The road we followed was marked out rather than made, and crossed a somewhat flat tract of country: there were hardly any trees, some straggling farms, and thinly-scattered villages. The climate was French: swallows flew over the water as on the pond at Combourg.
Philadelphia.
As we drew nearer to Philadelphia, we met country-folk going to market, public carriages and private carriages. Philadelphia struck me as a fine town, with wide streets, some of which were planted with trees, intersecting each other at right angles in regular order from north to south and east to west. The Delaware runs parallel to the street which follows its west bank. This river would be considered a large one in Europe: it is not spoken of in America; its banks are low and unattractive.
At the period of my journey (1791), Philadelphia had not yet spread as far as the Schuylkill; the ground running towards that tributary was divided into lots, upon which houses were being built at intervals.
Philadelphia presents a monotonous aspect. In general, the Protestant cities of the United States fall short in great works of architecture: the Reformation, young in years, and sacrificing nothing to the imagination, has rarely erected those domes, those aerial naves, those twin towers with which the old Catholic religion has crowned Europe. No monument, in Philadelphia, in New York; at Boston, one pyramid rising above the mass of walls and roofs: the eye is saddened by this uniform level.
First alighting at an inn, I next took a room in a boarding-house in which were staying planters from San Domingo and Frenchmen who had emigrated with other ideas than mine. A land of liberty offered an asylum to those who were fleeing from liberty: nothing better proves the high value of generous institutions than this voluntary exile of the partisans of absolute power in a pure democracy.
A man who had landed in the United States as I had, filled with enthusiasm for the classic races, a colonist who sought on every side the rigidity of the early Roman manners, was necessarily much scandalized to find on every hand the luxury of private carriages, frivolity of conversation, inequality of fortunes, the immorality of banking and gaming-houses, the excitement of theatres and ball-rooms. In Philadelphia I might have thought myself in Liverpool or Bristol The appearance of the inhabitants was agreeable: the Quakeresses with their grey gowns, their uniform little bonnets and their pale features seemed attractive.
At that period of my life, I had a great admiration for republics, although I did not believe them possible at the stage of the world's history which we had reached: my idea of liberty was that conceived by the ancients, liberty the daughter of the manners of a new-born society; but I knew nothing of the liberty which is the daughter of enlightenment and of an old civilization, a form of liberty which the representative republic has proved to be real: God grant that it may be lasting! A man, to be free, is not obliged himself to plough his small field, to storm at arts and sciences, to wear hooked nails and a dirty beard.
General Washington was not in Philadelphia when I arrived there; I was obliged to wait a week. I saw him go past in a carriage drawn by four prancing horses, driven four-in-hand. Washington, according to my then ideas, was necessarily Cincinnatus; Cincinnatus in a chariot somewhat upset my republic of 296 B.C. Could Washington the Dictator be anything save a boor, driving his oxen with a goad and holding the tail of his plough? But when I went to carry my letter of recommendation to him, I found once more the simplicity of the ancient Roman.
A small house, resembling the neighbouring houses, was the palace of the President of the United States: no sentries, no footmen even. I knocked, and a young maid-servant opened the door. I asked if the general was at home; she replied that he was in. I said I had a letter for him. The servant asked my name, which is difficult to pronounce in English and which she could not remember. She then said softly, "Walk in, sir," and led the way down one of those narrow passages which serve as an entrance-hall to English houses: she showed me into a parlour where she asked me to wait until the general came.