On the sixth of September, 1757, Lafayette was born. The kings of
Prance and Britain were seated upon their thrones by virtue of the
principle of hereditary succession, variously modified and blended
with different forms of religious faith, and they were waging war
against each other, and exhausting the blood and treasure of their
people for causes in which neither of the nations had any beneficial
or lawful interest.
In this war the father of Lafayette fell in the cause of his king
but not of his country. He was an officer of an invading army, the
instrument of his sovereign's wanton ambition and lust of conquest.
The people of the electorate of Hanover had done no wrong to him or
to his country. When his son came to an age capable of
understanding the irreparable loss that he had suffered, and to
reflect upon the causes of his father's fate, there was no drop of
consolation mingled in the cup from the consideration that he had
died for his country. And when the youthful mind was awakened to
meditation upon the rights of mankind, the principles of freedom,
and theories of government, it cannot be difficult to perceive in
the illustrations of his own family records the source of that
aversion to hereditary rule, perhaps the most distinguishing feature
of his own political opinions and to which he adhered through all
the vicissitudes of his life....
Lafayette was born a subject of the most absolute and most splendid
monarchy of Europe, and in the highest rank of her proud and
chivalrous nobility. He had been educated at a college of the
University of Paris, founded by the royal munificence of Louis XIV.,
or Cardinal Richelieu. Left an orphan in early childhood, with the
inheritance of a princely fortune, he had been married, at sixteen
years of age, to a daughter of the house of Noailles, the most
distinguished family of the kingdom, scarcely deemed in public
consideration inferior to that which wore the crown. He came into
active life, at the change from boy to man, a husband and a father,
in the full enjoyment of everything that avarice could covet, with a
certain prospect before him of all that ambition could crave. Happy
in his domestic affections, incapable, from the benignity of his
nature, of envy, hatred, or revenge, a life of "ignoble ease and
indolent repose" seemed to be that which nature and fortune had
combined to prepare before him. To men of ordinary mold this
condition would have led to a life of luxurious apathy and sensual
indulgence. Such was the life into which, from the operation of the
same causes, Louis XV. had sunk, with his household and court, while
Lafayette was rising to manhood surrounded by the contamination of
their example. Had his natural endowments been even of the higher
and nobler order of such as adhere to virtue, even in the lap of
prosperity, and in the bosom of temptation, he might have lived and
died a pattern of the nobility of France, to be classed, in
aftertimes, with the Turennes and the Montausiers of the age of
Louis XIV., or with the Villars or the Lamoignons of the age
immediately preceding his own.
But as, in the firmament of heaven that rolls over our heads, there
is, among the stars of the first magnitude, one so pre-eminent in
splendor as, in the opinion of astronomers, to constitute a class by
itself, so in the fourteen hundred years of the French monarchy,
among the multitudes of great and mighty men which it has evolved,
the name of Lafayette stands unrivaled in the solitude of glory.
In entering upon the threshold of life, a career was to open before
him. He had the option of the court and the camp. An office was
tendered to him in the household of the King's brother, the Count de
Provence, since successively a royal exile and a reinstated king.
The servitude and inaction of a court had no charms for him;
he preferred a commission in the army, and, at the time of the
Declaration of Independence, was a captain of dragoons in garrison
at Metz.
There, at an entertainment given by his relative, the Marechal de
Broglie, the commandant of the place, to the Duke of Gloucester,
brother to the British king, and then a transient traveler through
that part of France, he learns, as an incident of intelligence
received that morning by the English Prince from London, that the
congress of rebels at Philadelphia had issued a Declaration of
Independence. A conversation ensues upon the causes which have
contributed to produce this event, and upon the consequences which
may be expected to flow from it. The imagination of Lafayette has
caught across the Atlantic tide the spark emitted from the
Declaration of Independence; his heart has kindled at the shock,
and, before he slumbers upon his pillow, he has resolved to devote
his life and fortune to the cause.
You have before you the cause and the man. The self-devotion of
Lafayette was twofold. First to the people, maintaining a bold and
seemingly desperate struggle against oppression, and for national
existence. Secondly, and chiefly, to the principles of their
declaration, which then first unfurled before his eyes the
consecrated standard of human rights. To that standard, without an
instant of hesitation, he repaired. Where it would lead him, it is
scarcely probable that he himself then foresaw. It was then
identical with the Stars and Stripes of the American Union, floating
to the breeze from the Hall of Independence, at Philadelphia. Nor
sordid avarice, nor vulgar ambition, could point his footsteps to
the pathway leading to that banner. To the love of ease or pleasure
nothing could be more repulsive. Something may be allowed to the
beatings of the youthful breast, which make ambition virtue, and
something to the spirit of military adventure, imbibed from his
profession, and which he felt in common with many others. France,
Germany, Poland, furnished to the armies of this Union, in our
revolutionary struggle, no inconsiderable number of officers of high
rank and distinguished merit. The names of Pulaski and De Kalb are
numbered among the martyrs of our freedom, and their ashes repose in
our soil side by side with the canonized bones of Warren and of
Montgomery. To the virtues of Lafayette, a more protracted career
and happier earthly destinies were reserved. To the moral principle
of political action, the sacrifices of no other man were comparable
to his. Youth, health, fortune; the favor of his king; the
enjoyment of ease and pleasure; even the choicest blessings of
domestic felicity--he gave them all for toil and danger in a
distant land, and an almost hopeless cause; but it was the cause of
justice, and of the rights of human kind. ...
Pronounce him one of the first men of his age, and you have not yet
done him justice. Try him by that test to which he sought in vain to
stimulate the vulgar and selfish spirit of Napoleon; class him among
the men who, to compare and seat themselves, must take in the
compass of all ages; turn back your eyes upon the records of time,
summon from the creation of the world to this day the mighty dead of
every age and every clime--and where, among the race of merely
mortal men, shall one be found, who, as the benefactor of his kind,
shall claim to take precedence of Lafayette?
There have doubtless been, in all ages, men whose discoveries or
inventions, in the world of matter or of mind, have opened new
avenues to the dominion of man over the material creation; have
increased his means or his faculties of enjoyment; have raised him
in nearer approximation to that higher and happier condition, the
object of his hopes and aspirations in his present state of existence.
Lafayette discovered no new principle of politics or of morals. He
invented nothing in science. He disclosed no new phenomenon in the
laws of nature. Born and educated in the highest order of feudal
nobility, under the most absolute monarchy of Europe, in possession
of an affluent fortune, and master of himself and of all his
capabilities, at the moment of attaining manhood the principle of
republican justice and of social equality took possession of his
heart and mind, as if by inspiration from above. He devoted
himself, his life, his fortune, his hereditary honors, his towering
ambition, his splendid hopes, all to the cause of liberty. He came
to another hemisphere to defend her. He became one of the most
effective champions of our independence; but, that once achieved, he
returned to his own country, and thenceforward took no part in the
controversies which have divided us. In the events of our
revolution, and in the forms of policy which we have adopted for the
establishment and perpetuation of our freedom, Lafayette found the
most perfect form of government. He wished to add nothing to it.
He would gladly have abstracted nothing from it. Instead of the
imaginary republic of Plato, or the Utopia of Sir Thomas Moore, he
took a practical existing model, in actual operation here, and never
attempted or wished more than to apply it faithfully to his own
country.
It was not given to Moses to enter the promised land; but he saw it
from the summit of Pisgah. It was not given to Lafayette to witness
the consummation of his wishes in the establishment of a republic
and the extinction of all hereditary rule in France. His principles
were in advance of the age and hemisphere in which he lived. A
Bourbon still reigns on the throne of France, and it is not for us
to scrutinize the title by which he reigns. The principles of
elective and hereditary power, blended in reluctant union in his
person, like the red and white roses of York and Lancaster, may
postpone to aftertime the last conflict to which they must
ultimately come. The life of the patriarch was not long enough for
the development of his whole political system. Its final
accomplishment is in the womb of time.
The anticipation of this event is the more certain, from the
consideration that all the principles for which Lafayette contended
were practical. He never indulged himself in wild and fanciful
speculations. The principle of hereditary power was, in his
opinion, the bane of all republican liberty in Europe. Unable to
extinguish it in the Revolution of 1830, so far as concerned the
chief magistracy of the nation, Lafayette had the satisfaction of
seeing it abolished with reference to the peerage. An hereditary
crown, stript of the support which it may derive from an hereditary
peerage, however compatible with Asiatic despotism, is an anomaly in
the history of the Christian world, and in the theory of free
government. There is no argument producible against the existence
of an hereditary peerage but applies with aggravated weight against
the transmission, from sire to son, of an hereditary crown. The
prejudices and passions of the people of France rejected the
principle of inherited power, in every station of public trust,
excepting the first and highest of them all; but there they clung to
it, as did the Israelites of old to the savory deities of Egypt.
This is not the time nor the place for a disquisition upon the
comparative merits, as a system of government, of a republic, and a
monarchy surrounded by republican institutions. Upon this subject
there is among us no diversity of opinion; and if it should take the
people of France another half century of internal and external war,
of dazzling and delusive glories; of unparalleled triumphs,
humiliating reverses, and bitter disappointments, to settle it to
their satisfaction, the ultimate result can only bring them to the
point where we have stood from the day of the Declaration of
Independence--to the point where Lafayette would have brought
them, and to which he looked as a consummation devoutly to be
wished.
Then, too, and then only, will be the time when the character of
Lafayette will be appreciated at its true value throughout the
civilized world. When the principle of hereditary dominion shall be
extinguished in all the institutions of France; when government
shall no longer be considered as property transmissible from sire to
son, but as a trust committed for a limited time, and then to return
to the people whence it came; as a burdensome duty to be discharged,
and not as a reward to be abused; when a claim, any claim, to
political power by inheritance shall, in the estimation of the whole
French people, be held as it now is by the whole people of the North
American Union--then will be the time for contemplating the
character of Lafayette, not merely in the events of his life, but in
the full development of his intellectual conceptions, of his fervent
aspirations, of the labors and perils and sacrifices of his long and
eventful career upon earth; and thenceforward, till the hour when
the trump of the Archangel shall sound to announce that Time shall
be no more, the name of Lafayette shall stand enrolled upon the
annals of our race, high on the list of the pure and disinterested
benefactors of mankind.