I was raised in the English church.  I was taught to adore Wellington, to hate Napoleon as an enemy of liberty, a usurper, a false emperor, a monster, a murderer.  I was sent to Eton and to Oxford.  I was indoctrinated with the idea that there is a moral governance in the world, that God rules over the affairs of men.  I was taught these things, but I resisted them.  I did not rebel so much as my mind naturally proved impervious to these ideas.  I read the Iliad and the Odyssey with passionate interest.  They gave me a panoramic idea of life, men, races, civilizations.  They gave me understanding of Napoleon.  What if he had sold the Louisiana territory to rebel America, and in order to furnish that faithless nation with power to overcome England in some future crisis?  Perhaps this very moral governance that I was taught to believe in wished this to happen.  But if the World Spirit be nothing but the concurrent thinking of many peoples, as I grew to think, the World Spirit might irresistibly wish this American supremacy to be.

And now at eighteen I am absorbed in dreams and studies at Oxford.  I have many friends.  My life is a delight.  I arise from sleep with a song, and a bound.  We play, we talk, we study, we discuss questions of all sorts infinitely.  I take nothing for granted.  I question everything, of course in the privacy of my room or the room of my friends.  I do not care to be expelled.  And in the midst of this charming life bad news comes to me.  My father is dead.  He has left a large estate in Illinois.  I must go there.  At least my grandmother thinks it is best.  And so my school days end.  Yet I am only eighteen!

CHAPTER II

I am eighteen and the year is 1833.  All of Europe is in a ferment, is bubbling over in places.  Napoleon has been hearsed for twelve years in St. Helena.  But the principles of the French Revolution are working.  Charles is king of France, but by the will of the nation first and by the grace of God afterward.  There is no republic there; but the sovereignty of the people, the prime principle of the French Revolution, has founded the right of Charles to rule....  And what of England?  Fox had rejoiced at the fall of the Bastille.  Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey had sung of liberty, exulting in the emancipation of peoples from tyranny.  Then they had changed.  Liberalism had come under the heel again.  Revolution was feared and denounced.  Liberal principles were crushed....  But not for long.  We students read Shelley and Byron.  They were now gone from earth, eleven and nine years respectively.  They had not altered their faith, dying in the heyday of youthful power.  Would they have changed at any age to which they might have lived?  We believed they would not have done so.  But what of England?  It is 1833 and the reform bill is a year old.  The rotten boroughs are abolished.  There is a semblance of democratic representation in Parliament.  The Duke of Wellington has suffered a decline in popularity.  Italy is rising, for Mazzini has come upon the scene.  Germany is fighting the influence of Metternich.  We students are flapping our young wings.  A great day is dawning for the world.  And I am off to America!