With all these instances before me the case of the wealthy M.A., seemed to me all the more singular.  When I asked my mother to explain it to me, she always evaded an answer and spoke vaguely of adventures on the coast of Madagascar.  Upon one occasion, I pressed her more closely and asked her how it was that the coasting trade, at which no one had ever made money, could have made a millionaire of him.  “How obstinate you are, Ernest,” she replied.  “I have often told you not to ask me that!  Z——­ is the only person in our circle who has any pretensions to polish; he is in a good position; he is rich and respected; there is no need to ask him how he made his money.”  “Tell me all the same.”  “Well if you must know, and as people cannot get rich without soiling their fingers more or less, he was in the slave trade.”

A noble people, fit only to serve nobles, and in harmony of ideas with them, is in our day at the very antipodes of sound political economy, and is bound to die of starvation.  Persons of delicate ideas, who are hampered by honourable scruples of one kind and another, stand no chance with the matter-of-fact competitors who are the men not to let slip any advantage in the battle of life.  I soon found this out when I began to know something of the planet in which we live, and hence there arose within me a struggle or rather a dualism which has been the secret of all my opinions.  I did not in any way lose my fondness for the ideal; it still is and always will be implanted in me as strongly as ever.  The most trifling act of goodness, the least spark of talent, are in my eyes infinitely superior to all riches and worldly achievements.  But as I had a well-balanced mind I saw that the ideal and reality have nothing in common; that the world is, at all events for the time, given over to what is commonplace and paltry; that the cause which generous souls will embrace is sure to be the losing one; and that what men of refined intellect hold to be true in literature and poetry is always wrong in the dull world of accomplished facts.  The events which followed the Revolution of 1848 confirmed all their ideas.  It turned out that the most alluring dreams, when carried into the domain of facts, were mischievous to the last degree, and that the affairs of the world were never so well managed as when the idealists had no part or lot in them.  From that time I accustomed myself to follow a very singular course:  that is to shape my practical judgments in direct opposition to my theoretical judgments, and to regard as possible that which was in contradiction with my desires.  A somewhat lengthy experience had shown me that the cause I sympathised with always failed and that the one which I decried was certain to be triumphant.  The lamer a political solution was, the brighter appeared to me its prospect of being accepted In the world of realities.