246 PEOCEEDINGS OF TH-E AMERICAN ACADEMY 



than we can pay to him within our limits. And his merits are so 

 much the greater, in that, although born and ti'ained under other forms 

 of government, he thoroughly comprehended our political system, was 

 loyal to it, was as true and as intelligent a friend of the Constitution 

 as he could have been if this country had been his birthplace and the 

 home of his ancestors. In his work on Civil Liberty and Self-Govern- 

 ment, he has some fine remarks on the power of the institutions of our 

 Anglican race to assimilate new-comers, even to transform them ; but 

 when he landed on our shores he had no need of transformation, he 

 was well prepared to love institutional liberty like ours, and to show 

 to others its self-governing capacity. 



He was born in Berlin, March 18, 1800, and was old enough to 

 remember the battle of Jena, Napoleon's entrance into Berlin in 

 the autumn of 1806, and the humiliating treaty of Tilsit of the next 

 summer. His childhood and youth were marked by the love of study 

 and of truth ; he was fond of gymnastic exercises ; he was in training 

 for a future sphere in life, when the return of Napoleon from Elba 

 called him, a boy of only fifteen, into the army. He was at Ligny 

 and at Waterloo ; and in the course of this campaign received two 

 wounds. " Seriously wounded," says M. Rolin-Jaecquemyns, in a recent 

 number of his international review, " and knowing no one, the poor boy 

 was transported to Liege, where he found in a respectable family of 

 Belgium, still subsisting, the most disinterested and touching atten- 

 tions." After this experience of war, on his return to his home and 

 studies, he became acquainted with a somewhat celebrated German of 

 that period, Friedrich L. Jahn, who, in the days of the Tugenbund and 

 the rising of Germany against Napoleon, was patronized by the Prus- 

 sian government in his gymnastic discipline known by the name of 

 Turnkunst, but who fell under suspicion after the v/ar of liberation, 

 as a friend of advanced political freedom. Lieber, a favorite pupil, 

 was arrested with the gymnastic teacher, and remained in confinement, 

 it is said, about a year. On his release, being forbidden to study at a 

 Prussian university, he repaired to Jena, where he was graduated in 

 1820. Jena at this time was the resort of a number of students who 

 were disaffected towards the German governments, because they had 

 not fulfilled the expectations of the time when the young and old 

 pressed into the service of " fatherland " against the French. Lieber 

 may perhaps have known Ludwig Sand, a tete exaltee of that Uni- 

 versity, who, in March, 1819, assassinated Kotzebue, as being an 

 agent of Russian despotism. He was a suspected person within the 

 province of the Prussian police, and, as no prospects opened to him in 



