that the blacks who cultivate it shall preserve their liberty.”[101] Search history, whether ancient or modern pages, let Greece and Rome testify, but you can find nothing more sublimely touching than this voice from that heavy-bolted dungeon, serenely pleading for the liberty of others far away. That noblest woman, mated with him in soul as in marriage vow, had already exerted herself to accomplish this purpose,--but, alas! without effect. Cruelly was their liberty confiscated with his estates.[102] This confiscation, where Liberty itself disappeared, was the terrible climax of that proscription which now enveloped his friends and his family. In the prevailing masquerade of blood the charge of _Fayettism_ was equivalent to a decree of death. Nor was tender woman spared. The grandmother, the mother, and the sister of his wife, all of the same ducal house, perished on the scaffold. His wife was thrown into prison, and escaped the same fate only by the timely overthrow of Robespierre. Regaining liberty after a cruel imprisonment of sixteen months, her maternal care was for her son, George Washington Lafayette, still a boy, whom she sent to his great namesake at Mount Vernon with a letter from herself, and then, accompanied by her two youthful daughters, with the protection of an American passport, she makes her way across Germany to Vienna, where she throws herself before the Imperial despot. To her prayer for the release of her husband, he answers that “his hands are tied”; but, moved by her devotion, so womanly, so wifely, so heroic, he yields so far as to consent that she, with her daughters, may share his wretched captivity. Penetrating his dungeon, she learned that the first change of raiment allowed him was on her arrival, when the tattered rags which scarcely covered his emaciated form were exchanged for a garb of coarsest material,--an indulgence not accorded without the insult of informing him that this had been purposely sought, as with such alone was he worthy to be clothed.[103] Three silver forks in her little inventory were seized by the jailer, and this refined family during a lingering imprisonment were driven to eat with their fingers. These things are not to be forgotten, because, while exhibiting the cruelty of despotic power, against which the world now rises in judgment, they show how his fidelity was tried, as also that of his family. The wife, becoming ill, was refused permission to leave the dungeon for medical advice at Vienna, except on condition of not returning, when she beautifully declared, for herself and her daughters, that they had agreed to participate the rigors of his captivity, and now repeated, with all their hearts, that they were happier with him in the dungeon than they could be anywhere else without him. Lafayette himself, when tempted by offer of release on certain conditions or promises, was stern as his jailer, and refused inexorably,--choosing to suffer, sooner than compromise in any respect