PLANS AND PROJECTS-1838-1905 489 



Serfdom in Russia&quot; all had a bearing on the dominant 

 question of slavery, and the same was true of my Phi 

 Beta Kappa address at Yale on &quot;The Greatest Foe of 

 Modern States. &quot; Whatever I wrote during the Civil 

 War, and especially my pamphlet published in London as 

 a reply to the i American Diary of the London * Times 

 correspondent, Dr. Russell, had a similar character. The 

 feeling grew upon me that life in the United States during 

 the middle of the nineteenth century was altogether too 

 earnest for devotion to pure literature. The same feeling 

 pervaded my lectures at the University of Michigan, my 

 effort being by means of the lessons of history to set 

 young men at thinking upon the great political problems 

 of our time. The first course of these lectures was upon 

 the French Revolution. Work with reference to it had 

 been a labor of love. During my student life in Paris, 

 and at various other times, I had devoted much time to 

 the study of this subject, had visited nearly all the places 

 most closely connected with it not only in Paris but 

 throughout France, had meditated upon the noble begin 

 nings of the Revolution in the Palace and Tennis-court 

 and Church of St. Louis at Versailles; at Lyons, upon 

 the fusillades; at Nantes, upon the noyades; at the Ab- 

 baye, the Carmelite monastery, the Barriere du Trone, 

 and the cemetery of the Rue Picpus in Paris, upon the 

 Red Terror; at Nimes and Avignon and in La Vendee, 

 upon the White Terror; had collected, in all parts of 

 France, masses of books, manuscripts, public documents 

 and illustrated material on the whole struggle: full sets 

 of the leading newspapers of the Revolutionary period, 

 more than seven thousand pamphlets, reports, speeches, 

 and other fugitive publications, with masses of paper 

 money, caricatures, broadsides, and the like, thus form 

 ing my library on the Revolution, which has since been 

 added to that of Cornell University. Based upon these 

 documents and books were my lectures on the general 

 history of France and on the Revolution and Empire. 

 Out of this came finally a shorter series of lectures upon 



