In that hour of fate France appeared willingly on the scene as our champion. She succored us. Whatever may have been her motive, she put her ægis over our head. She sent her heroes to our camps; she gave us Lafayette and Rochambeau. She placed her fleets at our ports, with guns pointed seaward for protection. Then, when the fight was won, she aided us to enlarge our territories, to confirm our new republican empire. Though in the afterdays of her monarchical gloom France sometimes looked askance at our flag, the French nation was never once disloyal to us—never once indifferent to the fate of our great democracy.
In our institutional development for more than a century we have proceeded on the same general lines with the French. If we are satisfied with the result—if we believe in our republic—we ought, in good reason, to believe in the republic of France; for the republic is a universal fact, little trammelled by locality. The barrier of race ought not to predominate over political and social sympathies. The barrier of race ought not to separate us from our own. The fact that we are allied in ethnic descent with the English people ought not to make us enamored of the social life and civil institutions of Great Britain. Much less should the industrial and commercial life of England allure us as if to provoke a like manner of life in ourselves. Least of all should the financial method of Great Britain lead us by imitation to fix upon ourselves a similar incubus and horror.
This leads us to say that to break away from Great Britain, even when incited thereto by the antipathy and prejudice which we must needs hold against her; to leave her behind; to treat her as a historical fact not favorable, but inimical rather, to our progress and independent destiny,—seems to be the hardest task imposed upon the American democracy. The preference of race and language is so profound, the influences of the commercial life are so far-reaching, the admiration for political stability is so natural, the domination of centralized wealth is so overwhelming, and the allurements of consolidated power so well calculated to fascinate the masses, that even American democracy has found it hard to break the British tie and sail away uncabled and disenchanted on the sea.
This deluded instinct of attachment to Great Britain, and this unnatural lack of sympathy for France have cost us dearly. The two sentiments have modified our national life, and have left a result different by not a little from what it would have been if influenced by other and more wholesome dispositions on our part. Our nationality has lost much force on both counts—on the score of our illogical attachment to Great Britain on the one hand, and of our unnatural indifference to France on the other. Under the one influence we have become tolerant of subserviency as a national trait, and under the other we have become in a measure incapable of enthusiasm. The addition of British subserviency has been aggravated with the subtraction of French enthusiasm from our public and private life.
All this had been better otherwise. All this—even after the lapse of a hundred and twenty-one years from the great summer of our Independence—ought still to be bettered with amendment. It is not needed, stiff as we have already become in our national instincts and methods, to go forward by going backwards. To approximate Great Britain is to go backwards. The English people are among the greatest of the historic races, but the British monarchy, with its mediæval pretensions, its humbug of a throne and a crown, its subordinated ranks of society, its military and naval despotism, and its vast skein of tentaculæ stretching to every valuable thing in the world,—is perhaps the one thing that modern civilization should most dread and put away from the field of its desires.
On the other hand France is, in nearly all respects, admirable. Her mobility is life, and her warmth is a fructifying force. France gives forth more than she takes from the nations. Her republic is a splendid piece of political workmanship. Her spirit is patriotic. Her people, instead of straggling over the world like adventurers and pirates, remain in the borders of La Patrie, happy and vital in the possession of freedom.
Her lilies still bloom in the depth of the valleys.
Her vineyards are a covert under which if there be a peasantry it is not a peasantry forced down by oppression, but only the modest residue of the stronger life above and beyond. The free institutions of this beautiful land are the natural counterpart of our own; we should be all the better for warming ourselves not a little in the glow of the Gallic enthusiasm. Vive la France!