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NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
CHAP.

energetic man who dissented from the faith or disapproved the government of his country has known that if he is driven into exile he may begin life again in a new country, not indeed without some loss, but without let or hindrance from law. Napoleon himself advised Auguste de Staël to take service in England when he refused, from filial piety, to accept an appointment in France.[1] One of the roman triumvirs of 1849 earned an honourable living by teaching Italian in Oxford, and no less a man than Garibaldi was glad to take work for a time in a soap-boiling factory in New York. A future Saffi may find that the right to teach at Oxford is confined to Oxford graduates, and a future Garibaldi that he will have to take out his citizenship before he is allowed to do manual labour of any kind in a strange country; it may be even that to take out his citizenship will be as difficult in a good many parts of the world as it is in Switzerland. The inevitable result of all this must be to impose silence upon the men who are inclined to take up arms against abuses in politics or in the social system. The Liberal reformer under a despotism will know that if he escapes being shot or imprisoned he will be starved for want of employment when he is in exile. The man who finds himself ostracised by society, as Godwin and Shelley were, will have to change his name like Godwin,[2] if he has not, like Shelley, private means to fall back upon, and the chance that an unpopular man can disguise himself under an alias in his own country is becoming appreciably less as the right to investigate every man's private surroundings is more

  1. Memoirs of Mdme. de Rémusat, vol. ii. p. 414.
  2. Godwin had to disguise himself under the alias of Baldwin when he went into business as a bookseller.