Jean Jules Jusserand

“ On these occasions I consider how mankind may be connected like one great family in fraternal ties. I indulge a fond, perhaps an enthusiastic idea that, as the world is evidently less barbarous than it has been, its amelioration must still be progressive; that nations are becoming more humanized in their policy, that the subjects of ambition and causes for hostility are daily diminishing; and in fine that the period is not very remote when the benefits of a liberal and free commerce will pretty generally succeed to the devastations and horrors of war. ”

“ The year of the alliance, 1778, Sébastien Mercier, in his De la Littérature, had drawn up a picture of the French people’s expectation: “Perhaps it is in America that the human race will transform itself, adopt a new and sublime religion, improve sciences and arts, and become the representative of the nations of antiquity. A haven of liberty, Grecian souls, all strong and generous souls will develop or meet there, and this great example given to the universe will show what men can do when they are of one mind and combine their lights and their courage.” ”

“ At length, my dear marquis, I am become a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, and under the shadow of my own vine and my own fig-tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life, I am solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments of which the soldier who is ever in pursuit of fame, the statesman whose watchful days and sleepless nights are spent in devising schemes to promote the welfare of his own, perhaps the ruin of other countries, as if the globe was insufficient for us all ... can have very little conception. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ The Americans, according to Turgot, must be free, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of humanity; an experiment of the utmost import is about to begin, and should succeed. He added this, the worthy forecast of a generous mind: “It is impossible not to form wishes for that people to reach the utmost prosperity it is capable of. That people is the hope of mankind. It must show to the world by its example, that men can be free and tranquil, and can do without the chains that tyrants and cheats of all garb have tried to lay on them under pretense of public good. ”

“ ON two tragic occasions, at a century’s distance, the fate of the United States has trembled in the balance: would they be a free nation? Would they continue to be one nation ? A leader was wanted on both occasions, a very different one in each case. This boon was granted to the American people, who had a Washington when a Washington was needed, and a Lincoln when a Lincoln could save them. ”

“ In less than fifty years, 26 owing to the powerful sap of liberty, we have seen an empire arise, having for its base, not conquest, but peace and industry, an empire which before the end of the century will be the greatest state in the civilized world, and which, if it remains faithful to the thought of its founders, if ambition does not arrest the course of its fortune, will offer to the world the prodigious sight of a republic of one hundred million inhabitants, richer, happier, more brilliant than the monarchies of the old world. All this is Washington’s work. ”

“ Biographies innumerable, in pamphlet form or in many volumes, have told us of the deeds of Abraham Lincoln, of his appearance, of his peculiarities, of his virtues, and of the part he played in the history of the world, not alone the world of his day, but that of after-time. For not only the souvenir of his personality and of his examples, and the consequences of what he did, survive among us, but so do also a number of his clean-cut, memorable, guiding sentences which continue alive and active among men. His mind is still living. ”

“ As far now as the eye can reach the picturesque outline of one of the finest cities that exist is discovered; steeples and pinnacles rise above the verdure of the trees lining the avenues within the unaltered frame supplied by the blue hills of Maryland and Virginia.
The will of Congress, the choice made by the great man whose name the city was to bear, the talents of a French officer, caused this change. ”

“ DOES peace mean progress? Is the disappearance of war a sign of improvement or of decay? At a yet recent date learned men, their eyes to their microscopes, were teaching us that among the various kinds of living creatures they had studied, war was the rule; that where struggle ceased, life ceased; and that, since more beings came into the world than the world could feed, the destruction of the weakest was both a necessity and a condition of progress. Struggle, war, violence meant development; peace meant decay. ”

“ His work was a work of love, but it was also a work of reason, as befits a philosopher. He leaned throughout toward conservative methods, which have doubtless the fault of attracting less tumultuous attention to the worker: a great fault in the eyes of the many, a great quality in Furness’s own.
His shrewd good sense, seconded by a no less enjoyable good humor, never failed him. When he began, one important question had first to be decided: would he admit in his work only textual and philological criticisms or also æsthetic criticism, mere poetry, sheer literature? ”

“ One of the most authoritative publicists of the day, Lacretelle, in 1785, considering, in the Mercure de France, the future of the new-born United States, praised the favorable influence exercised on them by the so much admired British Constitution—“the most wonderful government in Europe. For it will be England’s glory to have created peoples worthy of throwing off her yoke, even though she must endure the reproach of having forced them to independence by forgetfulness of her own maxims.” ”

“ The squares were to be allotted, one to each of the States forming the Union: “The centre of each square will admit of statues, columns, obelisks, or any other ornaments ... to perpetuate not only the memory of such individuals whose counsels or military achievements were conspicuous in giving liberty and independence to this country, but also those whose usefulness hath rendered them worthy of general imitation, to invite the youth of succeeding generations to tread in the paths of those sages or heroes whom their country has thought proper to celebrate.” ”

“ He lived by duty and for duty.... No mistake is possible; what Europe honors in Lincoln, whether or not she is aware of it, is duty. She thus affirms that there are not two morals, one for the masters, the other for the slaves; one for men in public life, the other for obscure citizens; that there is only one way to be great: never to lie to oneself, nor to others, and to be just. ”

“ All those who, in the course of centuries, led men to the conquest of their rights can be truly claimed as the intellectual ancestors of the present promoters of a sane international peace: men like our Jean Bodin, who, while upholding, as was unavoidable in his day, the principle of autocracy, yet based his study of the government of nations on the general interests of the commonwealth, and who, in opposition to Machiavelli, who had called his book The Prince, called his The Republic. ”

“ A member of the American Philosophical Society, founded in his own city by Franklin “to promote useful knowledge,” Furness was true to the motto of the society and lived the life of a true philosopher. I call him Furness, without Doctor or any other title, not because he is no more, but to obey a request of his. “I do not like titles in the republic of letters,” he wrote me in the early times of our acquaintance; “if you will drop all to me, I will do the same to you. One touch of Shakespeare makes the whole world kin.” ”

“ He wrote from Passy, on October 16, 1783, to his friend David Hartley, one of the British plenipotentiaries for the peace: “What would you think of a proposition, if I sh’d make it of a family compact between England, France, and America? America would be as happy as the Sabine girls if she could be the means of uniting in perpetual peace her father and her husband. 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? ”

“ So powerful is such a lever that even in the past, in times when men were not their own masters, public opinion had to be reckoned with; such imperious leaders of men as a Richelieu or a Napoleon knew it better than any one. Opinio veritate major, had even cynically said the great philosopher Francis Bacon. But if opinion can occasionally defeat truth, much better can it defend truth. ”

“ In our old societies, power put man into tutelage, or rather, man put himself in that position at the hands of the government, to which he looked for everything he wanted in life and for solutions which no government, whether monarchical or republican, could give.
“The United States, on the contrary, have granted to public power just what it is fit that that power should possess, neither more nor less.” ”

“ His fame rises like one of those sanctuaries wherein flows a spring inexhaustible for the people.... What would be the rank of Bonaparte in the universe if he had added magnanimity to what there was heroical in him, and if, being at the same time Washington and Bonaparte, he had appointed Liberty for the heiress of his glory? ”

“ Lincoln’s instinct, his good sense, his personal disinterestedness, his warmth of heart for friend or foe, his high aims, led him through the awful years of anguish and bloodshed during which, ceaselessly, increased the number of fields dotted with tombs, and no one knew, so great were the odds, whether there would be one powerful nation or two less powerful, inimical to one another. ”

“ What would take place at the peace, if the allies were victorious? Would not France require, in one form or another, some advantages for herself? But she did not; her peace was to be like her war, pro-American rather than anti-English.
Another striking trait in the numerous French accounts which have come down to us of this campaign against the English is the small space that the English, as a nation, occupy in them. The note that predominates is enthusiasm for the Americans, not hatred for their enemies. ”

“ Some such pencil portraits by L’Enfant subsist, for example in the Glover family at Washington, and are creditable and obviously true-to-nature sketches.
Whenever, during the war or after, something in any way connected with art was wanted, L’Enfant was, as a matter of course, appealed to, whether the question was of a portrait, of a banqueting hall, of a marble palace, a jewel, a solemn procession, a fortress to be raised, or a city to be planned. A man of many accomplishments, with an overflow of ideas and few competitors, he was the factotum of the new nation. ”

“ Such thinkers truly deserve the name of forerunners; such men as that great Hugo Grotius, whose ever-living fame was not without influence on the selection of his own country as the seat of the peace conferences of our day, and who, being then settled in France, near Senlis, dedicated to King Louis XIII his famous work on war and peace, so memorable for its denunciation of frivolous wars and wanton cruelties. ”

“ All our sympathies are for the North, but they in no way diminish our admiration for the South.... How not to admire the Southerners, while regretting that such rare and high qualities had not been dedicated to an irreproachable cause! What men, and also, and especially, what women! Daughters, wives, mothers, those women of the South have revived, in the midst of the nineteenth century, the patriotism, devotion, abnegation of the Roman ones in the heyday of the republic. ”

“ Within her frontiers elements of destruction or disruption had been growing; animosities were embittered among people equally brave, bold, and sure of their rights. The edifice raised by Washington was shaking on its base; a catastrophe was at hand, such a one as he had himself foreseen as possible from the first. Slavery, he had thought, should be gradually but thoroughly abolished. “Your late purchase,” he had written to Lafayette, “of an estate in the colony of Cayenne, with a view of emancipating the slaves on it, is a generous and noble proof of humanity. ”

“ What we may hope and must strive for is that, with the development of mankind, a better knowledge of our neighbors, an understanding that a difference is not necessarily a vice, nor a criticism a threat, with that better instruction which a society like this one is giving to the many, a time may come when that same public opinion will render impossible the two sorts of casus belli for which More deems war to be not only necessary but noble and virtuous. ”

“ If it ends as our last accounts to the 1st of August predict, that nation will be the most powerful and happy in Europe; but I fear, though it has gone triumphantly through the first paroxysm, it is not the last it has to encounter before matters are finally settled. In a word, the Revolution is of too great a magnitude to be effected in so short a space, and with the loss of so little blood. ”

“ Then developed that famous struggle between equally brave opponents, with its various fortunes, its miseries, its hecatombs, and the coming of days so dark that it often seemed as though there remained little chance for the survival of one great, powerful, united nation: the hatreds were so deep, the losses so immense. ”