confiscated in 1790 was only 17,000; and what is that in a population of 24,000,000 or 26,000,000? The army withdraws from the marriage state twenty times that number of men, in the vigor of their age; whereas the greater part of the monks are men in the decline of life. It is a matter of astonishment that a work which professes to treat of "public felicity" should devote itself entirely to the material well-being of society, and have nothing to say of the moral condition of mankind, which is the more important element of the two in making up the sum of human happiness. Every author, of course, has a right to fix the limits of his subject; but then he must not promise on the title-page more than he means to perform. The authorship of the essay on "Public Felicity" was not long a secret; but de Chastellux received perhaps as much annoyance as glory from the discovery. His ideas did not please everybody, and among those who fell foul of him for his philosophical errors were some of his own family. He made little account of their opposition, and in 1774 came out boldly with an eulogy on Helvétius, with whom he had lived for a long time on the most intimate terms. Two years later, he published a second edition of his previous treatise, with the addition of a chapter of "Ulterior Views," in which he points out the danger of some of the revolutionary opinions which were then coming more and more into vogue, and the futility of trying to realize in actual life that form of government which might be theoretically the best. If he had been alive in 1789, he would have belonged to the monarchical party in the Constituent Assembly; and, after having done his part in paving the way for the revolution, he would have perished as one of its victims. Among political and social reformers, he must be classed with the school of Montesquieu rather than with that of Rousseau.