become the respectable and sure asylum of virtue, honesty, toleration, equality, and of a tranquil liberty.”[57] Where are nobler words of aspiration for our country than this simple testimony by a youth of nineteen, pouring out his heart to his wife of seventeen? Where in history are grander words from youth or man? For seven weeks laboring through the sea, yet sustained by thoughts like these, he arrived at last on the coast of South Carolina. It was dark, but, pushing ashore in a boat, and following the guidance of a light, he found himself under a friendly roof. His first word, as he touched the land, was a vow to conquer or perish with it. The Continental Congress was then sitting at Philadelphia, and, without stopping for rest, the sea-worn voyager hastened to report himself there. Most of the way on horseback, for nine hundred miles, he journeyed on, enjoying the country in its native freshness, and the simple, cordial welcome which greeted him everywhere on the road. “The further North I advance,” thus he wrote to his wife, “the more I like this country and its people.”[58] He had already been struck by what to him were “black domestics who came to ask his orders.”[59] Then for the first time he looked upon a slave. His well-known sentiments, so constantly declared, show clearly how his candid nature must have been troubled. He had forsaken France, where, amidst gross inequalities of condition, this grossest was unknown,--where, in the descending ranks of the feudal hierarchy, there was no place for this degradation,--where, amidst unjust taxes and injurious privileges without number, every man had a right at least to his child, to his wife, and to himself,--and where the boast went forth, as in England, and was repeated by judicial tribunals, that the air was too pure for a slave. With heavenly generosity he had turned away from his own country to help the cause of Freedom in another hemisphere, and here he found man despoiled of all _personal_ rights, and even degraded to be property, by those whose own struggles merely for _political_ rights had thrilled the fibres of his being. Youthful, and little schooled as yet in the world, he must have recoiled instinctively, as this most dismal and incomprehensible inconsistency appeared before him. How faithfully he battled with the demon his life will show.