During my short trip to foreign lands last year (1837), I wrote brief remarks about the places I visited and published some of them in The Northern Bee. Now, in publishing the collected travel letters, I particularly wish that these volumes would receive the same favorable attention that was given to the previously published excerpts by the people whose opinion I hold dear. My trip was neither academic nor literary: I went abroad for rest and pleasure; at the same time, I engaged in constructive work. The minister of finance, having solicited the highest Imperial assent for my trip abroad, also expressed a desire to receive accurate and thorough information about the structure of technical and trade schools in foreign lands, especially in Germany. I fulfilled the wish of my most venerable chief, and, having presented to His Excellency the report on foreign establishments of this kind, asked for permission to print an excerpt from it in this collection. This treatise is placed at the end of the third part of these letters.

In publishing this book, I have an advantage over many other writers: They await the judgment and opinion of the public in the future; I, however, having published some of my letters in the newspaper, have already heard opinions of my views and judgments and can answer some of the critical remarks that reached me.

Mainly, as far as I am aware, I was accused of expressing strict and biting opinions of France and the Frenchmen; it was claimed that I scold them mercilessly and unfairly. But have my critics been to France? Have they been there in the last seven years? I did not scold anyone at all and did not dare to scold, but wrote what I felt and thought. In France one can find people of great intellect, talent, and achievements; there are heroes of truth, honor, and virtue, who sacrificed everything to their oath and the given word. I happen to know Frenchmen, to whom, without much thought, I would entrust the protection of my life, my children, my honor.