PLANS AND PROJECTS-1838-1905 501 



at large cannot justly be blamed for this : it was indeed 

 made the more illustrious by Xavier s great example. 

 The evil, if evil there was, lay in human nature, and a 

 proper history of this evolution of myth and legend, by 

 throwing light into one of the strongest propensities of 

 devout minds, would give a most valuable warning against 

 basing religious systems on miraculous claims which are 

 constantly becoming more and more discredited and 

 therefore more and more dangerous to any system which 

 persists in using them. 



Still another project interested me; effort connected 

 with it was a kind of recreation ; this project was formed 

 during my attache days at St. Petersburg with Governor 

 Seymour. It was a brief biography of Thomas Jef 

 ferson. I made some headway in it, but was at last 

 painfully convinced that I should never have time to finish 

 it worthily. Besides this, after the Civil War, Jefferson, 

 though still interesting to me, was by no means so great 

 a man in my eyes as he had been. Perhaps no doctrine 

 ever cost any other country so dear as Jefferson s pet 

 theory of State rights cost the United States: nearly a 

 million of lives lost on battle-fields, in prisons, and in 

 hospitals ; nearly ten thousand millions of dollars poured 

 into gulfs of hatred. 



With another project I was more fortunate. In 1875 I 

 was asked to prepare a bibliographical introduction to Mr. 

 O Connor Morris s short history of the French Revolu 

 tion. This I did with much care, for it seemed to me that 

 this period in history, giving most interesting material for 

 study and thought, had been much obscured by ideas 

 drawn from trashy books instead of from the really good 

 authorities. 



Having finished this short bibliography, it occurred to 

 me that a much more extensive work, giving a selection of 

 the best authorities on all the main periods of modern his 

 tory, might be useful. This I began, and was deeply inter 

 ested in it ; but here, as in various other projects, the fates 

 were against me. Being appointed a commissioner to the 



