acquainted with each other, made those gatherings in Albemarle Street, as Mr Gladstone said, "the most charming in London." How many must remember them as I do, and the dear figure which, no matter who was there, was always the central one. So true and loyal a friend will leave so very large a vacant place.' One special point about the large number of wellknown people who gathered round him so gladly was that they had no business connexion with him, and, if they were authors, published their books elsewhere. Among such were Sir George Grey, and Sir Bartle Frere, who was a Wimbledon neighbour and a much-loved friend. There were great rejoicings among us when Sir Bartle came home from India or South Africa to the house near Newstead where his family were brought up. Prof. Owen often came over from Sheen, and delighted and amused us with queer stories of beasts and natural history; and Prof. Flower, who later followed in his footsteps, was another frequent guest, as were also Froude and Lecky, and Sir Theodore and Lady Martin. My father read little poetry and certainly no Browning, yet Browning was an admired and ever-welcome guest; no one was better informed in a wide range of subjects, and he and my father had so much in common that to listen to their talk was a delight. My father knew nothing of music, but that most versatile of men, Sir George Grove, was a constant visitor; and so were Madame Lind-Goldschmidt and her husband, who were well known in his circle of valued friends and neighbours at Wimbledon. He was a staunch and devout old-fashioned Churchman of a very moderate type, averse from all extremes. Yet Dean Hook and Dean Stanley, both reported extremists in those days, were his intimate friends. He once said of Stanley, when Prof. Max Müller had been asked to lecture in the Abbey,' He can tolerate anybody except a High-Churchman.' In one way he was ahead of his own generation of Churchmen, for, when the movement was started in Oxford, by men of a younger generation, for assimilating the proved results of modern criticism and showing them to be compatible with the doctrine of Biblical Inspiration, and most of those of his standing held aloof in displeasure, he welcomed it and gladly published their book 'Lux Mundi.' When it came to points of ascertained fact he said, If the Church does not bend, she will break.' His generosity was shown, not only in gifts of books but in lavish help to all sorts of good causes. He served from the first on the committee for the decoration of St Paul's; and, when Bishop Thorold started his great scheme for the evangelisation of the slums of his diocese (now the South London Church Fund), it was my father who suggested to him to include in it the poor district of South Wimbledon, which had sprung up like a mushroom under his eyes. He had noticed with dismay the growth of its mean streets and population in the course of his work as a J.P. The formation of a new parish, the salaries of workers, and the building of the Church of All Saints, were all abundantly helped by him, as an inscription in the Church now testifies. The amount given by him to private cases of distress, whether poor authors or others, will never be known. Last November the firm completed a century and a half of existence; and I may claim as, I believe, a unique feature that during the whole time the head of it has been a John Murray in direct descent. As I write, the fifth of the name is commanding a battalion in Flanders; and I may perhaps be excused for expressing a hope that he may be spared to continue the tradition. My father, to whom much of the prestige which the firm has enjoyed is due, was its chief for close on fifty years; and of him I would venture to quote the well-known epigram of Martial: 'Præteritosque dies et tutos respicit annos : JOHN MURRAY. Art. 2.-GERMANY'S DEBT TO FRANCE. 1. La Formation de la Prusse Contemporaine. By G. Cavaignac. Two vols. Paris: Hachette, 1891-8. 2. Deutsche Geschichte, 1786-1806. By K. T. Heigel. Two vols. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1899-1911. 3. Freiherr vom Stein. By Max Lehmann. Three vols. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1902-1905. 4. Französische Einflüsse auf die Staats- und Rechtsentwicklung Preussens im xix Jahrhundert. By Ernst von Meier. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1907-8. 5. Das Rheinland und die Französische Herrschaft. By J. Hashagen. Bonn: Hanstein, 1908. 6. Le Rhin Français pendant la Révolution et l'Empire. By P. Sagnac. Paris: Alcan, 1917. 7. Les Survivances Françaises dans l'Allemagne Napoléonienne depuis, 1815. By J. Rovère. Paris: Alcan, 1918. And other works. DURING the years preceding the French Revolution Germany presented a pathetic spectacle of political decrepitude. The Holy Roman Empire was afflicted with creeping paralysis; and Justus Möser truthfully remarked that no Curtius would leap into the abyss for the preservation of the Imperial system. Germany, cried Friedrich Karl Moser in the bitterness of his heart, is a great but despised people. Every nation, he added, had a governing principle. In England it was liberty, in Holland trade, in France the honour of the King, while in Germany it was obedience. Pamphleteers lamented the anæmia of the Fatherland, but not one of them could suggest a remedy. The political framework of central Europe was the consecration of anarchy, and the country was racked by an incurable particularism. Few competent observers believed that it could be reformed, and an increasing number turned their eyes to Prussia as to a possible saviour. The Fürstenbund, or League of Princes, formed by Frederick the Great to resist Hapsburg ambitions, was welcomed in certain quarters as the dawn of a better age. Johannes Müller hailed it as a bulwark against the world-domination of the Emperor, a defence of the rights of every member of the Empire, and a beneficent revolution from above; and, when it fell to pieces, he uttered a cry of despair. 'Without law or justice, without security against capricious burdens, uncertain of maintaining our children, our liberties, our rights or our lives for a single day, the helpless prey of superior power, without national feeling-that is our status quo. I cannot understand how we Germans have lost the courage and intelligence to advance from hoary pedantries to an effective Imperial constitution, to a common patriotism, so that we could at length say, We are a nation.' 'It is a rickety house,' echoed Thugut from Vienna; 'one must either leave it alone or pull it down and build another.' It was, indeed, past mending, and only waited for the sword of the executioner. No less urgent was the need of reform in the majority of the units which composed the Empire. While Germany could boast of a certain number of rulers of conscience and capacity, such as Karl August of Weimar and Karl Friedrich of Baden, the Duke of Brunswick and the Duke of Gotha, nowhere in Europe was absolutism more repulsive than in the little Courts where Frederick's doctrine of service had never penetrated, where mistresses ruled supreme, where venality placed the unfittest in office, and where reckless ostentation stood out in glaring contrast to the poverty of the people. The peasant,' wrote a satirist grimly, ‘is like a sack of meal. When emptied there is still some dust in it; it only needs to be beaten.' For the most part the victims suffered in silence; but discontent found powerful interpreters in Moser and Schlözer, Schubart and Weckerlin; while the revolt of the American Colonies and the establishment of a democratic republic free from courts and armies, feudalism and poverty, was at once a warning to rulers that there was a limit to tyranny and an inspiration to downtrodden peoples all over the world. At the same time the intellectual revival which had given birth to the Aufklärung or Enlightenment began to produce its effect on the political plane. During the generation of peace which followed the Seven Years' War Germany learned to read, to think and to ask questions. The critical spirit, once aroused, spread rapidly, finding nourishment in the rank evils which overspread the land. In an age of obscurantism and repression every leader of thought was on the side of the Opposition. 'In my youth,' wrote Goethe in 1790, 'it hardly occurred to anybody to envy the privileged class or to grudge them their privileges; but knights, robbers, an honest Tiers État and an infamous nobility-such are the ingredients of our novels and plays during the last ten years.' The poet was thinking above all of Schiller, whose passionate denunciations of tyranny moved his audiences to frenzied enthusiasm. Thus the lethargy which had weighed on Germany in the first half of the 18th century was rapidly passing away. The personality and victories of Frederick the Great, the object-lesson of the American War, the leaven of Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, the challenge of the Aufklärung, the radicalism of the dramatists, the barbed arrows of the journalists-these crowding and converging influences and experiences set the mind of the nation in a ferment. To borrow the words of Kant in 1784, it was not an enlightened age but an age in process of enlightenment. Change was in the air, and the fragility of traditional institutions and ideas was widely recognised. In Germany, as in France, prophetic voices gave warning of the wrath to come, and skilled observers felt the earth trembling beneath their feet. On the eve of the Revolution the mass of the population was poor, ignorant, ill-governed, discontented and helpless; and, when the Rights of Man were proclaimed from the banks of the Seine, the German people, fast bound in the fetters of feudalism and autocracy, was ready to welcome the virile message as a gospel of deliverance. The opening scenes of the French Revolution were watched with delight by most of the leaders of German opinion. The Declaration of the Rights of Man put into words the muffled aspirations of the masses all over Europe, and gave to the humble and disinherited a new sense of human dignity. When France in trumpet tones decreed the downfall of feudalism, proclaimed the equality of burdens, and declared every man possessed of certain inalienable rights, generous hearts in Germany, no less than in England, were thrilled by the warmth and glory of the sunrise. Johannes Müller, the historian of Switzerland's struggles for freedom, pronounced the destruction of the Bastille the happiest |