Tous ces fléaux célestes,
Ces ravageurs d'États dont les pieds triomphants
Sur les pères broyés écrasent les enfants,
Grâce à toi, désormais, pâliront dans l'histoire....
L'humanité te doit l'esclavage aboli....
L'Amérique sa force et la paix revenue,
L'Europe un idéal de grandeur inconnue,
Et l'avenir mettra ton image et ton nom
Plus haut que les Césars—auprès de Washington.
When, in a log cabin of Kentucky, over a century ago, that child was born who was named after his grandfather killed by the Indians, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon I swayed Europe, Jefferson was President of the United States, and the second War of Independence had not yet come to pass. It seems all very remote. But the memory of the great man to whom these lines are dedicated is as fresh in everybody's mind as if he had only just left us; more people, indeed, know of him now than was the case in his own day. "It is," says Plutarch, "the fortune of all good men that their virtue rises in glory after their death, and that the envy which any evil man may have conceived against them never survives the envious." Such was the fate of Lincoln.
FOOTNOTES
[227] Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, vol. XIII, col. 33 ff., November 2 and 3, 1803. Senator White had also objected that the price, of fifteen million dollars, was too high; while the French plenipotentiary, Barbé-Marbois, had observed that the lands still unoccupied, to be handed to the American Government "would have a value of several billions before a century had elapsed," in which he was no bad prophet. Marbois added: "Those who knew the importance of a perfect understanding between these two countries attached more value to the twenty million francs set apart for the American claims than to the sixty offered to France." In accordance again with Senator White, the deciding motive had not been that longing for "a perfect understanding" mentioned by Marbois, but a feeling that Louisiana would, at the next war, "inevitably fall into the hands of the British." "Of course, it would," future Marshal Berthier, who was averse to the cession, had observed when the point had been mentioned at the council held at the Tuileries, before the First Consul Bonaparte, on Easter Day, 1803, "but Hanover would just as soon be in our hands, and an exchange would take place at the peace.... Remember this: no navy without colonies; no colonies without a navy." Barbé-Marbois, Histoire de la Louisiane, Paris, 1829, pp. 295, 315, 330.
[228] May 10, 1786.
[229] September 9, 1786.
[230] July 8, 1783.
[231] "Short Autobiography, written at the request of a friend," Complete Works, ed. Nicolay and Hay, 1905, pp. 26, 27.
[232] Ibid., 28, 29.