This curious piece of legislation is due to Mr. Sumner, who introduced the resolution into the Senate. In the Lower Chamber it gave rise to unbounded jocosity. One honourable member, it appears, moved an amendment, not only forbidding a diplomate from wearing Court-dress, but also prescribing the kind of dress which he shall wear on great occasions. Among other items in this proposed costume, there was to be "a cocked-hat looped up with an American eagle," and "a swallow-tailed coat with stars and stripes on the tails, butternut pantaloons, close-fitting yellow stockings with gaiters, and a buckskin vest with one side black and the other side white." But this elegant humour was far exceeded by another gentleman, who moved that diplomatic agents shall not be permitted to wear any Court-dress except such as shall be prescribed, and the patterns drawn, by the chief tailor of the nation, who is now presiding over its destinies." This graceful reference to the fact that Mr. Johnson had once been a tailor was at once seen to be so steeped in wit and fancy that the House was convulsed with laughter. Some English people are very angry at this, and insist that it is only which sober persons usually speak with bated breath. Such a gibe as this against the chief tailor presiding over the national destinies is not the product of the political ideas of the United States, but a mark of the stage of manners at which they have arrived. It would be impossible in our House of Commons; not because the House represents oligarchic ideas in politics, but because we have a very long civilization at the back of us, while the Americans have only a very short civilization. One wishes very much that the Americans would advance rather more rapidly in the pursuit of the amenities; only let us not father on democracy the offences against good taste and fastidiousness which are really due to the social state, and which after all are not a bit more repugnant to modern politeness than the manners of our own senators a generation or two back-and they were aristocratic enough in all conscience. Mr. Covode's humour, however, and that of the gentleman who proposed a swallowtailed coat with stars and stripes on the tails, were both quenched by Mr. Banks, who took up seriously what these two wits had taken up jocosely. The question whether the American Ambassadors should wear spotted waistcoats, shoe-buckles, swords, and so forth, was no joke to him. Somehow or other, in his eyes, it involves the supremacy of the United States. By an inscrutable mental process, the shoebuckles and swallow-tails recalled to the mind of Mr. Banks the alleged prophecy of Turgot, that the United States would prove |