Lafayette, We Come! / The Story of How a Young Frenchman Fought for Liberty in America and How America Now Fights for Liberty in France

by Rupert Sargent Holland

It was a war in fact deliberately determined upon and brought about by that same dark enemy of liberty that thrust Lafayette into an Austrian dungeon a century ago, that oppressed the people of Italy and wantonly imprisoned some of the noblest patriots that ever lived, that tore Alsace-Lorraine from France, and that has rattled its sabre and clanked its spurs and declared that war and destruction are the noblest objects of man. But the people have let themselves be treated like galley-slaves, have allowed that dark enemy of liberty to chain them to the benches and make them row that ship of state which is nothing less than a pirate bark upon the seas of the world. The people have been blind. Our President has tried to help them to see the light of freedom.

Treachery, deceit, lies, these have been the watchwords of the rulers of the Huns. When our government was still at peace with Germany her statesmen tried to make a secret agreement with Mexico that in case we should declare war the latter country should attack us and take our southwestern states. Again and again they lied to our Ambassador at Berlin and tried to intimidate him. Nothing has been sacred to them. They talk of religion and God and in the same breath outrage every teaching of Christianity. They have no respect for the great works of art of the world; cathedrals, libraries are destroyed without a thought other than to impress the enemy peoples with the frightfulness of their warfare. The world must be taught to fear them is their creed. And they have no more sense of humor than a stone. Over the slaughter of thousands of poor slave-driven soldiers the Kaiser can still send decorations to his sons, complimenting them and extolling their valor and generalship while all the world knows them to be mere pawns and puppets tricked out in the gaudy dress of the Hohenzollerns. Neither Kaiser nor generals nor statesmen have the least sense of humor, and a sense of humor is more than a saving grace, it is the mark of a sanity of judgment. But how can any sane judgment be found in a nation that thinks to frighten the rest of the world into submission by bombing hospital camps and Red Cross workers? There is no health in the monster. All the poisons of the past ages have collected in his blood.

America has never forgotten Lafayette. As John Quincy Adams said to him, he was ours “by that unshaken sentiment of gratitude for ... services which is a precious portion of our inheritance; ours by that tie of love, stronger than death, which has linked” Lafayette’s “name for the endless ages of time with the name of Washington.” In 1916 the old Château of Chavaniac, Lafayette’s birthplace, one hundred and fifty miles to the south of Paris, was put up for sale by the owner, a grandson of George Washington Lafayette. Patriotic Americans bought it, desiring to make a French Mount Vernon of the historic castle and grounds. At first it was intended to convert the château into a museum, to be filled with relics of Lafayette and Washington and the American Revolution, but the great needs that were facing France led to a change of plan. The castle should become more than a museum; it should be a home and school for as many children of France as could be provided for. This would have been Lafayette’s own wish, and in doing this the American society known as the French Heroes Lafayette Memorial has paid the noblest tribute to the great patriot. And the people of France, the most appreciative people in the world, have welcomed the gift and the spirit that underlay it.

Anatole France, the great French writer, has summed up the sentiment of his nation in glowing words. “American thought,” he says, “has had a beautiful inspiration in choosing the cradle of Lafayette, in which to preserve memoirs of American independence and to establish an institution for the public good. In preserving in the Château de Chavaniac d’Auvergne the testimonies and relics of the war which united under the banner of liberty, Washington and Rochambeau, and in founding the Lafayette museum, ties which have bound the two great democracies to an eternal friendship have been commemorated. But this was not enough for the inexhaustible liberality of the Americans. It went further, and it was decided that upon this illustrious corner of France, the children of those who died in defense of liberty, should find a refuge and home, and that, deprived of their natural protection, some of these children should be adopted by the great American people, while others of delicate constitution should recover health and strength on this robust land. It is a large heart that these men reveal in preserving a grateful remembrance of past services, and in coming to the assistance of the orphaned of a past generation who fought for their cause a hundred and forty years ago. May I venture, as an aged Frenchman and a lover of liberty, to proffer to America the tribute of my heartfelt homage?”

And so the castle where Lafayette was born and the fields and woods he knew so well in his boyhood among the Auvergne Mountains are now to be the home of generations of French children whose fathers gave their lives that the world might be set free from tyrants and war cease to be. What could be more fitting! It is one of the beautiful things of history that Americans could do this for France. It is in such ways that the spirit of brotherly love may some day encircle the earth.

For all wise men know that it is not riches, nor material possessions nor great territories that make either men or nations noble. The United States might cover half the globe, her wealth be beyond what man has ever dreamed of, her population run into the hundreds of millions, and yet our country be only hated and feared by other peoples. That was the future the rulers of Germany had been planning for their nation; so they might possess material things they were willing, nay, they were glad that the rest of the world should hate them. They had no wisdom at all; they had forgotten all the lessons of history. Christ might never have taught, churches never been more than bricks and stone, patriots and poets never have striven to show men their ideals, so far as these rulers, and through them their people, were concerned. Lafayette knew the truth, but the spirit of Lafayette was what Germany and Austria most hated; they are trying to-day to imprison that spirit just as they did imprison the man himself when they had the chance.

Nations, like men, live to serve, not to conquer for the lust of power. Only when nations have learned that are they worthy of admiration. Had America drawn her cloak about her, said “I am safe between my two oceans,” made money out of the sufferings of other peoples, held fast to safety and ease, then America would have betrayed every ideal of her founders, every hope of the men who have loved and worshipped their “land of the free.” Only when America said there were greater things than ease and safety, that the liberty of all peoples was indissolubly bound up with her own freedom, did she show herself as the great republic in spirit as well as in name; only when she was willing to serve others did she rise to the true heights of her national soul.

One of our poets, James Russell Lowell, has written the beautiful line, “‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe, when for the truth he ought to die!” The truth of that was known to the farmers of 1775 who took their guns and at Lexington and Concord fired “the shot heard round the world.” And the same truth was known to the men of 1861 who went out to keep the republic their fathers had given them. For we have all received a great legacy from those who have gone before, and now we know what it is, and have again gone forth to fight for truth.

We know that this is the greatest of all crusades. We know that men must be set free. Tyrants, whether they be emperors and kings or governments that place greed above justice, must be cleared from the earth. This last and greatest of tyrants, this league of the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs, has by its very brutality and injustice opened men’s eyes and let loose a new spirit in the world. Russia was autocratic, her ruling house of Romanoff was in many ways true brother of the other tyrants, but the people of Russia felt the new spirit and have already driven their Czar from his throne. When we think of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and all that France had to endure on the hard road to liberty we may well imagine that dark days lie before the Russian people, but in time France rose like a phœnix from the ashes of revolt, and when we see what France is to-day we may look confidently to the future of this other great people.