CHAPTER XXXIII.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE.

THE United States has contributed to the diplomatic circles of the Old World some incongruous members, heroes of the caucus and the stump, not versed in the lore of courts, and unskilled in drawing-room arts. So, at least, we are occasionally told by persons who think it a prettier thing to bow to a lady than to an audience, and nobler to chat agreeably at dinner than to discourse acceptably to a multitude. Perhaps we shall do better in the diplomatic way by and by. Hitherto our diplomatists have won their signal successes simply by being good citizens. We have never had a Talleyrand, nor one of the Talleyrand kind (though we came near it when Aaron Burr was pressed for a foreign appointment), and no American has ever been sent to lie abroad for his country's good. We have had, however, besides a large number of respectable ministers in the ordinary way, three whose opportunity was, at once, immense and unique, - Franklin, Jefferson, and Washburne; and each of these proved equal to his opportunity.

It is not as a record of diplomatic service that Jefferson's five years' residence in France is specially important to us. France and America were like lovers then, and it is not difficult to negotiate between lovers. His master in the diplomatic art was the greatest master of it that ever lived, Benjamin Franklin's excellence being, that he conducted the intercourse of nations on the principles which control men of honor and good feeling in their private business, who neither take, nor wish, nor will have, an unjust advantage, and look at a point in dispute with their antagonist's eyes as well as their own, never insensible to his difficulties and his scruples. It is what France did to Jefferson that makes his long residence there historically important; because the mind he carried

home entered at once into the forming character of a young nation, and became a part of it forever. All these millions of people, whom we call fellow-citizens, are perhaps more or less different in their character and feelings from what they would have been, if, in the distribution of diplomatic offices in 1785, Congress had sent Jefferson to London instead of Paris, and appointed John Adams to Paris instead of London.

At first he had the usual embarrassments of American ministers: he could read, but not speak, the French language, and he was sorely puzzled how to arrange his style of living so as not to go beyond his nine thousand dollars a year. The language was a difficulty which diminished every hour, though he never trusted himself to write French on any matter of consequence; but the art of living in the style of a plenipotentiary, upon the allowance fixed by Congress, remained difficult to the end. Nor could he, during the first years, draw much revenue from Virginia. He left behind him there so long a "list of debts" (the result of the losses and desolations of the war), that the proceeds of two crops, and the arrears of his salary as governor, voted by the legislature, only sufficed to satisfy the most urgent of them.

A Virginia estate was a poor thing indeed in the absence of the master; and unhappily, the founders of the government of the United States, in arranging salaries, made no allowance for the American fact, that the mere absence of a man from home usually lessens his income and increases his expenditure. Even Franklin took it for granted that we should always have among us men of leisure, most of whom would be delighted to serve the public for nothing. Who, indeed, could have foreseen a state of things, such as we see around us now, when the richer a man is the harder he works, and when, in a flourishing city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, not one man of leisure can be found, nor one man of ability who can "afford" to go to the legislature? Jefferson, Adams, and perhaps I may say most of the public men of the country, have suffered agonies of embarrassment from the failure of the first Congresses to adopt the true republican principle of paying for all service done the public at the rate which the requisite quality of service commands in the market. The only great error, perhaps, of Washington's career was his aristocratic disdain of taking fair wages for his work,- an error which most of his successors and

many of their most-valued ministers have rued in silent bitterness. Nay, he rued it himself. What anxious hours Washington himself passed from the fact that there were so few competent statesmen in the country who chanced to be rich enough to live in Philadelphia on the salary of a secretary of state!

Jefferson was somewhat longer than usual in getting used to what he called "the gloomy and damp climate" of Paris, such a contrast to the warmth, purity, and splendor of the climate of his mountain home. We find him, too, still mourning his lost wife, and writing to his old friend Page, that his "principal happiness was now in th retrospect of life." Moreover, the condition of human nature in Europe astonished and shocked him beyond measure. He was not prepared for it; he could not get hardened to it. While experiencing all those art raptures which we should presume he would, keenly enjoying the music of Paris above all, and the architecture only less, falling in love with a statue here and an edifice there, still, he could not become reconciled to the hideous terms on which most of the people of France held their lives. At his own pleasant and not inelegant abode, gathered most that was brilliant, amiable, or illustrious in Paris. Who so popular as the minister of our dear allies across the sea, the successor of Franklin, the friend of Lafayette, the man of science, the man of feeling, the scholar and musical amateur reared in the wilderness? He liked the French, too, exceedingly. He liked their manners, their habits, their tastes, and even their food. He was glad to live in a community, where, as he said, "a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness," and where people enjoyed social pleasures without eating like pigs and drinking like Indians. But none of these things could ever deaden his heart to the needless misery of man in France. Read his own words:

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First to his young friend and pupil, James Monroe, in June, 1785, when he had been ten months in Paris: "The pleasure of the trip [to Europe] will be less than you expect, but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own country, its soil, its climate, its equality, liberty, laws, people, and manners. My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy! I confess I had no idea of it myself."

To Mrs. Trist, in August, 1785: "It is difficult to conceive how

so good a people, with so good a king, so well-disposed rulers in general, so genial a climate, so fertile a soil, should be rendered so ineffectual for producing human happiness by one single curse, that of a bad form of government. But it is a fact, in spite of the mildness of their governors, the people are ground to powder by the vices of the form of government. Of twenty millions of people supposed to be in France, I am of opinion there are nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence, than the most conspicuously-wretched individual of the whole United States."

To an Italian friend in Virginia, September, 1785: "Behold me, at length, on the vaunted scene of Europe! You are, perhaps, curious to know how it has struck a savage of the mountains of America. Not advantageously, I assure you. I find the general fate of mankind here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire's observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil. It is a true picture of that country to which they say we shall pass hereafter, and where we are to see God and his angels in splendor, and crowds of the damned trampled under their feet.

To George Wythe of Virginia, in August, 1786: "If anybody thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators of the public happiness, send him here. It is the best school in the universe to cure him of that folly. He will see here, with his own eyes, that these descriptions of men are an abandoned conspiracy against the happiness of the people. Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know, that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance."

To General Washington, in November, 1786: "To know the mass of evil which flows from this fatal source [an hereditary aristocracy], a person must be in France; he must see the finest soil, the finest climate, and the most compact State, the most benevolent character of people, and every earthly advantage combined, insufficient to prevent this scourge from rendering existence a curse to twenty-four out of twenty-five parts of the inhabitants of this country."

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To James Madison, in January, 1787: "To have an idea of the curse of existence under a government of force, it must be seen. is a government of wolves over sheep."

To another American friend, in August, 1787: "If all the evils which can arise among us from the republican form of government, from this day to the day of judgment, could be put into scale against what this country suffers from its monarchical form in a week, or England in a month, the latter would preponderate. No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations. The best they can do is to leave things to their ministers; and what are their ministers but a committee badly chosen?" To Governor Rutledge of South Carolina, August, 1787: "The European are governments of kites over pigeons."

To another American friend, in February, 1788: "The longexpected edict at length appears. It is an acknowledgment (hitherto withheld by the laws), that Protestants can beget children, and that they can die, and be offensive unless buried. It does not give them permission to think, to speak, or to worship. It enumerates the humiliations to which they shall remain subject, and the burthens to which they shall continue to be unjustly exposed. What are we to think of the condition of the human mind in a country where such a wretched thing as this has thrown the State into convulsions, and how must we bless our own situation in a country the most illiterate peasant of which is a Solon compared with the authors of this law. Our countrymen do not know their own superiority."

Such were the feelings with which he contemplated the condition of the French people. But he was in a situation to know, also, how far "the great" in France were really benefited by the degradation of their fellow-citizens. Their situation was dazzling; but there was, he thought, no class in America who were not happier than they. Intrigues of love absorbed the younger, intrigues of ambition the elder. Conjugal fidelity being regarded as something provincial and ridiculous, there was no such thing known among them as that "tranquil, permanent felicity with which domestic society in America blesses most of its inhabitants, leaving them free to follow steadily those pursuits which health and reason approve, and rendering truly delicious the intervals of those pursuits."

Such sentiments as these were in vogue at the time, even among