Part 14

The question now was as to the new form of government for the country. The people still remembered the days of the Reign of Terror and were not ready for a real republic. The Duke of Orleans, who had opposed King Charles, was very popular, and it was decided to appoint him lieutenant-general of the nation. The people would have liked to have Lafayette as their governor. The French captain of the ship that carried the fugitive Charles X. away from France, said to the ex-King, “If Lafayette, during the recent events, had desired the crown, he could have obtained it. I myself was a witness to the enthusiasm that the sight of him inspired among the people.”

But Lafayette did not want the crown, nor even to be the constitutional head of the nation. It seemed to him best that the Duke of Orleans should receive the crown, not as an inheritance, but as a free gift of the people accompanied by proper limitations. So he took steps to have the country accept the Duke as its new ruler.

The people of France had at last become an important factor in deciding on their own form of government. The Duke of Orleans, better known as Louis Philippe, did not seize the crown, as earlier kings had done; he waited until the Chamber of Deputies and Lafayette, representing the nation, offered it to him, and then he accepted it as a republican prince. The deputies marched with the Duke to the Hôtel de Ville, and as they went through the streets there were more shouts of “_Vive la liberté!_” than there were of “_Vive le Duc d’Orléans!_” Liberty meant far more to the people now than a king did, and Prince Louis Philippe knew it. As he went up the stairs of the Hôtel de Ville he said conciliatingly to the armed men among whom he passed, “You see a former National Guard of 1789, who has come to visit his old general.”

Lafayette had always wanted a constitutional monarchy for France; he knew Louis Philippe well, being allied to him through marriage with the Noailles family, and he believed that the Duke would make a capable ruler, his authority being limited by the will of the people. So when Louis Philippe came to him at the Hôtel de Ville Lafayette placed a tricolored flag in the Duke’s hand, and leading him to a window, embraced him in full sight of the great throng in the street. The people had been undecided; they did not altogether trust any royal prince; but when they saw Lafayette’s act, they immediately followed his lead, and cheers for the constitution and the Duke greeted the men at the window.

Lafayette had given France her new ruler, declining the crown for himself, even as Washington had done in the United States. He made it clear to the new king that he expected him to rule according to the laws. He said to Louis Philippe, “You know that I am a republican and that I regard the Constitution of the United States as the most perfect that has ever existed.”

“I think as you do,” answered Louis Philippe. “It is impossible to have passed two years in America and not to be of that opinion. But do you believe that in the present situation of France and in accordance with general opinion that it would be proper to adopt it?”

“No,” said Lafayette; “what the French people want to-day is a popular throne surrounded by republican institutions.”

“Such is my belief,” Louis Philippe agreed.

Charles X. had fled from his kingdom before Lafayette and the people even as his brother Louis XVIII. had once fled from it before Napoleon and the people. On August 9, 1830, the Duke of Orleans entered the Palais Bourbon, where the Chambers were assembled, as lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and left it as Louis Philippe, King of the French. The constitution which he had sworn to obey was not, like former charters, a favor granted by the throne, but was the organic law of the land, to the keeping of which the sovereign was as much bound as the humblest of his subjects. Lafayette and the people had at last won a great victory for independence after all the ups and downs of the Revolution and the days of Napoleon.

As Lafayette marched his reorganized National Guard, thirty thousand strong, in review before the King, it was clear that the General was the most popular, as well as the most powerful, man in France. And at the public dinner that the city of Paris gave him on August fifteenth, when he congratulated his fellow-citizens on the success and valor with which they had defended their liberties and besought them to preserve the fruits of victory by union and order, he could justly feel that a life devoted to the cause of freedom had not been spent in vain.

The coming years were to show that the people of France had much yet to learn about self-government, but when one contrasts the results of the revolution of 1830 with that of 1789 one sees how far they had progressed in knowledge.

Lafayette’s presence was needed at Louis Philippe’s court to act as a buffer between the sovereign and the people, and again and again he saw revealed the truth of the old adage, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Presently a revolution in Belgium left the throne of that country vacant and it was offered to Lafayette. “What would I do with a crown!” he exclaimed. “Why, it would suit me about as much as a ring would become a cat!”

The duties of his office as Commander of the National Guard, the tact that was constantly required of him as intermediary between the people and the royal court began to wear upon him, and he soon resigned his position as Commander. Then, as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, he continued his political labors. In time he saw many incidents that pointed in the direction of new aggressions on the part of the King, and he even came to believe that the fight for liberty was not yet won and never would be so long as a Bourbon occupied the throne of France. But he wanted the desired end to be reached by peaceful means, constantly preached loyalty to the government they had founded as the chief duty of the nation, and when, in 1832, a new revolution seemed imminent he would have no part in it and by his indignant words quickly brought the attempt to an end. He was now seventy-seven years old and great-grandchildren played about his knees at his home at Lagrange.

His work for France and for America and for the world was done. In the spring of 1834 he caught a severe cold, which sapped his strength. On May twentieth of that year he died, having worked almost to the last on problems of government. As his funeral wound through the streets of Paris to the little cemetery of Picpus, in the center of the city, a great throng followed. On that day church-bells tolled in France, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, and England. All nations that loved liberty honored the great apostle of it. In the United States the government and the army and navy paid to Lafayette’s memory the same honors they had given to Washington, the Congress of the United States went into mourning for thirty days and most of the people of the nation followed its example. America vowed never to forget the French hero; and America never has.

Men have sometimes said that Lafayette’s enthusiasm was too impulsive, his confidence in others too undiscriminating, his goal too far beyond the reach of his times; but these were the marks of his own sincere and ardent nature. He was remarkably consistent in all the sudden shiftings of an age full of changes. Other men had sought favor of the Jacobins, of Napoleon, and of Louis XVIII. as each came into power; but Lafayette never did. All men knew where he stood. As Charles X. said of him, “There is a man who never changes.” He stood fast to his principles, and by standing fast to them saw them ultimately succeed.

He was a man who made and held strong friends. Washington, Jefferson, and Fox loved him as they loved few others. Napoleon and Charles X. could not resist the personal attraction of this man whom neither could bribe and whom both feared. Honesty was the key-note of his character, and with it went a simplicity and generosity that drew the admiration of enemies as well as of friends.

He had done a great deal for France, he had done as much for the United States. His love of liberty bound the two nations together, and when, in 1917, one hundred and forty years after his coming to America to fight for freedom, the United States proclaimed war as an ally of France in that same great cause, the thought of Lafayette sprang to every mind. The cause for which he had fought was again imperiled. The America in which Lafayette had believed was now to show that he had not been mistaken in his vision of her.

XV

AMERICA’S MESSAGE TO FRANCE--“LAFAYETTE, WE COME!”

There have been many great changes in all the countries of the world since the time of Lafayette, and in most nations liberty has become more and more the watchword and the goal. The French Revolution was like a deep chasm between the era of feudalism and the era of the rights of man, and though the pendulum has sometimes seemed to swing backward for a short time it has almost constantly swung farther and farther forward in the direction of independence. The right of the common man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has gradually taken the place of the so-called divine right of kings to do as they pleased with their subjects.

In a sense the United States blazed the trail and led the way. The men of 1776 proclaimed the principles of liberty and drew up a constitution which has required few changes to the present day. They were remarkably wise men; and the people of America were almost as wise, for they appreciated the laws under which they lived and showed no disposition to thwart or overthrow the statesmen they themselves elected to guide the nation. The United States grew and grew, crossed the Mississippi, crossed the Rocky Mountains, reached the Pacific coast, and fronted on two oceans. As pioneers from the east had pushed out into the middle of the continent, cleared the wilderness, and filled it with prosperous cities and villages, so pioneers from the middle-west went on across the deserts and the mountains and made the far west flourish like the rose. The great northern territory of Alaska became part of the republic; to the south Porto Rico; far out in the Pacific Hawaii and the Philippines joined the United States; the Panama Canal was cut between the two oceans; and the republic that had begun as thirteen small states along the Atlantic seaboard became one of the most powerful nations in the world. Her natural resources were almost limitless and the energy of her people made the most of what nature had provided.

The republic fought several wars. That with Mexico settled boundary disputes. The Civil War between the North and the South resulted in the abolition of slavery and made the country a united whole, no State having a right to secede from the rest. The war with Spain freed Cuba and other Spanish possessions in the western hemisphere. But none of these wars changed the system of government of the country. The United States was still the great republic during all the eventful happenings of the Nineteenth Century.

Meantime what had happened in France? Louis Philippe had shown himself in his true lights as a Bourbon, had been driven from his throne, and had been followed by various kinds of government. A new Napoleon, the nephew of the first one, had come into power, had made himself Emperor as Napoleon III., and had tried to restore the glories of the First Empire. For a time France seemed to prosper under his rule, but it came to a sudden end when the King of Prussia defeated the armies of France in 1871 and drove Napoleon III. into exile. France lost her provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and William I. of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the great hall of Versailles. There followed in Paris the days of the Commune, which almost equaled the Reign of Terror for lawlessness. Gradually order was evolved under a new constitution with a President at the head of the government, and ever since France has been a real republic. From much turmoil and bloodshed she had won the liberty that Lafayette had dreamed of.

Other countries in Europe had won independence too. England required no revolution; by peaceful means she grew more liberal; her sovereign became largely a figurehead, and the House of Commons, elected by the people, was the real seat of government. Italy, which in Lafayette’s time was mainly a collection of small kingdoms and duchies, ruled by Austrian archdukes or by the Pope, united under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel, the King of Savoy, drove out the Austrians, deprived the Papacy of its temporal power, and became a nation under a constitutional king. The west of Europe was really republican, like the United States; it was only in the east that the ideas of feudalism still held sway.

Russia had her Czar, an autocrat of the worst type, Turkey her Sultan, a relic of the Dark Ages, Austria her Hapsburg Emperor, a thorough Bourbon, who learned nothing and forgot nothing. And Germany had her Hohenzollern and Prussian Emperor, the descendant of a long line of autocratic rulers, the sovereign made by Bismarck, “the man of blood and iron,” the stanch believer in the old doctrine of the divine right of kings. Germany had become an empire by the power of the sword, and her Emperor never allowed his people to forget that fact.

Power goes to the head of a nation like strong wine. The true test of the greatness of a nation is its ability to use its power for the good of the world rather than for selfish ends. Prussia had always been selfish. She had fought a number of successful wars, against Denmark, against Austria, and against France, and each time she had taken territory from her adversary. Her statesmen regarded her power only as a means to gain greater material strength, and from the birth of the empire they trained the people to think only of that end.

It was inevitable that the forces of freedom and those of autocracy should come into conflict some day. Germany knew this, and her autocrats carefully prepared themselves for the coming strife with the lovers of freedom. They paid little or no attention to programs for peace offered by other nations, they refused to agree to limit their armaments, they openly showed their contempt for the conferences at the Hague. Like a fighter who feels his strength they were constantly wanting to force other people to acknowledge their power; time and again they could barely restrain themselves from leaping at some opponent; they only waited for the most auspicious moment to strike.

What they regarded as the right moment came in July, 1914. The assassination of the heir apparent to the Austrian throne by a Servian gave the rulers of Germany a pretext to make war on the world. Austria, always haughty, always greedy, always weak and blind, was simply the catspaw of the Hohenzollerns. Austria sent an overbearing message to Servia, and Russia, taking the rôle of protector of the small Balkan states, made it clear that she sided with Servia. Germany pretended to take fright and warned Russia not to attempt to oppose Austria. England and France tried to keep peace in Europe by suggesting a conference to discuss the matter. But the Kaiser of Germany and his generals did not want peace; they wanted to show the world how strong they were, they wanted the world to bow down absolutely before them; they precipitated the crisis and, pretending that they acted in self-defense, declared war on Russia, France, and England.

In the first days of August, 1914, the enemy of liberty began its march. With a ruthlessness that has no counterpart except in the acts of those barbarian hordes that swept across Europe in the Dark Ages Germany marched into Belgium, a small and peaceful country, giving as the only excuse for her wanton invasion the fact that the easiest road to France lay across that land. She expected Belgium to submit. The giant, swollen with power, would do as it pleased with the pigmy. And when the British Ambassador remonstrated with the German Chancellor over this illegal treatment of a nation that all the powers of Europe had promised to protect the Chancellor answered that the treaty of Germany with Belgium was simply “a scrap of paper.” Germany knew no treaties that opposed her desires; Germany has cared for nothing but her own selfish goal. And the great German people consented to this infamous course, because they had been taught that their first duty was blind obedience to the will of the Fatherland, which meant the will of the House of Hohenzollern. Never in history has a people,--and in this case a people that was supposed to be civilized and thoughtful,--bowed its neck so meekly to the yoke of its overlords.

But as the hordes of power-drunk Germans,--whom civilization has rightly named the Huns, in memory of those earlier barbarian invaders of western Europe,--advanced through the peaceful fields of little Belgium they found, to their great surprise, that the Belgian people did not intend to submit to such an outrage without protest. Led by their heroic king, Albert, the Belgians threw themselves in the path of the Huns and checked them for a few days. They could not save their country, but they saved precious days for the French and English, and the Huns found that their march to Paris was not the easy, triumphal progress they had planned.

Yet the German army was a mighty and effective machine in that autumn of 1914, built by men who had devoted their lives to perfecting instruments of destruction. It rolled on and on, across Belgium, southward and westward into France, crushing the small Belgian army, forcing the outnumbered British into retreat, driving back the French by sheer weight of cannon and men. The Kaiser thought to repeat the act of his grandfather and make the French sign a treaty with him at Versailles, taking more territory and wealth from them as the next step toward making the House of Hohenzollern the greatest power in the world. As the Huns drove on their over-mastering pride and self-conceit grew and grew, inflating them like over-swollen frogs, until a chorus of what the rest of the world had formerly considered intelligent professors, scientists, and writers, actually dared to announce that the German will to victory was the supreme achievement of the ages. Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, at the height of their power, never lost some sense of proportion, some human notion of justice; it was left to this Germany of 1914 to show how blind, how mad, how intolerant the mind of man can be.

Rapidly the Huns marched toward Paris; and then something happened. The French turned at bay, held, drove the invaders back. Over the ground they had crossed in triumph the Huns retreated, back and back until they had reached the line of the River Marne. And when the French General Joffre drove them back to the Marne he won one of the greatest victories for civilization in the annals of history.

Meantime Russia was attacking in the east and the Germans had to look to the protection of their own territory. Europe was now ablaze, England was training men, France was digging trenches, the flames of war, lighted by Germany’s reckless torch, were spreading across the world. Italy, true to the principles of her great leaders of the last century, Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel, hating that power of Austria whose history had been one long record of deceit and enslavement, joined hands with the countries that stood for liberty and justice. The Turk, true to his nature, united with the Hun. The war raged back and forth, its battle-fields the greater part of Europe.

The issue was clearly drawn between liberty and tyranny. The Germans were now the Bourbons, the Allied Powers were the true descendants of Lafayette and Washington. The land of Lafayette lay next to the Menace and her fair breast had been the first to bear the scars of war. The land of Washington, however, lay far across the Atlantic, and one of her guiding principles had been to avoid taking part in the affairs of Europe. Some of her sons, loving Lafayette’s country for what she meant to the world, volunteered in the French army, joined the French flying corps, worked in the hospital service; but the great republic across the sea proclaimed herself a neutral, although the hopes of her people lay on the side of France and England.

But Germany knew no law, either that of Christ or man. The Sermon on the Mount, the merciful provisions of the Hague Conventions, might never have been given to the world as far as she was concerned. See what some of her writers, men supposedly human, dared to say. “Might is right and ... is decided by war. Every youth who enters a beer-drinking and dueling club will receive the true direction of his life. War in itself is a good thing. God will see to it that war always recurs. The efforts directed toward the abolition of war must not only be termed foolish, but absolutely immoral. The peace of Europe is only a secondary matter for us. The sight of suffering does one good; the infliction of suffering does one more good. This war must be conducted as ruthlessly as possible.” And another German said, “They call us barbarians. What of it? The German claim must be: ... Education to hate.... Organization of hatred.... Education to the desire for hatred. Let us abolish unripe and false shame.... To us is given faith, hope, and hatred; but hatred is the greatest among them.”

This was indeed a strange religion for a nation that was supposed to have heard of the Sermon on the Mount; a religion that might have been made by Satan himself, with hate for its foundation instead of love. Yet this was the German religion; if any one dare to deny that the words of these writers truly represent Germany let him look at Germany’s acts, let him think of the treatment of Belgium, the bombing of unprotected cities and towns, the enslavement of women and children, the destruction of hospital ships and of Red Cross camps, the murder of Edith Cavell, the sinking of the _Lusitania_!

The submarine captain who fired the torpedo that sank the _Lusitania_ was a true son of Germany. He sent non-combatants to their death in the sea as ruthlessly as might a demon of darkness. There was no humanity in him, nor in those who commanded the deed. But there is no act of evil that does not bear its own just consequences. The innocent men, women and children who went down with the _Lusitania_ called forth the hate of the world on the Huns, and set America on fire with indignation. For every victim there Germany was to pay a thousandfold in time.

The United States had a great President, a man who knew the temper of his people far better than those who criticized him. He knew the history of the country, he knew that its people loved peace and hated war, that Europe was far from the vision of most of them, and that they still cherished Washington’s advice against the making of “entangling alliances.” He tried to be patient, even with Germany, though he knew her for what she was; he waited, urging her to obey the laws of civilization, hoping that he might act as a peacemaker between the warring nations, feeling that peace might lie in the power of America, provided she kept neutral. But his efforts meant nothing to Germany; she believed in insincerity and the piling of lies on lies.