"I have no family history to relate, even briefly, General. In the ordinary sense of the word, I have no family to speak of at all; I do not even know who my grandfather was. My father never spoke of him; he appears to have had no reason to be proud of his father. My father was proud, but only of himself, of his herculean strength, of his untiring energy, of his dauntless courage. My father was the owner of a river boat: if an opportunity occurred at the bursting of a dyke to risk his life for that of others, or in the times of the French War to carry a dangerous message, or to undertake anything which no one else would undertake, my father did it, and carried it out. He was as passionate as he was proud. When the superintendent of dykes, a man of high rank, on one occasion had a quarrel with him and ventured to lay his hand upon him, my father knocked him down on the spot, and paid for his violence by a year's imprisonment. "It seems that even people of no family have a right to talk of hereditary virtues and vices. My brother, the father of my nephew, who has the honour to be known to General von Werben, appeared to have inherited only the virtues; an intelligent, prudent, brave man, who left his home early, in order to seek his fortunes in the wide world, and died many years ago in the exercise of his calling as captain of a mail steamer at Hamburg. I, on the contrary, had inherited, besides the few advantages of which my father could boast, nearly all his weaknesses; I was proud, arrogant, haughty, and passionate, like him. I have never been able to understand how men could endure any restraint which they were able to throw off, I mean an unjust restraint, which does not necessarily result from the nature of man, such as sickness or death, or from the nature of society, such as law and order, but which one set of men have exercised over another, from arbitrariness, avarice or hard-heartedness, and which the others have borne out of stupidity, denseness or cowardice. I have therefore always instinctively hated the rule of kings and princes as an institution which only suits a people that is yet in its infancy, or a worn-out and aged people, but which must be rejected with horror by a strong nation, conscious of its strength; and I have especially hated the nobility as the refuse and chips of the material from which the idol is made; and I have hated all institutions which in principle tend towards royalty and nobility. To endure as little as possible of these restraints, to place myself in a position in which I could live according to my convictions, has been, as long as I can remember, the most absorbing passion of my mind. That I have not remained as ignorant as I came out of the village school, that I have worked my way up from my position as cabin-boy and steersman to be a man of property, I may thank that passion. It ran a little wild at first, before reason came to its aid and showed it ends