AS COMMISSIONER AT PARIS -1878 523 



eign affairs, but, having retired from politics, had given 

 himself up in his old age to various good enterprises, 

 among these, to the great Reform School at Mettray. 

 This he urged me to visit, and, although it was at a con- 

 siderable distance from Paris, I took his advice, and was 

 much interested in it. The school seemed to me well de- 

 serving thorough study by all especially interested in the 

 problem of crime in our own country. 



There is in France a system under which, when any 

 young man is evidently going all wrong, squandering his 

 patrimony and bringing his family into disgrace, a fam- 

 ily council can be called, with power to place the wayward 

 youth under restraint; and here, in one part of the Met- 

 tray establishment, were rooms in which such youths were 

 detained in accordance with the requests of family coun- 

 cils. It appeared that some had derived benefit from these 

 detentions, for there were shown me one or two letters 

 from them: one, indeed, written by a young man on the 

 bottom of a drawer, and intended for the eye of his suc- 

 cessor in the apartment, which was the most contrite yet 

 manly appeal I have ever read. 



Another man of great eminence whom I met in those 

 days was Thiers. I was taken by an old admirer of 

 his to his famous house in the Place St. Georges, and 

 there found him, in the midst of his devotees, receiving 

 homage. 



He said but little, and that little was commonplace ; but 

 I was not especially disappointed : my opinion of him was 

 made up long before, and time has but confirmed it. The 

 more I have considered his doings as minister or parlia- 

 mentarian, and the more I have read his works, whether 

 his political pamphlet known as the "History of the 

 French Revolution," which did so much to arouse sterile 

 civil struggles, or his "History of the Consulate and of the 

 Empire," which did so much to revive the Napoleonic 

 legend, or his speeches under the constitutional monarchy 

 of Louis Philippe, under the Republic, and under the Sec- 

 ond Empire, which did so much to promote confusion and 



