Thus, while the Romulus of the place married his daughter to a
Congressman, and was buried in a "mausoleum" on H Street, Remus died
without the walls and mingled his ashes, perhaps, with paupers.
The vaunted metropolis of the republican hopes of mankind--for such
was Washington, the fabulous city, advertised and praised in every
capital of Western Europe--drew to its site artists, adventurers, and
speculators from all lands. From Thomas Law, a secretary of Warren
Hastings, who wasted the earnings of India on enterprises here, to a
Frenchman who died on the guillotine for practising with an infernal
machine upon the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, the long train of
pilgrims came and saw and despaired, and many of them, perhaps, lie in
the Potter's Field. Old books and newspapers, chary on such personal
questions, contain occasional references as to some sculptor's
suicide, or to the straits of this or that French officer, a claimant
about Congress; and we know that Major L'Enfant, who conceived the
plan of the place, sought refuge with a pitying friend and died here
penniless. The long war of twenty years in Europe brought to America
thousands in search of safety and rest, and to these the magnetism of
the word "capital" was often the song of the siren wiling them to the
poor-house. By the time Europe had wearied of the sword, the fatality
attending high living, large slave-tilled estates, the love of
official society, and the defective education of the young men of
tide-water Virginia and Maryland, produced a new class of native-born
errants and broken profligates at Washington, and many a life whose
memories began with a coach-and-four and a park of deer ended them
between the coverlets of a poor-house bed. The old times were, after
all, very hollow times! We are fond of reading about the hospitality
of the Madisonian age, but could so many have accepted it if all were
prosperous?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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