His work for France and for America and for the world was done. In the spring of 1834 he caught a severe cold, which sapped his strength. On May twentieth of that year he died, having worked almost to the last on problems of government. As his funeral wound through the streets of Paris to the little cemetery of Picpus, in the center of the city, a great throng followed. On that day church-bells tolled in France, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, and England. All nations that loved liberty honored the great apostle of it. In the United States the government and the army and navy paid to Lafayette’s memory the same honors they had given to Washington, the Congress of the United States went into mourning for thirty days and most of the people of the nation followed its example. America vowed never to forget the French hero; and America never has.

Men have sometimes said that Lafayette’s enthusiasm was too impulsive, his confidence in others too undiscriminating, his goal too far beyond the reach of his times; but these were the marks of his own sincere and ardent nature. He was remarkably consistent in all the sudden shiftings of an age full of changes. Other men had sought favor of the Jacobins, of Napoleon, and of Louis XVIII. as each came into power; but Lafayette never did. All men knew where he stood. As Charles X. said of him, “There is a man who never changes.” He stood fast to his principles, and by standing fast to them saw them ultimately succeed.

He was a man who made and held strong friends. Washington, Jefferson, and Fox loved him as they loved few others. Napoleon and Charles X. could not resist the personal attraction of this man whom neither could bribe and whom both feared. Honesty was the key-note of his character, and with it went a simplicity and generosity that drew the admiration of enemies as well as of friends.

He had done a great deal for France, he had done as much for the United States. His love of liberty bound the two nations together, and when, in 1917, one hundred and forty years after his coming to America to fight for freedom, the United States proclaimed war as an ally of France in that same great cause, the thought of Lafayette sprang to every mind. The cause for which he had fought was again imperiled. The America in which Lafayette had believed was now to show that he had not been mistaken in his vision of her.

XV
AMERICA’S MESSAGE TO FRANCE—​“LAFAYETTE, WE COME!”

There have been many great changes in all the countries of the world since the time of Lafayette, and in most nations liberty has become more and more the watchword and the goal. The French Revolution was like a deep chasm between the era of feudalism and the era of the rights of man, and though the pendulum has sometimes seemed to swing backward for a short time it has almost constantly swung farther and farther forward in the direction of independence. The right of the common man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has gradually taken the place of the so-called divine right of kings to do as they pleased with their subjects.

In a sense the United States blazed the trail and led the way. The men of 1776 proclaimed the principles of liberty and drew up a constitution which has required few changes to the present day. They were remarkably wise men; and the people of America were almost as wise, for they appreciated the laws under which they lived and showed no disposition to thwart or overthrow the statesmen they themselves elected to guide the nation. The United States grew and grew, crossed the Mississippi, crossed the Rocky Mountains, reached the Pacific coast, and fronted on two oceans. As pioneers from the east had pushed out into the middle of the continent, cleared the wilderness, and filled it with prosperous cities and villages, so pioneers from the middle-west went on across the deserts and the mountains and made the far west flourish like the rose. The great northern territory of Alaska became part of the republic; to the south Porto Rico; far out in the Pacific Hawaii and the Philippines joined the United States; the Panama Canal was cut between the two oceans; and the republic that had begun as thirteen small states along the Atlantic seaboard became one of the most powerful nations in the world. Her natural resources were almost limitless and the energy of her people made the most of what nature had provided.