fire, an action which totally destroyed his popularity and influence. Soon after, he resigned his commission and his seat in the Assembly, and withdrew to one of his country-seats.

He was not long allowed to remain in seclusion. The allied dynasties of Europe, justly alarmed at the course of events in Paris, threatened the new republic with war. La Fayette was appointed to command one of the three armies gathered to defend the frontiers. While he was disciplining his troops, and preparing to defend the country, he kept an anxious eye upon Paris, and saw with ever-increasing alarm the prevalence of the savage element in the national politics. In 1792, he had the boldness to write a letter to the National Assembly, demanding the suppression of the clubs, and the restoration of the king to the place and power assigned him by the constitution.

Learning, soon after, the new outrages put upon the king, he suddenly left his army and appeared at the bar of the Assembly, accompanied by a single aide-de-camp; there he renewed his demands, amid the applause of the moderate members; but a member of the opposite party adroitly asked:

"Is the enemy conquered? Is the country delivered, since General La Fayette is in Paris?"

"No," replied he, "the country is not delivered; the situation. is unchanged; and, nevertheless, the general of one of our armies is in Paris."

After a stormy debate, the Assembly declared that he had violated the constitution in making himself the organ of an army legally incapable of deliberating, and had rendered himself amenable to the minister of war for leaving his post without permission. Repulsed thus by the Assembly, coldly received at court, and rejected by the National Guard, he returned to his army despairing of the country. There he made one more attempt to save the king by inducing him to come to his camp and fight for his throne. This project being rejected, and the author of it denounced by Robespierre, his bust publicly burned in Paris, and the medal formerly voted him broken by the hand of the executioner, he deemed it necessary to seek an asylum in a neutral country. Having provided for the safety of his army, he crossed the frontiers, in August, 1792, accompanied by

twenty-one persons, all of whom on passing an Austrian post were taken prisoners, and La Fayette was thrown into a dungeon. His noble wife, who had been for fifteen months a prisoner in Paris, hastened, after her release, to share her husband's captivity.

For five years, in spite of the remonstrances of England, America, and the friends of liberty everywhere, La Fayette remained a prisoner. To every demand for his liberation, the Austrian government replied, with its usual stupidity, that the liberty of La Fayette was incompatible with the safety of the governments of Europe. He owed his liberation, at length, to General Bonaparte, and it required all his great authority to procure it. When La Fayette was presented to Napoleon to thank him for his interference, the First Consul said to him :"I don't know what the devil you have done to the Austrians; but it cost them a mighty struggle to let you go."

La Fayette voted publicly against making Napoleon consul for life, and against the establishment of the empire. Notwithstanding this, Napoleon and he remained very good friends. The emperor said of him one day :

"Everybody in France is corrected of his extreme ideas of liberty except one man, and that man is La Fayette. You see him now tranquil: very well; if he had an opportunity to serve his chimeras, he would reappear upon the scene more ardent than ever."

Upon his return to France he was granted the pension belonging to the military rank he had held under the republic, and he recovered a competent estate from the property of his wife. Napoleon also gave a military commission to his son, George Washington, and when the Bourbons were restored, La Fayette received an indemnity of four hundred and fifty thousand francs.

Napoleon's remark proved correct. La Fayette, though he spent most of the evening of his life in directing the cultivation of his estates, was always present at every crisis in the affairs of France to plead the cause of constitutional liberty. He made a fine remark once in its defence, when taunted with the horrors of the French Revolution:

The tyranny of 1793," he said, "was no more a republic than the massacre of St. Bartholemew was a religion." His visit to America, in 1824, is well remembered. He was the guest of the nation, and Congress, in recompense of his expenditures during the Revolutionary War, made him a grant of two hundred thousand dollars and an extensive tract of land. It was La Fayette who, in 1830, was chiefly instrumental in placing a constitutional monarch upon the throne of France. The last words he ever spoke in public were uttered in behalf of the French refugees who had fled from France for offences merely political; and the last words he ever wrote recommended the abolition of slavery. He died May 19, 1834, aged seventyseven. His son, George Washington, always the friend of liberty, like his father, died in 1849. Two grandsons of La Fayette are still living in France, both of whom have been in public life.

BOLIVAR.

THE reader perhaps has sometimes asked himself why the fertile countries of South America advance so slowly in wealth and population. In all that continent, which is considerably larger than North America, there are but seventeen millions of inhabitants, while North America contains almost exactly twice that number. Brazil, for example, which is about as large as the United States, and was settled sooner, contains but seven millions of people, and nowhere exhibits anything like the prosperity which has marked every period of our own history.

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The principal reasons of this difference are three in number. In the first place, nature herself in South America interposes mighty obstacles to the purposes of man. Vast plains exist, which, in the rainy season, are covered with luxuriant verdure, and in the dry season assume the appearance of a desert. The forests, owing to the fertility of the soil under a tropical sun, are so dense and tangled as almost to baffle the efforts of the pioneer to remove them. The principal rivers, which are the largest in the world, are more like flowing seas than navigable streams. The Plata, for example, is one hundred and thirty miles wide at its mouth, and is full of strong, irregular currents. The Amazon, too, which is four thousand miles in length, and navigable for one-half that distance, is, in many places, so wide that the navigator has to sail by the compass. The mountains, also, are precipitous and difficult of access, and contain thirty active volcanoes. All nature, in fact, is on a prodigious scale, and the very richness of the soil is frequently an injury rather than a help to man.

In the next place, the Spanish and Portuguese, who settled this continent, drawn thither by the lust of gold, were little

calculated to wrestle with the obstacles which nature placed in their path. Lastly, the Spanish and Portuguese governments, narrow, bigoted, ignorant, and tyrannical, for three centuries cramped the energies of the people, and oppressed them by nerciless exactions.

"Three hundred years ago," said Henry Clay, in his great speech upon the emancipation of South America, "upon the ruins of the thrones of Montezuma and the Incas of Peru, Spain erected the most stupendous system of colonial despotism that the world has ever seen, the most vigorous, the most exclusive. The great principle and object of this system has been to render one of the largest portions of the world exclusively subservient, in all its faculties, to the interests of an inconsiderable spot in Europe. To effectuate this aim of her policy, she locked up Spanish America from all the rest of the world, and prohibited, under the severest penalties, any foreigner from entering any part of it. To keep the natives themselves ignorant of each other, and of the strength and resources of the several parts of her American possessions, she next prohibited the inhabitants of one viceroyalty or government from visiting those of another; so that the inhabitants of Mexico, for example, were not allowed to enter the viceroyalty of New Granada. The agriculture of those vast regions was so regulated and restrained as to prevent all collision with the agriculture of the peninsula. Where nature, by the character and composition of the soil, had commanded, the abominable system of Spain has forbidden, the growth of certain articles. Thus the olive and the vine, to which Spanish America is so well adapted, are prohibited, wherever their culture can interfere with the olive and the vine of the peninsula. The commerce of the country, in the direction and objects of the exports and imports, is also subjected to the narrow and selfish views of Spain, and fettered by the odious spirit of monopoly. She has sought, by scattering discord among the several castes of her American population, and, by a debasing course of education, to perpetuate her oppression. Whatever concerns public law, or the science of government, all writings upon political economy, or that tend to give vigor, and freedom, and expansion, to the