250 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



the regulations of war in use in most European countries. . . . The 

 States of Europe cannot in tliis point remain behind the American pat- 

 tern, without exposing themselves to the mortifying judgment of public 

 opinion, that in the development of the law of nations they keep them- 

 selves in the rear of the progress of civilized humanity." 



The war came to an end, and left Dr. Lieber as busy as ever- in 

 his lectures to his classes, his occasional writings and coirespondence. 

 When he began the last work of his life, " The Rise of the Constitu- 

 tion," we know not ; but it is a very interesting fact that his last touches 

 — leaving it, as we understand, in a finished or almost finished state — 

 were given on the last day of his life. He was ailing, without being 

 aware that he had any serious malady ; and his wife had left the room 

 to provide something for his comfort, when on returning to the cham- 

 ber she found him already gone. He had died of a disease of the 

 heart. It was on the 2d of October, 1872, on or near the day when his 

 lectures for the year were to begin, at the age of seventy -two years 

 and somewhat more than a half, that he was called away. He died in 

 the Christian faith, a communicant in the Episcopal Church. 



In estimating Dr. Lieber's merits as a writer and thinker on polit- 

 ical and social questions, this strikes us first of all, that he had a prac- 

 tical education fitting him for his chosen science. Few men have had 

 such advantages of living — at great expense of comfort, it is true — 

 under diverse institutions. He could remember the prostration of 

 Prussia during the domination of ^Napoleon, and the reviving patriotism, 

 which seized first on young minds, after the disastrous Russian expedi- 

 tion. He was a witness to the reactionary movements in Germany, 

 and to the broken or deferred promises of constitutional liberty. He 

 became a refugee from his fatherland, only to find in the Greece of his 

 imagination a people morally and by imperfect culture unfitted for free- 

 dom. He saw the effete and crumbling tyranny of the ecclesiastical 

 state. He learned what English liberty was by a long residence in 

 that country. He made the United States his final home, and became 

 thoroughly, even admiringly, attached to the Constitution. No native 

 citizen perhaps appreciated more fully than he the wisdom of the foun- 

 ders of the American " Bundestaat." And, finally, in this Union lie 

 had rare oj^portunities to comjjare the capacities for self-government 

 of States under the curse of slavery and of those which were true to 

 the American idea. He was in these ways aided in becoming one of 

 the most practical of political writers, not at all to the result of rejecting 

 theory, but in such a sense that he looked at theory and at practical 

 problems both. His " Civil Liberty and Self- Government " may be said 



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