LAS CASES, EMMANUEL AUGUSTIN DIEUDONNÉ MARIN JOSEPH, Marquis (1766–1842), French official, was born at the castle of Las Cases near Revel in Languedoc. He was educated at the military schools of Vendôme and Paris; he entered the navy and took part in various engagements of the years 1781–1782. The outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 caused him to “emigrate,” and he spent some years in Germany and England, sharing in the disastrous Quiberon expedition (1795). He was one of the few survivors and returned to London, where he lived in poverty. He returned to France during the Consulate with other royalists who rallied to the side of Napoleon, and stated afterwards to the emperor that he was “conquered by his glory.” Not until 1810 did he receive much notice from Napoleon, who then made him a chamberlain and created him a count of the empire (he was marquis by hereditary right). After the first abdication of the emperor (11th of April 1814), Las Cases retired to England, but returned to serve Napoleon during the Hundred Days. The second abdication opened up for Las Cases the most noteworthy part of his career. He withdrew with the ex-emperor and a few other trusty followers to Rochefort; and it was Las Cases who first proposed and strongly urged the emperor to throw himself on the generosity of the British nation. Las Cases made the first overtures to Captain Maitland of H.M.S. “Bellerophon” and received a guarded reply, the nature of which he afterwards misrepresented. Las Cases accompanied the ex-emperor to St Helena and acted informally but very assiduously as his secretary, taking down numerous notes of his conversations which thereafter took form in the famous Mémorial de Ste Hélène. The limits of this article preclude an attempt at assessing the value of this work. It should be read with great caution, as the compiler did not scruple to insert his own thoughts and to colour the expressions of his master. In some cases he misstated facts and even fabricated documents. It is far less trustworthy than the record penned by Gourgaud in his Journal. Disliked by Montholon and Gourgaud, Las Cases seems to have sought an opportunity to leave the island when he had accumulated sufficient literary material. However that may be, he infringed the British regulations in such a way as to lead to his expulsion by the governor, Sir Hudson Lowe (November, 1816). He was sent first to the Cape of Good Hope and thence to Europe, but was not at first allowed by the government of Louis XVIII. to enter France. He resided at Brussels; but, gaining permission to come to Paris after the death of Napoleon, he took up his residence there, published the Mémorial, and soon gained an enormous sum from it. He died in 1842 at Passy.
See Mémoires de E. A. D., comte de Las Cases (Brussels, 1818); Mémorial de Ste Hélène (4 vols., London and Paris, 1823; often republished and translated); Suite au mémorial de Ste Hélène, ou observations critiques, &c. (2 vols., Paris, 1824), anonymous, but known to be by Grille and Musset-Pathay. See too Gourgaud, Montholon, and Lowe, Sir Hudson. (J. Hl. R.)
LASHIO, the headquarters of the superintendent, northern
Shan States, Burma, situated in 22° 56′ N. and 97° 45′ E. at an
altitude of 3100 ft., on a low spur overlooking the valley of the
Nam Yao. It is the present terminus of the Mandalay-Kun
Long railway and of the government cart road from Mandalay,
from which it is 178 m. distant. It consists of the European
station, with court house and quarters for the civil officers;
the military police post, the headquarters of the Lashio battalion
of military police; the native station, in which the various
nationalities, Shans, Burmans, Hindus and Mahommedans,
are divided into separate quarters, with reserves for government
servants and for the temporary residences of the five sawbwas
of the northern Shan States; and a bazaar. Under Burmese
rule Lashio was also the centre of authority for the northern
Shan States, but the Burmese post in the valley was close to the
Nam Yao, in an old Chinese fortified camp. The Lashio valley
was formerly very populous; but a rebellion, started by the
sawbwa of Hsenwi, about ten years before the British occupation,
ruined it, and it is only slowly approaching the prosperity it
formerly enjoyed; pop. (1901) 2565. The annual rainfall
averages 54 in. The average maximum temperature is 80.5°
and the average minimum 55.5°.
LASKER, EDUARD (1829–1884), German publicist, was born
on the 14th of October 1829, at Jarotschin, a village in Posen,
being the son of a Jewish tradesman. He attended the gymnasium,
and afterwards the university of Breslau. In 1848,
after the outbreak of the revolution, he went to Vienna and
entered the students’ legion which took so prominent a part in
the disturbances; he fought against the imperial troops during
the siege of the city in October. He then continued his legal
studies at Breslau and Berlin, and after a visit of three years to
England, then the model state for German liberals, entered the
Prussian judicial service. In 1870 he left the government
service, and in 1873 was appointed to an administrative post
in the service of the city of Berlin. He had been brought to the
notice of the political world by some articles he wrote from
1861 to 1864, which were afterwards published under the title
Zur Verfassungsgeschichte Preussens (Leipzig, 1874), and in
1865 he was elected member for one of the divisions of Berlin
in the Prussian parliament. He joined the radical or Fortschritts
party, and in 1867 was also elected to the German parliament,
but he helped to form the national liberal party, and in consequence
lost his seat in Berlin, which remained faithful to the
radicals; after this he represented Magdeburg and Frankfort-on-Main
in the Prussian, and Meiningen in the German, parliament.
He threw himself with great energy into his parliamentary
duties, and quickly became one of its most popular and most
influential members. An optimist and idealist, he joined to a
fervent belief in liberty an equal enthusiasm for German unity
and the idea of the German state. His motion that Baden
should be included in the North German Confederation in
January 1870 caused much embarrassment to Bismarck, but
was not without effect in hastening the crisis of 1870. His great
work, however, was the share he took in the judicial reform
during the ten years 1867–1877. To him more than to any
other single individual is due the great codification of the law.
While he again and again was able to compel the government
to withdraw or amend proposals which seemed dangerous to
liberty, he opposed those liberals who, unable to obtain all the
concessions which they called for, refused to vote for the new
laws as a whole. A speech made by Lasker on the 7th of February
1873, in which he attacked the management of the Pomeranian
railway, caused a great sensation, and his exposure of the
financial mismanagement brought about the fall of Hermann
Wagener, one of Bismarck’s most trusted assistants. By this
action he caused, however, some embarrassment to his party.
This is generally regarded as the beginning of the reaction
against economic liberalism by which he and his party were to
be deprived of their influence. He refused to follow Bismarck
in his financial and economic policy after 1878; always unsympathetic
to the chancellor, he was now selected for his most
bitter attacks. Between the radicals and socialists on the one
side and the government on the other, like many of his friends,
he was unable to maintain himself. In 1879 he lost his seat in
the Prussian parliament; he joined the Sezession, but was ill
at ease in his new position. Broken in health and spirits by the
incessant labours of the time when he did “half the work of the
Reichstag,” he went in 1883 for a tour in America, and died
suddenly in New York on the 5th of January 1884.
Lasker’s death was the occasion of a curious episode, which caused much discussion at the time. The American House of Representatives adopted a motion of regret, and added to it these words: “That his loss is not alone to be mourned by the people of his native land, where his firm and constant exposition of, and devotion to, free and liberal ideas have materially advanced the social, political and economic conditions of these people, but by the lovers of liberty throughout the world.” This motion was sent through the American minister at Berlin to the German foreign office, with a request that it might be communicated to the president of the Reichstag. It was to ask Bismarck officially to communicate a resolution in which a foreign parliament expressed an opinion in German affairs exactly opposed to that which the emperor at his advice had always followed. Bismarck therefore refused to communicate the resolution, and returned it through the German minister at Washington.
Among Lasker’s writings may be mentioned: Zur Geschichte der parlamentarischen Entwickelung Preussens (Leipzig, 1873), Die Zukunft des Deutschen Reichs (Leipzig, 1877) and Wege und Ziele der
