the present state of feeling in Europe is far from giving
reason to foresee an intervention in favor of the South; it is necessary
to sap at the base these deplorable sophisms, more fully credited than
is imagined, which may, in due time, under the pressure of certain
industrial needs or of certain political combinations, urge France and
England into a course which is not their own.

For the present, I have only wished to repeat, with a strengthened
conviction, what I said a few months ago. I believed then in the
uprising of a great people; now I am sure of it.

VALLEYRES, _November_ 2, 1861.

* * * * *

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

At this moment, when we are anxiously scrutinizing every indication of
European feeling with respect to the American question, the advent of a
book, bearing the stamp of a close philosophical, political, and
practical study of the subject, and written, withal, in so hopeful a
spirit as to make us feel with the writer that whatever may result from
the present crisis must be for good, cannot fail to be of public
interest and utility. So truly prophetic is this work in its essence,
that we can hardly believe that it was written in great part amid the
mists that preceded the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln. All probabilities
appear to have been foreseen, and the unerring exactness with which
events have taken place hitherto precisely in the direction indicated by
the author, encourages us to believe that this will continue until his
predictions will have been fulfilled to the end. Clear-sighted,
philosophical, appreciative of American genius and accomplishment,
critical, yet charitable to tenderness, stigmatizing the fault, yet
forgiving the offender, cheering our nation onward by words of
encouragement, bravely spoken at the needed-moment, menacing Europe with
the scorn of posterity, if, forgetting her oft-repeated professions, she
dare forsake the side of liberty to traffic in principles; such is the
scope of what a late reviewer calls "the wisest book which has been
written upon America since De Tocqueville."

Few men are better qualified to judge American affairs than Count de
Gasparin. A many-sided man, combining the scholar, the statesman, the
politician, the man of letters, and the finished gentleman, possessed of
every advantage of culture, wealth, and position, he has devoted a long
life to the advocacy of liberty in all its forms, whether religious