enough for all
England.'

'A friend of mine,' said Beaumont, had a remarkably good Swiss servant.
His education was far above his station, and we could not find what had
been his birth or his canton.

'Suddenly he became agitated and melancholy, and at last told my friend
that he must leave him, and why. His father was the hereditary _bourreau_
of a Swiss canton. To the office was attached an estate, to be forfeited
if the office were refused. He had resolved to take neither, and, to
avoid being solicited, had left his country and changed his name. But his
family had traced him, had informed him of his father's death, and had
implored him to accept the succession. He was the only son, and his
mother and sisters would be ruined, if he allowed it to pass to the next
in order of inheritance, a distant cousin. He had not been able to
persist in his refusal.'

'The husband of an acquaintance of mine,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'used
to disappear for two or three hours every day. He would not tell her for
what purpose. At last she found out that he was employed in the _chambre
noire_, the department of the police by which letters passing through the
post are opened. The duties were well paid, and she could not persuade
him to give them up. They were on uneasy terms, when an accident threw a
list of all the names of the _employes_ in the _chambre noire_, into the
hands of an opposition editor, who published them in his newspaper.

'She then separated from him.'

'If the Post-office,' I said, 'were not a Government monopoly, if
everyone had a right to send his letters in the way that he liked best,
there would be some excuse. But the State compels you, under severe
penalties, to use its couriers, undertaking, not tacitly but expressly,
to respect the secrecy of your correspondence, and then systematically
violates it.'

'I should have said,' answered Ampere, 'not expressly but tacitly.'

'No,' I replied; 'expressly. Guizot, when Minister for Foreign Affairs,
proclaimed from the tribune, that in France the secrecy of correspondence
was, under all circumstances, inviolable. This has never been officially
contradicted.

'The English Post-office enters into no such engagements. Any letters may
be legally opened, under an order from a Secretary of State.'

'Are prisoners in England,' asked Beaumont, 'allowed to correspond with
their friends?'

'I believe,' I answered, 'that their letters pass through the Governor's
hands