1880.] '">! . I Robinson. 



of Mr. Chevalier in the winter of 1838-39, when he was scarcely thirty- 

 thi'ee years of age. Honors and distinctions were tlien bestowed on him 

 rapidly. Appointed " Master of Requests " in 1836, he became successive- 

 ly Counsellor of State, member of the Superior Council of Commerce, 

 Chief Engineer of Mines, and in 1841, at the age of 35, successor of the 

 celebrated Rossi, as Professor of Political Economy in the College of 

 France. No appointment could have been more gratifying to Mr. Cheva- 

 lier than this. His lectures were to be on subjects familiar to him, to which 

 his thoughts had been given from the time of his entrance in the Polytech- 

 nic School, and it was a labor of love to him to pre^jare and deliver them. 

 Though the recipient since of many distinctions and honors, among them 

 that of Senator of France in 1860, and charged with corresponding duties, 

 and obliged occasionally to devolve on a substitute his duties as pi'ofessor, 

 he continued to hold the Professorship of Political Economy, in the College 

 of France until liis death, with the exception of a brief period after the 

 Revolution of 1848, when he was deprived of his chair by the Provisional 

 government of the day, but which was restored to him in the course of a 

 few months by a vote of the National Assembly. 



Mr. Chevalier, though eminent as a Political Economist and Publicist, 

 and zealous always in promoting what he believed to be the interests of 

 his country, was in no sense a parly man. He was an admirer of Mr. 

 Thiers, and an attached friend of Count Mole, successive Ministers of 

 Louis Philippe, but he had no difficulty in opposing important measures 

 recommended by them as Ministers, of which he did not approve ; and he 

 manifested signally in 1870 his independence when he stood in the Senate 

 Chamber almost, if not altogether alone, in voting against the Prussian 

 War. When in France in 1867, on hearing his name mentioned as a man 

 of pre-eminent ability by a gentleman of influence in the Orleanist Party, 

 and bearing one of the renowned names of France, I was tempted to ask 

 how it came to pass that Mr. Chevalier had not been in the Cabinet of either 

 Louis Philippe or Louis Napoleon. His reply was simply "11 traverse 

 trap son chemin," showing that in Empires and Monarchies, as in the 

 United States, those who would be cabinet officers and dispensers of 

 government patronage, must give up to a greater or less extent their inde- 

 pendence of opinion, which conscientious and really able men cannot 

 readily surrender. 



Mr. Chevalier was elected in 1845 a Deputy of the Department of the 

 Aveyron, and during the same year was married to Mile. Emma Fournier, 

 a highly educated and accomplished young lady, the only daughter of a 

 large and wealthy manufacturer of Lodeve in the Department of the 

 Herault ; and in 1851 he was elected a meml)er of the Institute of France, 

 in the Department of Moral and Political Sciences. 



He had thus attained at the age of 45, all that, if a selfish or merely am- 

 bitious man, he could have desired. With an ample income from the hon- 

 orable positions held by him, and occasional contributions of his well-con- 

 sidered views, on subjects of public interest, to the regular periodicals and 



