Madame de Staël thought Lafayette more like the English and Americans than like the French, even in his personal appearance. Another French estimate, that he had "a cold manner, masking concentrated enthusiasm," is quite in keeping with American character, as was his incorrigible dash of optimism. It was to America, a country of wide spaces and few inhabitants, that he followed his vision of liberty in early manhood, and there where the play and interplay of selfish interests was far less complicated than in France he saw it become a practical reality. Later he championed many noble causes in many parts of the world. Next to political freedom and as a necessary part of it, he had at heart the emancipation of the negroes. This he tried himself to put into practice. He was shocked when he returned to our country in 1824 to find how much race prejudice had increased. He remembered that black soldiers and white messed together during the American Revolution. Religious liberty for Protestants, civil rights for Jews and Protestants; suppression of the infamous _lettres de cachet_; trial by jury; a revision of French criminal law to allow the accused the privilege of counsel, of confronting witnesses, and of free [Pg 298]communication with his family--benefits, by the way, which were all enjoyed by the accused in the state trials which took place while Lafayette was in power; abolition of the death penalty and freedom of the press were some of the measures most ardently championed by this believer in liberty and law. He remained a man of visions to the end. After his death one of the men who wrote in praise of him said that if he had lived during the Middle Ages he would have been the founder of a great religious order, one which had a profound moral truth as its guiding principle. Another compared him to a Knight of the Round Table fighting for the lady of his adoration, whose name was Liberty. Possibly no knight-errant, ancient or modern, can seem altogether sane, much less prudent, to the average unimaginative dweller in this workaday world. Yet what would the workaday world be without its knights-errant of the past; the good their knight-errantry has already accomplished; the courage it inspires for to-day; the promise it gives us for the future?