Meanwhile the period which was to separate us from the citizens of New York arrived, and our hearts were oppressed with sadness. On the 14th of July we left that city, to which we should not return previous to quitting America. The magistrates and the people attended the nation’s guest. A deep melancholy was evinced in every countenance; and although the wharves were covered with an immense multitude, a solemn silence was observed during our embarkation, interrupted only by the last farewell.
CHAPTER XV.
Letter of Mr. Keratry on the anniversary of Bunker’s hill—Fair Mount Water Works at Philadelphia—Germantown—Mr. Watson’s Historical Box—Field of the Battle of Brandywine—Invocation of the Rev. William Latta—Clergy of Lancaster—Return to Baltimore, lighted by a fire.
Whilst the citizens of the United States were exhausting every means to prove their grateful recollections of the ancient friend of their fathers, of their country, and of their institutions, France was not indifferent to the honours rendered to one of her sons on a distant shore. By means of her writers, her poets and her orators, she united her voice to that of republican America, to celebrate the principal circumstances of this triumph, honourable alike to the two nations. It was by means of one of the public journals,[[21]] printed at Paris and transmitted to the United States, that Mr. Keratry, inspired by the solemnity of Bunker’s hill, expressed the aspirations and sentiments of every friend of liberty in France:—
“Nations acquit themselves of a sacred debt in honouring the memories of their great citizens; but even by that they perform also an act of personal preservation, since nothing can better excite a generous patriotic devotion than the certainty secured to its author, of escaping oblivion.
“There is in fact, in the acclamations of public gratitude, something inspiring and almost contagious, which snatches man from himself, and the interests of daily life. We sacrifice this life to assure ourselves of another more brilliant and enduring. If told that these plaudits should be decreed to frigid ashes, one would feel himself revived to participate in this futurity of glory; and by a miracle of patriotism, the general safety of a country results from all the sacrifices of individuals.
“Nations capable of these sacrifices, even while endeavouring to throw off a yoke of oppression, the inevitable tendency of which is to degrade our species, wherever it is submitted to, were never without virtue. We are entirely convinced, that as God judges men individually, by their earthly conduct, in a future state, he pronounces also collectively on nations here below according to their sum of merit, and this is the providential justice of the present economy. According as he weighs them, they prosper or they perish! Thus have colonies become empires—thus have empires been swept away.
“Inhabitants of North America! citizens of an enfranchised world! behold what has permitted you to become embodied and constitute a nation; see what has guaranteed to you a perpetuity of ennobled existence! Your nobility is produced by your habits of laborious exertion, and by your domestic virtues. These virtues exist amongst you: where women are chaste, men are brave; where religion is the free and spontaneous motion of the creature toward the Creator, and is not transformed into a political lever of worldly interests, salutary faith presides over social order, and nerves the soul. You have had a Franklin, a Washington, a Samuel Adams, a Jefferson: if needed, you will find others. The tree abounds in sap, why then shall it not produce new fruits? Your prosperity no longer excites my astonishment; it is in the nature of things both human and divine.
“You do well, however, in enhancing the renown of these supporters of your liberty; and in raising monuments worthy of those who died in insuring it. The great citizen, who in 1765 was one of the founders of the noble conspiracy in Boston, so influential on your destinies; he who was on two memorable occasions commissioned by that city, to console, by his eloquence, the shades of your illustrious compatriots, massacred the 2d of March, 1770; he who in 1775 assisted you to win the brilliant auguries of the battle of Lexington, and who fell by a mortal blow at Breed’s Hill, in the second engagement of your struggle for independence, Dr. Warren, merited from yourselves and from your children, a peculiar distinction.
“It was perhaps sufficient for the glory of this gallant patriot, whose virtue was attested by the sorrow of his most decided enemies, and to whose courage the entrenched earth yet bears witness, which received with his blood his last drawn sigh: it was sufficient I say, that his collected remains should have found an honourable sepulture in the bosom of that city whose liberty he was so desirous to behold accomplished. You have decreed more than this for his heroic companions in arms. Men of North America, I congratulate you that the services of the brave remain vivid in your memories: for it were the extreme of rashness, to expect aught for the future of nations that forget the past, by which they were established and by which they exist. There are in you the elements of vigour, and you well know how to cherish them. You have desired that the hand of one of the earliest defenders of your liberty might assist you to complete the pious duty. Already have our imaginations and our eyes followed to the tomb of Washington, this aged soldier celebrated in the annals of two nations; nor can I believe that the sun ever shone on a more noble spectacle on this earth. Let us accompany, him yet farther, when on the 17th of the next month, he united with you in founding the monument built by the citizens of Boston to the memory of the brave of Bunker’s hill: fully worthy, indeed, to solemnize with you this great obligation, his views no doubt were directed toward his own country, whilst assisting you in the discharge of your country’s debt. He shall intercede by his prayers for us, and perhaps without envying the happy situation you owe to the civil and military talents of your citizens, he will humbly ask of Providence why those happy days seem to have been withdrawn from France, the dawn of which she once beheld. No! in his grief he will be silent, lest the tombstone, and the sacred bones which it protects, should render him a reply too severe for us, inhabitants of ancient Europe, where, pretensions to liberty are made without sacrifices, and to happiness without virtue!