“The fight for liberty in America was won. Its future here was threatened with but one danger,—the slavery of the negro. The soul of La Fayette, purified by battle and suffering, saw the inconsistency and the peril, and he returned to this country to plead with state legislatures and with Congress for the liberation of what he termed ‘my brethren, the blacks.’ But now the hundred years’ war for liberty in France was to begin. America was its inspiration, La Fayette its apostle, and the returning French army its emissaries. Beneath the trees by day and in the halls at night, at Mount Vernon, La Fayette gathered from Washington the gospel of freedom. It was to sustain and guide him in after years against the temptations of power and the despair of the dungeon. He carried the lessons and the grand example through all the trials and tribulations of his desperate struggle and partial victory for the enfranchisement of his country. From the ship, on departing, he wrote to his great chief, whom he was never to see again, this touching good by: ‘You are the most beloved of all the friends I ever had or shall have anywhere. I regret that I cannot have the inexpressible pleasure of embracing you in my own house, and welcoming you in a family where your name is adored. Everything that admiration, respect, gratitude, friendship, and filial love can inspire is combined in my affectionate heart to devote me most tenderly to you. In your friendship I find a delight which no words can express.’ His farewell to Congress was a trumpet blast which resounded round a world then bound in the chains of despotism and caste. Every government on the continent was an absolute monarchy, and no language can describe the poverty and wretchedness of the people. Taxes levied without law exhausted their property; they were arrested without warrant, and rotted in the Bastile without trial, and they were shot as game, and tortured without redress, at the caprice or pleasure of their feudal lords. Into court and camp this message came like the handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast. Hear his words: ‘May this immense temple of freedom ever stand a lesson to oppressors, an example to the oppressed, a sanctuary for the rights of mankind, and may these happy United States attain that complete splendor and prosperity which will illustrate the blessings of their government, and for ages to come rejoice the departed souls of its founders.’ Well might Louis the Sixteenth, more far-sighted than his ministers, exclaim, ‘After fourteen hundred years of power the old monarchy is doomed.’” CHAPTER V.