of
a European Diet, or Senate, to be composed of representatives of all
nations, before which princes should be bound, before resorting to arms,
to state their grievances and require redress. Writing about eighty
years after the publication of this project, Volney asked: "What is
a people?--an individual of the society at large. What a war?--a duel
between two individual people. In what manner ought a society to act
when two of its members fight?--Interfere, and reconcile or repress
them. In the days of the Abbe de St.-Pierre, this was treated as a
dream; but, happily for the human race, it begins to be realised." Alas
for the prediction of Volney! The twenty-five years that followed the
date at which this passage was written, were distinguished by more
devastating and furious wars on the part of France than had ever been
known in the world before.

The Abbe was not, however, a mere dreamer. He was an active practical
philanthropist and anticipated many social improvements which have since
become generally adopted. He was the original founder of industrial
schools for poor children, where they not only received a good
education, but learned some useful trade, by which they might earn an
honest living when they grew up to manhood. He advocated the revision
and simplification of the whole code of laws--an idea afterwards carried
out by the First Napoleon. He wrote against duelling, against luxury,
against gambling, against monasticism, quoting the remark of Segrais,
that "the mania for a monastic life is the smallpox of the mind." He
spent his whole income in acts of charity--not in almsgiving, but in
helping poor children, and poor men and women, to help themselves. His
object always was to benefit permanently those whom he assisted. He
continued his love of truth and his freedom of speech to the last. At
the age of eighty he said: "If life is a lottery for happiness, my lot
has been one of the best." When on his deathbed, Voltaire asked him
how he felt, to which he answered, "As about to make a journey into the
country." And in this peaceful frame of mind he died. But so outspoken
had St.-Pierre been against corruption in high places, that Maupertius,
his Successor at the Academy, was not permitted to pronounce his ELOGE;
nor was it until thirty-two years after his death that this honour was
done to his memory by D'Alembert. The true and emphatic epitaph of the
good, truth-loving, truth-speaking Abbe was this--"HE LOVE