What? “No Government to deal with?” Here’s a central truth to be found in none of the ‘standard authorities,’ and yet to be seen by a practised diplomatist all the way from Canada. About the same date M. Bacourt came to this country to represent the French Government and be made wretched by the crude deportment of the Americans. His chief concern was to get away to some country where people were less unconventionally at their ease in drawing-rooms; but he turned, when necessary, to the business of his legation; and whenever he did so he found that “here diplomatic affairs are not treated as everywhere else, where we communicate with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and arrange the matter with him alone.” He must ‘arrange’ the matter with several committees of Congress. He must go to see Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Winthrop, whose “husbands are members of the House of Representatives, and on the committee having charge of commercial affairs, in which” he “is interested,” for “they say that these gentlemen are very particular about visits from foreign ministers to their wives.”[C] Just Lord Elgin’s testimony. Again the ‘standard authorities’ are added to, and that in a quarter where we should least expect to find them supplemented. We need despair of no source. [C] Souvenirs of a Diplomat, pp. 189, 281. These are only near and easily recognized illustrations of the errant mode of study I am expounding and advocating. Other systems besides our own receive similar chance illumination in the odd corners of all sorts of books. Now and again you strike mines like the “Mémoires of Madame de Rémusat,” the “Letters” of Walpole, or the “Diary” of a Pepys or an Evelyn; at other periods you must be content to find only slender veins of the ore of familiar observation and intimate knowledge of affairs for which you are delving; but your search will seldom be altogether futile. Some newly opened archive office may offer _cahiers_, such as revealed to de Tocqueville, more than all other records, the _ancien régime_. Some elder Hamerton may tell you of the significant things to be seen ‘round his house.’ All correspondence and autobiography will repay perusal, even when not so soaked in affairs as the letters of Cromwell, or so reminiscent of politics as the “Memoirs of Samuel Romilly.”