Chapter V

Once more now a republic has been established in France, which, having, we hope, something of the qualities of "coolness and moderation" that Washington wanted us to possess, will, we trust, prove perpetual. It has already lasted nearly half a century: an unexampled phenomenon in the history of Europe, no other republic of such magnitude having thus survived in the old world since the fall of the Roman one, twenty centuries ago.

If the great man were to come again, we entertain a fond hope that he would deem us not undeserving now of the sympathies he bestowed on our ancestors at the period when he was living side by side with them. Most of the leading ideas followed by him throughout life are those which we try to put in practise. We have our faults, to be sure; we know them, others know them, too; it is not our custom to conceal them, far from it; may this serve as an excuse for reviewing here by preference something else than what might occasion blame.

That equality of chances for all, which caused the admiration of the early French visitors to this country, which was one of the chief things for which Washington had fought, and continues to be to-day one of the chief attractions offered to the immigrant by these States, has been secured in the French Republic, too, where no privileges of any sort remain, the right to vote is refused to none, taxation is the same for all, and military service is expected from everybody. No principle had more importance in the eyes of Washington than that of "equal liberty." "What triumph for our enemies to verify their predictions!" Washington had written to John Jay, in a moment of depression, when he feared that what Genet was to call "monocracy" was in the ascendant; "what triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are unable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious."[221]

In France, as in the United States, the unique source of power is the will of the people. In our search for the solution of the great problem which now confronts the world, that of the relations of capital and labor, we endeavor to practise the admirable maxim of one of our statesmen of to-day: "Capital must work, labor must possess." And though we are still remote from this goal, yet we have travelled so far toward it that, at the present day, one out of every two electors in France is the possessor of his own house.[222]

The development of instruction was one of the most cherished ideas of Washington, as it is now of his descendants. "You will agree with me in opinion," he said in a speech to both houses of Congress in 1790, "that there is nothing that can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of happiness." Instruction has become, under the Republic, obligatory for all in France, and is given free of cost to all. Not a village, not a hamlet, lost in the recesses of valleys or mountains, that is without its school. The state expenditure for primary instruction during the Second Empire amounted only to twelve million francs; the mere salary of school-teachers alone is now twenty times greater. We try to live up to the old principle: three things should be given free to all--air, water, knowledge: and so it is that at the Sorbonne, the Collège de France, in the provincial universities, all one has to do in order to follow the best courses of lectures is to push open the door. The man in the street may come in if he chooses, just to warm himself in winter or to avoid a shower in summer. Let him; perhaps he will listen too.

Very wisely, being, in many ways, very modern, Washington attached great importance to inventions. In a speech to Congress on January 9, 1790, he said: "I cannot forbear intimating to you the expediency of giving effectual encouragement as well to the introduction of new and useful inventions from abroad as to the exertions of skill and genius in producing them at home, and of facilitating the intercourse between the distant parts of our country by a due attention to the post-office and the post-roads."

Distances having immensely increased in America (as well as means to cover them), these latter remarks are certainly still of value. With a much less difficult problem to solve, we believe that, in the matter of post-roads, and with a system of rural delivery coextensive with the national territory, we would pass muster in the presence of the great man. As for inventions, we hope that even the compatriots of Franklin, Fulton, Whitney, Horace Wells, W.T.G. Morton, Morse, Bell, Edison, the Wright brothers, and many more, would consider that our show is a creditable one, with Jacquard's loom, the laws of Ampère on electricity, Séguin's tubular boilers, Sauvage's screw, Niepce and Daguerre's photography, Renard and Kreb's first dirigible, Lumière's cinematograph, Curie's radium, with the automobile, which is transforming our way of life (decentralizing overcentralized countries) as much as the railroads did in the last century; and, more than all, because so beneficent to all, with the discoveries of Chevreul, Flourens, Claude Bernard, Laveran, Berthelot, and especially Pasteur.

On the question of the preservation of natural resources, to which, and not too soon, so much attention has been paid of late, Washington had settled ideas; so have we, ours being somewhat radical, and embodying, for mines especially, the French principle that "what belongs to nobody belongs to everybody," and by everybody must be understood the nation. Concerning this problem and the best way to solve it, Washington sent once a powerful appeal to the President of Congress, saying: "Would there be any impropriety, do you think, sir, in reserving for special sale all mines, minerals, and salt springs, in the general grants of land belonging to the United States? The public, instead of the few knowing ones, might in this case receive the benefits which would result from the sale of them, without infringing any rule of justice that is known to me."[223]

One of the most memorable and striking things done by the French Republic is the building of a vast colonial empire, giving access to undeveloped, sometimes, as in Dahomey, barbaric and sanguinary races, still indulging in human sacrifices. Washington has laid down the rule of what should be done with respect to primitive races. "The basis of our proceedings with the Indian natives," he wrote to Lafayette, "has been and shall be justice, during the period in which I have anything to do with the administration of this government. Our negotiations and transactions, though many of them are on a small scale as to the objects, ought to be governed by the immutable principles of equality." And addressing the Catholic Archbishop of Baltimore, John Carroll, he again said: "The most effectual means of securing the permanent attachment of our savage neighbors is to convince them that we are just."

There is nothing we are ourselves more sincerely convinced of than that such principles are the right ones and should prevail. That we did not lose sight of them in the building of our colonial empire its very vastness testifies; using opposite means, with so many other tasks to attend to, we should have failed. The number of people living under the French flag is about one hundred million now. Judging from the testimony of independent witnesses,[224] it seems that, on this, too, we have acted in accordance with the views of the former commander-in-chief, who had written to Lafayette on August 15, 1786: "Let me ask you, my dear marquis, in such an enlightened, in such a liberal age, how is it possible that the great maritime powers of Europe should submit to pay an annual tribute to the little piratical states of Barbary? Would to Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind or crush them into non-existence." The "reform" was begun by Decatur in 1815, and perfected by Bourmont in 1830.

On one point Washington was very positive; this leader of men, this warrior, this winner of battles, loathed war. He wanted, of course, his nation, as we want ours, never to be without a military academy (our West Point is called Saint-Cyr), and never to be without a solid, permanent army, for, as he said, in a speech to Congress in 1796: "However pacific the general policy of a nation may be, it ought never to be without an adequate stock of military knowledge for emergencies ... war might often depend not upon its own choice." Of this we are only too well aware.

There is scarcely, however, a question that oftener recurs under his pen in his letters to his French friends than the care with which wars should be avoided, and no hopes were more fondly cherished by him than that, some day, human quarrels might be settled otherwise than by bloodshed. To Rochambeau, who had informed him that war-clouds which had recently appeared in Europe were dissipated (soon, it is true, to return more threatening), he expressed, in 1786, his joy at what he considered a proof that mankind was becoming "more enlightened and more humanized." To his friend David Humphreys he had written from Mount Vernon, July 25, 1785: "My first wish is to see this plague to mankind (war) banished from off the earth, and the sons and daughters of this world employed in more pleasing and innocent amusements than in preparing implements and exercising them for the destruction of mankind. Rather than quarrel about territory, let the poor, the needy, the oppressed of the earth, and those who want land, resort to the fertile plains of our Western country, the _second land of promise_, and there dwell in peace, fulfilling the first and great commandment." His dream was of mankind one day "connected like one great family in fraternal ties."[225]

On this matter, of such paramount importance to all the world, and in spite of so much, so very much remaining to be done, we may, I hope, consider in France that our Republic would deserve the approval of the departed leader. We have indeed vied with the United States (and praise be rendered to empires and kingdoms who have played also the part of realms of good-will), in an effort to find better means than wars for the settlement of human quarrels. Success could not be expected at once, but it is something to have honestly, earnestly tried. The great man would have judged failures with indulgence, for he well knew how others' dispositions are to be taken into account. "In vain," he had said, "is it to expect that our aim is to be accomplished by fond wishes for peace."[226]

And at the present hour, when it seems to the author of these lines that, as he writes, his ears are filled with the sound of guns, wafted by the wind over the submarine-haunted ocean, what would be the feeling of our former commander if he saw what is taking place, and the stand made by the descendants of those soldiers intrusted years ago to his leadership? Perhaps he would think, as he did, when told by Lafayette of a recent visit to the battle-fields of Frederick II of Prussia: "To view the several fields of battle over which you passed could not, among other sensations, have failed to excite this thought: 'Here have fallen thousands of gallant spirits to satisfy the ambitions of their sovereign, or to support them perhaps in acts of oppression and injustice. Melancholy reflection! For what wise purpose does Providence permit this?'"

Perhaps--who knows?--considering the silent resolution, abnegation, and unanimity with which the whole people, from the day when war was declared on them by a relentless enemy, tried to uphold the cause of independence and liberalism in a world-wide conflict, the leader might be tempted to write once more in the pages of his private journal the three words he had written on May 1, 1781. Who knows? Of one thing we are sure, no approval could please us more than that of the commander-in-chief of former days.

FOOTNOTES:

[148] He kept all his life a feeling that his early education had been incomplete. Strongly advised by David Humphreys to write an account of the great events in which he had taken part, he answered that he would not, on account of a lack of leisure, and a "consciousness of a defective education." July 25, 1785. When Lafayette was beseeching him to visit France some day, he answered: "Remember, my good friend, that I am unacquainted with your language, that I am too far advanced in years to acquire a knowledge of it." September 30, 1779. Franklin added later his entreaties to those of Lafayette; see Washington's answer, October 11, 1780.

[149] "For my own part I can answer I have a constitution hardy enough to encounter and undergo the most severe trials and, I flatter myself, resolution to face what any man durst." To Governor Dinwiddie, May 29, 1754.

[150] In continuation of the La Verendrie's (father and sons) bold attempt to reach the great Western sea, a token of which, a leaden tablet with a French and Latin inscription and the arms of France, was recently discovered near Fort Pierre, South Dakota. See _South Dakota Historical Collections_, 1914, pp. 89 ff.

[151] _The Journal of Major George Washington, sent by the Hon. Robert Dinwiddie, Esq., his Majesty's Lieut.-Governor and Commander in chief of Virginia, to the commandant of the French forces in Ohio._ Williamsburg, 1754.

[152] _Mémoire contenant le précis des faits avec leurs pièces justificatives pour servir de response aux observations envoyées par les ministres d'Angleterre dans les cours d'Europe_, Paris, 1756.

[153] "As to any danger from the enemy, I look upon it as trifling." Washington to his brother, John, May 14, 1755.

[154] Washington to Dinwiddie, July 18, 1755.

[155] Same date. Washington revisited the region in October, 1770, but the entries in his journal contain no allusion to previous events: "We lodged [at Fort Pitt] in what is called the town, about three hundred yards from the fort.... These houses, which are built of logs, and ranged into streets, are on the Monongahela, and, I suppose, may be twenty in number, and inhabited by Indian traders, etc. The fort is built on the point between the rivers Allegheny and Monongahela, but not so near the pitch of it as Fort Duquesne."

[156] To Richard Washington, merchant, London; from Fort Loudoun, April 15, 1757. The same letter enlightens us as to Washington's tastes concerning things material. He orders "sundry things" to be sent him from London, adding: "Whatever goods you may send me where the prices are not absolutely limited, you will let them be fashionable, neat and good in their several kinds." Same tastes shown in his letter to Robert Cary and Co., ordering a chariot "in the new taste, handsome, genteel, and light," painted preferably green, but in that he would be "governed by fashion." (June 6, 1768.) The chariot was sent in September; it was green, "all the framed work of the body gilt, handsome scrawl, shields, ornamented with flowers all over the panels."

[157] Mount Vernon, April 5, 1765.

[158] This continued until the proclamation of independence. By letter of March 19, 1776, Washington notified the President of Congress of the taking of Boston, and the retreat of the "ministerial army." The flag of the "insurgents" was then the British flag with thirteen white and red stripes, emblematic of the thirteen colonies.

[159] An appointment accepted in a characteristically modest spirit, as shown by his letter to his "dear Patsy," his wife, giving her the news, and that to Colonel Bassett, where he says: "I can answer but for three things, a firm belief in the justice of our cause, close attention in the prosecution of it, and the strictest integrity. If these cannot supply the place of ability and experience, the cause will suffer, and, more than probable, my character along with it, as reputation derives its principal support from success." June 9, 1775.

[160] To his brother, John, December 18, 1776.

[161] August 19, 1777.

[162] November 14, 1778.

[163] To Washington, June 15, 1777. Same impression later (1785) on Lafayette, who saw the Prussian grand manoeuvres, and sent an account of them to Washington: "The Prussian army is a perfectly regular piece of machinery.... All the situations which may be imagined in war, all the movements which they may cause, have been by constant habit so well inculcated in their heads that all those operations are performed almost mechanically." February 8, 1786. _Mémoires, correspondance et manuscrits du Général Lafayette_, Bruxelles, 1838, I, 204.

[164] Pp. 10 ff.

[165] To General Sullivan, September, 1778.

[166] December 12, 1779.

[167] To President Reed, May 28, 1780.

[168] "Before York," October 12, 1781.

[169] To Lafayette, October 20, 1782.

[170] February 6, 1783.

[171] Sending him a farewell letter in which he said: "You may rest assured that your abilities and dispositions to serve this country were so well understood, and your service so properly appreciated that the residence of no public minister will ever be longer remembered or his absence more sincerely regretted. It will not be forgotten that you were a witness to the dangers, the sufferings, the exertions and the successes of the United States from the most perilous crises to the hour of triumph." February 7, 1788.

[172] They merely sanctioned some territorial exchanges and restitutions on both sides in the colonies, and stipulated that the British agent in Dunkirk, who had been expelled at the beginning of the war, would not return.

[173] March 29, 1783.

[174] Princeton, October 12, 1783. He started for that journey the following autumn.

[175] September 10, 1791.

[176] Mount Vernon, April 4, 1784.

[177] December 8, 1784. Bayard Tuckerman, _Lafayette_, 1889, I, 165.

[178] July 25, 1785.

[179] "Excellence, Vos vertus civiles et vos talents militaires ont donné à votre patrie la liberté et le bonheur; mais leur influence sur celui du globe entier est encore préférable à mes yeux. C'est à ce grand but que tend tout homme qui se sent digne d'arriver a l'immortalité," etc. May 28, 1789. Papers of the Continental Congress, LXXVIII, 759, Library of Congress.

[180] June 22, 1784. _Jean Antoine Houdon_, by C.H. Hart and Ed. Biddle, Philadelphia, 1911, p. 182.

[181] _Ibid._, p. 189. Peale's full-length portrait, with "a perspective view of York and Gloucester, and the surrender of the British army," price thirty guineas, reached Paris in April, 1785, and has since disappeared.

[182] July 10, 1785. _Ibid._, p. 191.

[183] Above, p. 12.

[184] Amsterdam, 1783. The author is strongly anti-English and is indignant at the "guilty Anglomania" still existing in France.

[185] In the _Mercure de France_, 1785, prefacing a review of Crèvecoeur's _Letters from an American Farmer_, and reproduced at the beginning of the French edition of the _Letters_, 1787.

[186] _Observations sur le gouvernement et les loix des Etats Unis d'Amérique_, Amsterdam, 1784, 12mo; in the form of letters to John Adams. The Constitutions under discussion are those of the original States. "Tandis," says Mably, "que presque toutes les nations de l'Europe ignorent les principes constitutifs de la société et ne regardent les citoyens que comme les bestiaux d'une ferme qu'on gouverne pour l'avantage particulier du propriétaire, on est étonné, on est édifié que vos treize Républiques ayent connu à la fois la dignité de l'homme et soient allé puiser dans les sources de la plus sage philosophie les principes humains par lesquels elles veulent se gouverner." (P. 2.)

[187] Wanting, on his return to America, to make Washington's acquaintance, Franklin's own grandson called similarly provided. Lafayette to Washington, warmly praising the young man, July 14, 1785. _Mémoires, correspondance et manuscrits du Général Lafayette, publiés par sa Famille_, Brussels, 1837, I, 201.

[188] May 25, 1788. J.P. Brissot, _Correspondance et Papiers_, ed. Perroud, Paris, 1912, p. 192.

[189] 1787. Text of the reports of the sittings. _Ibid._, pp. 105 ff.

[190] _Ibid._, pp. 114, 116, 126, 127, 136.

[191] "Under that name of liberty the Romans, as well as the Greeks, pictured to themselves a state where no one was subject save to the law, and where law was more powerful than men." (Bossuet.)

[192] _Nouveau Voyage dans les Etats Unis de l'Amérique Septentrionale_, Paris, 3 vols., April, 1791, but begun to be printed, as shown by a note to the preface, in the spring of 1790. The work greatly helped to make America better and very favorably known in Europe, for it was translated into English, German, and Dutch. While Brissot was returning to France (January, 1789), his brother-in-law, François Dupont, was sailing for the United States, to settle there among free men and, scarcely landed, was writing to a Swiss friend of his, Jeanneret, who lived in Berlin, of his delight at having left "a small continent like that of Europe, partitioned among a quantity of petty sovereigns bent upon capturing each other's possessions, causing their subjects to slaughter one another, in ceaseless mutual fear, busy tightening their peoples' chains and impoverishing them--and I am now on a continent which reaches from pole to pole, with every kind of climate and of productions, among an independent nation which is now devising for itself, in the midst of peace, the wisest of governments. We are not governed here by a foolish or despotic sovereign.... Farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and manufacturers are encouraged and honored; they are the true nobles.... Between the man who sells his labor and the one who buys it the agreement is between equals. The French are, however, very popular in this country." Brissot, _Correspondance_ ed. Perroud, pp. 218, 219.

[193] _Mémoires du [Chevalier de Pontgibaud] Comte de Moré_, 1827, pp. 105, 132. Writing at that date, Lafayette's former companion thought that monarchy had been re-established in France forever.

[194] January 1, 1788.

[195] New York, April 29, 1790.

[196] June 18, 1788.

[197] March 17, 1790; August 11, 1790. The key is the one which gave access to the main entrance; those at the Carnavalet Museum in Paris opened the several towers.

[198] To this remarkable forecast of the Terror, and of the ruin of such great hopes, Jared Sparks, in his edition of the _Writings_, caused Washington to add a prophecy of Napoleon's rule, described as a "higher-toned despotism than the one which existed before." But this is one of the embellishments which Sparks, who prophesied _à coup sûr_, since he wrote after the events, thought he was free to introduce in the great man's letters.

[199] Paris, May 12, 1787. Washington papers, Library of Congress.

[200] Calais, April 3, 1789.

[201] Paris, July 31, 1789.

[202] "Rochambeau near Vendôme," April 11, 1790.

[203] Paris, May 12, 1787.

[204] Ternant to Montmorin, Philadelphia, March 13, 1792. _Correspondence of the French Ministers_, ed. Turner, Washington, 1904.

[205] July 28, 1792.

[206] Philadelphia, May 18, 1793. _Correspondence of the French Ministers in the United States_, ed. Turner, Washington, 1904, p. 214.

[207] May 31, June 19, 1793. _Ibid._, pp. 216, 217.

[208] June 19, 1793. _Ibid._, p. 230.

[209] October 11, 1793. _Ibid._, p. 287.

[210] Washington to Alexander Hamilton, July 29, 1795.

[211] To Jefferson, June 6, 1796.

[212] To Oliver Wolcott, May 15, 1797.

[213] Mount Vernon, May 29, 1797.

[214] To T. Pickering, August 29, 1797.

[215] "_Nulli flebilior quam mihi_," wrote Lafayette, in learning the news, to Crèvecoeur, who had just dedicated to Washington his _Voyage dans la haute Pennsylvanie_, adorned, by way of frontispiece, with a portrait of Washington, "gravé d'après le camée peint par Madame Bréhan, à New York, en 1789." Crèvecoeur wanted to offer a copy of his book to Bonaparte. "Send it," a friend of his who knew the young general told him; "it is a right you have as an associate member of the Institute; add a letter of two or three lines, mentioning in it the name of Washington." _St. John de Crèvecoeur_, by Robert de Crèvecoeur, 1883, p. 399.

[216] "Eloge funèbre de Washington, prononcé dans le temple de Mars (Hôtel des Invalides) le 20 pluviose, an VIII (8 février, 1800)," in _OEuvres de M. de Fontanes, recueillies pour la première fois_, Paris, 1839, 2 vols., II, 147.

[217] Lafayette's journeys to America.

[218] An exact justification of Lacretelle's prediction; above, p. 94.

[219] _Histoire des Etats Unis_, 3 vols.; preface dated 1855; the lectures had been delivered in 1849. Washington is the hero of the work, which is carried on only to 1789.

[220] _Washington, libérateur de l'Amérique_, 1882, often reprinted, dedicated: "A la mémoire de Lazare Hoche, le soldat citoyen, qui aurait été notre Washington s'il eût vécu."

[221] August 1, 1786.

[222] "It is estimated that there are more small holdings of land in France than in Germany, England, and Austria combined." _Report of the [U.S.] Commissioner of Education_, 1913, p. 714.

[223] To Richard H. Lee, December 14, 1784. On French exertions in that line, Consul-General Skinner wrote: "If correspondents could penetrate, as the writer has done, the almost inaccessible mountain villages of this country, and there discover the enthusiastic French forester at work, applying scientific methods to a work which can not come to complete fruition before two or three hundred years, they would retire full of admiration and surprise and carry the lesson back to the United States." _Daily Consular Reports_, November 2, 1907.

[224] "The story of French success in the exploration, the civilization, the administration, and the exploitation of Africa, is one of the wonder tales of history. That she has relied on the resources of science rather than those of militarism makes her achievement the more remarkable.... Look at Senegambia as it is now under French rule.... Contrast the modernized Dahomey of to-day with its railways, schools, and hospitals with the blood-soaked country of the early sixties; remember that Algeria has doubled in population since [the time of] the last Dey--and you will have a bird's-eye view, as it were, of what the French have accomplished in the colonizing field." E. Alexander Powell, _The Last Frontier_, New York, 1912, p. 25. Concerning the Arabs under French rule, Edgar A. Forbes writes: "The conquered race may thank the stars that its destiny rests in a hand that seldom wears the rough gauntlet." _The Land of the White Helmet_, New York, 1910, p. 94.

[225] To Lafayette, Aug. 15, 1786. Cf. below, p. 347. Same views in Franklin, who had written to his friend David Hartley, one of the British plenipotentiaries for the peace: "What would you think of a proposition, if I should make it, of a family compact between England, France, and America?... What repeated follies are those repeated wars! You do not want to conquer and govern one another. Why, then, should you continually be employed in injuring and destroying one another?" Passy, Oct. 16, 1783.

[226] June 15, 1782.