volumes of his letters produced in the last ten years show what truth there is in this thesis of the Memoirs. They show that Talleyrand accepted the essential philosophy of Liberalism, construed from Montesquieu and Turgot, Smith and Bentham. In 1786 he defends the Commerical Treaty as a policy based on the true natural laws that will put an end to the rivalry of nations. He believes, even then, that France and England ought to be inseparable in the cause of reason and justice against the world of divine right. A little later he declares that the traditional alliances terminate with the traditional monarchy ; and anticipating in 1792 the language of James Mill, argues that arbitrary governments labour for their own good, and free governments for the good of mankind. At a time when it was said that there were only two tolerant prelates in the Church of France, he was one of them. If it cost a sceptic no meritorious effort to emancipate the Jews, the ex-Bishop of Autun attested his sincerity in an hour of passion and peril, by insisting that the State has no authority over the conscience of citizen or monarch, and that the priest who refused the oath must be protected against the popular rage. He deems it the interest and the duty of France to rest content within her own wide borders, and to respect the integrity and independence of other countries by the same law as her own. He pleads for non-intervention in 1792, and still more in 1798, as plainly as in 1830. He acknowledged more and more that every people has the right to shape its own government, and maintained that France would have done well to create a united Italy, an independent Poland. As an avowed convert to the doctrine of Nationality and Revolution, he doubted the supreme masterpiece of political conpromise and half measures, the Orleanist monarchy, and exhorted Lamartine to reserve his genius for a worthier cause than the support of a baseless throne. At the height of authority and fame he defies the wrath of his Government, and compels Louis Philippe to refuse for his son the proffered crown of Belgium.
When we touch the hard formation and come to the
