o important papers, and when he became a great public personage,
everything was laid open before him. In diplomatic matters he is very
far ahead of all other writers, except Sorel. Having been an
opposition leader, and what in Prussia is called a Liberal, he went
over to Bismarck, and wrote the history of the new German Empire under
his inspiration, until the Emperor excluded him from the archives, of
which, for many active years, he had been the head. His five volumes,
not counting various essays written in amplification or defence,
stand, in the succession of histories, by dint of constant revision,
at a date near the year 1880. For a time they occupied the first
place. In successive editions errors were weeded out as fast as they
could be found; and yet, even in the fourth, Mounier, who, as
everybody knows, was elected for Dauphine, is called the deputy from
Provence. Inasmuch as he loves neither Thiers nor Sieyes, Sybel
declares it absurd to compare, as Thiers has done, the Constitution of
1799 to the British Constitution. In the page alluded to, one of the
most thoughtful in the Consulate and Empire, Thiers is so far from
putting the work of Sieyes on the British level, that his one purpose
is to display the superiority of a government which is the product of
much experiment and incessant adaptation to the artificial outcome of
political logic.

Sybel's view is that the Revolution went wrong quite naturally, that
the new order was no better than the old, because it proceeded from
the old, rose from an exhausted soil, and was worked by men nurtured
in the corruption of the old _regime_. He uses the Revolution to
exhibit the superiority of conservative and enlightened Germany. And
as there is little to say in favour of Prussia, which crowned an
inglorious war by an inglorious peace, he produced his effect by
piling up to the utmost the mass of French folly and iniquity. And
with all its defects, it is a most instructive work. A countryman, who
had listened to Daniel Webster's Bunker Hill oration, described it by
saying that every word weighed a pound. Almost the same thing might be
said of Sybel's history, not for force of language or depth of
thought, but by reason of the immense care with which every passage
was considered and all the evidence weighed. The author lived to see
himself overtaken and surpassed, for internal history by Taine, and
for foreign affairs by Sorel.

Taine was trained in the systems of Hege