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Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville

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Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Jacques Pierre Brissot, who assumed the name of de Warville, a celebrated French Girondist, was born at Chartres, where his father was an inn-keeper, in January 1754. He received a good education and entered the office of a lawyer at Paris. His first works were on the philosophy of law, and showed how thoroughly Brissot was imbued with the ethical precepts of Rousseau. The first work was dedicated to Voltaire and was received by the old philosophe with much favour. Brissot became known as a facile and able writer, and was engaged on the Mercure, on the Courrier de l'Europe, and on other papers. Ardently devoted to the service of humanity, he projected a scheme for a general concourse of all the savants in Europe, and started in London a paper, Journal du Lycée de Londres, which was to be the organ of their views. The plan was unsuccessful, and soon after his return to Paris Brissot was lodged in the Bastille on the charge of having published a work against the government. He obtained his release after four months, and again devoted himself to pamphleteering, but had speedily to retire for a time to London. On this second visit he became acquainted with some of the leading Abolitionists, and founded later in Paris a Société des Amis des Noirs, of which he was president during 1790 and 1791. As an agent of this society he paid a visit to the United States in 1788, and in 1791 published his "New Travels in the United States of America."

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Leseprobe

New Travels in the United States of America

Performed in 1788

JACQUES PIERRE BRISSOT DE WARVILLE

New Travels in the United States of America, J. P. Brissot de Warville

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

Printed by Bookwire, Voltastraße 1, 60486 Frankfurt/M.

ISBN: 9783849663988

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

PREFACE

NO traveller, I believe, of this age, has made a more useful present to Europe, than M. de Warville in the publication of the following Tour in the United States. The people of France will derive great advantages from it; as they have done from a variety of other labours of the same industrious and patriotic author. Their minds are now open to enquiry into the effects of moral and political systems, as their commerce and manufactures are to any improvements that their unembarrassed situation enables them to adopt.

Many people read a little in the preface, before they buy the book; and I shall probably be accused of being in the interest of the Bookseller, and of making an assertion merely to catch this fort of readers, when I say that the English have more need of information on the real character and condition of the United States of America, than any other people of Europe; and especially when I add, that this book is infinitely better calculated to convey that information, than any other, or than all others of the kind that have hitherto appeared.

I do not know how to convince an English reader of the first of these remarks; but the latter I am sure he will find true on perusing the work.

The fact is, we have always been surprizingly ignorant both of the Americans and of their country. Had we known either the one or the other while they were colonies, they would have been so at this day, and probably for many days longer; did we know them now, we should endeavour to draw that advantage from them that the natural and adventitious circumstances of the two countries would indicate to reasonable men. There is no spot on the globe, out of England, so interesting for us to study under all its connections and relations, as the territory of the United States. Could we barter all the Canadas and Nova-Scotias, with all their modifications and subdivisions, for such an amicable intercourse as might have been established with that people since the close of the war, we would have every reason to rejoice in the change.

Ministers, as wicked as they are, do more mischief through ignorance, than from any less pardonable cause. And what are the sources of information on this subject, that are generally drawn from in this kingdom? Those Americans, who best know their own country, do not write; they have always been occupied in more important affairs. A few light superficial travellers, some of whom never appear to have quitted Europe, who have not knowledge enough even to begin to enquire after knowledge; a few ministerial governors of royal provinces, whose business it always was to give false information: such are the men whose errors have been uniformly copied by succeeding writers, systematized by philosophers, and acted out by politicians.

These blunders assume different shapes and come recommended to us under various authorities. You see them mustered and embodied in a gazetteer or a geographical grammar[1], marching in the splendid retinue of all the sciences in the Encyclopedia; you find them by regiments pressed into the service of De Paw, tortured into discipline and taught to move to the music of Raynal, and then mounted among the heavy armed cavalry of Robertson. Under such able commanders, who could doubt of their doing execution? Indeed their operations have been too fatal to us. Our false ideas of the Americans have done us more injury, even since the war, than twenty Russian or Spanish armaments. But the evil still continues; and every day lessens the opportunity of profiting from their acquaintance.

We have refused, ever since the war, to compliment them with an envoy; we have employed, to take care of our consular interests, and represent the epitomized majesty of the British nation, an American Royalist, who could be recommended to us only for his stupidity, and to them only for his suspected perfidy to their cause.

The book that bears the name of Lord Sheffield on the American trade, has served as the touchstone, the slateman's confession of faith, relative to our political and commercial intercourse with that country. It is said to have been written by an American who had left his country in disgrace, and therefore intended to write against it. And the book really has this appearance; it has passed for a long time in England as a most patriotic and useful performance; it has taught us to despise the Americans in peace and commerce, as the works of other men of this cast had before told us to do in war and politics. The details in it, furnished by the clerks of the custom-house, are doubtless accurate, though of little consequence; but the reasoning is uniformly wrong, the predictions are all false, and the conclusions which he draws, and which of course were to serve as advice to the government, are calculated to flatter our vanity, to confirm us in our errors, and mislead us in our conduct. Had the ablest sophist in Europe been employed to write a book professedly against Great-Britain and in favour of America, he could not have succeeded so well. It persuaded us to refuse any kind of commercial treaty with them; which forced them to learn a lesson, of which they might otherwise have been ignorant for half a century, that after beating our armies they could rival our manufactories; that they could do without us much better than we could without them.

M. de Warville has taught his countrymen to think very differently of that people. I believe every reader of these travels, who understands enough of America to enable him to judge, will agree with me in opinion, that his remarks are infinitely more judicious, more candid, and less erroneous than those of any other of the numerous observers that have visited that country. Most of them have been uniformly superficial, often scurrilous, blending unmerited censure with fulsome praise, and huddling together, to form the whole piece, a parcel of unfinished images, that give no more a picture of that people, than of the Arabs or the Chinese. Their only object, like that of a novel writer, is to make a book that will sell; and yet they preserve not even that consistency with themselves, which is indispensable in the wildest romance. M. de Warville is a sober, uniform, indefatigable, and courageous defender of the rights of mankind; he has certainly done much in his own country in bringing forward the present Revolution. His great object in these travels, seems to have been, to observe the effects of habitual liberty on man in society; and his remarks appear to be those of a well-informed reasoner, and an unprejudiced inquirer.

London, Feb. 1, 1792.

PREFACE OF THE AUTHOR.

THE publication of Voyages and Travels will doubtless appear, at first view, an operation foreign to the present circumstances of France. I should even myself regret the time I have spent in reducing this Work to order, if I did not think that it might be useful and necessary in supporting our Revolution. The object of these Travels was not to study antiques, or to search for unknown plants, but to study men who had just acquired their liberty. A free people can no longer be strangers to the French.

We have now, likewise, acquired our liberty. It is no longer necessary to learn of the Americans the manner of acquiring it, but we must be taught by them the secret of preserving it. This secret consists in the morals of the people; the Americans have it; and I see with grief, not only that we do not yet possess it, but that we are not even thoroughly persuaded of its absolute necessity in the preservation of liberty. This is an important point; it involves the salvation of the revolution, and therefore merits a close examination.

What is liberty? It is the most perfect state of society: it is the state in which man depends but upon the laws which he makes; in which, to make them good, he ought to perfect the powers of his mind; in which, to execute them well, he must employ all his reason; for coercive measures are disgraceful to freemen-they are almost useless in a free State; and when the magistrate calls them to his aid, liberty is on the decline, morals are nothing more than reason applied to all the actions of life; in their force consists the execution of the laws. Reason or morals are to the execution of the laws among a free people, what setters, scourges, and gibbets are among slaves. Destroy morals, or practical reason, and you must supply their place by setters and scourges, or else society will no longer be but a state of war, a scene of deplorable anarchy, to be terminated by its destruction.

Without morals there can be no liberty. If you have not the former, you cannot love the latter, and you will soon take it away from others; for if you abandon yourself to luxury, to ostentation, to excessive gaming, to enormous expenses, you necessarily open your heart to corruption; you make a traffic of your popularity, and of your talents; you fell the people to that despotism which is always endeavouring to replunge them into its chains.

Some men endeavour to distinguish public from private morals; it is a false and chimerical distinction, invented by vice, in order to disguise its danger. Doubtless a man may possess the private virtues without the public; he may be a good father, without being an ardent friend of liberty; but he that has not the private virtues, can never possess the public; in this respect they are inseparable; their basis is the same, it is practical reason. What! within the walls of your house, you trample reason under foot; and do you respect it abroad, in your intercourse with your fellow-citizens? He that respects not reason in the lonely presence of his household gods, can have no sincere attachment to it at all; and his apparent veneration to the law is but the effect of fear, or the grimace of hypocrisy. Place him out of danger from the public force, his fears vanish, and his vice appears. Besides, the hypocrisy of public virtue entrains another evil; it spreads a dangerous snare to liberty over the abyss of despotism.

What confidence can be placed in those men who, regarding the revolution but as their road to fortune, assume the appearance of virtue but to deceive the people; who deceive the people but to pillage and enslave them; who, in their artful discourses, where eloquence is paid with gold, preach to others the sacrifice of private interest, while they themselves sacrifice all that is sacred to their own? men whose private conduct is the assassin of virtue, an opprobrium to liberty, and gives the lie to the doctrines which they preach:

Qui Curius Simulant, et baccanalia vivunt.

Happy the people who despise this hypocrisy, who have the courage to degrade, to chastise, to excommunicate these double men, possessing the tongue of Cato, and the soul of Tiberius. Happy the people who, well convinced that liberty is not supported by eloquence, but by the exercise of virtue, esteem not, but rather despise, the former, when it is separated from the latter. Such a people, by their severe opinions, compel men of talents to acquire morals; they exclude corruption from their body, and lay the foundation for liberty and long prosperity.

But if this people, improvident and irresolute, dazzled by the eloquence of an orator who flatters their passions, pardon his vices in favour of his talents; if they feel not an indignation at seeing an Alcibiades training a mantle of purple, lavishing his sumptuous repasts, lolling on the bosom of his mistress, or ravishing a wife from her tender husband; if the view of his enormous wealth, his exterior graces, the soft sound of his speech, and his traits of courage, could reconcile them to his crimes; if they could render him the homage which is due only to talents united with virtue; if they could lavish upon upon him praises, places, and honours; then it is that this people discover the full measure of their weakness, their irresolution, and their own proper corruption; they become their own executioners; and the time is not distant, when they will be ready to be sold, by their own Alcibiades, to the great king, and to his satraps.

Is it an ideal picture which I here trace, or, is it not ours? I tremble at the resemblance! Great God! shall we have achieved a revolution the most inconceivable, the most unexpected, but for the sake of drawing from nihility a few intriguing, low, ambitious men, to whom nothing is sacred, who have not even the mouth of gold to accompany their soul of clay? Infamous wretches! they endeavour to excuse their weakness, their venality, their eternal capitulations with despotism, by saying, these people are too much corrupted to be trusted with complete liberty. They themselves give them the example of corruption; they give them new shackles, as if shackles could enlighten and ameliorate men.

O Providence! to what destiny reservest thou the people of France? They are good, but they are flexible; they are credulous, they are enthusiastic, they are easily deceived. How often, in their infatuation, have they applauded secret traitors, who have advised them to the most perfidious measures! Infatuation announces either a people whose aged weakness indicates approaching dissolution, or an infant people, or a mechanical people, a people not yet ripe for liberty: for the man of liberty is by nature a man of reason, he is rational in his applauses, he is sparing in his admiration, if, indeed, he ever indulges this passion; he never profanes these effusions, by lavishing them on men who dishonour themselves. A people degraded to this degree, are ready to caress the gilded chains that may be offered them. Behold the people of England dragging in the dirt that parliament to whom they owed their liberty, and crowning with laurels the infamous head of Monk, who sold them to a new tyrant.

I have scrutinized those men, by whom the people are so easily infatuated. How few patriots was I able to number among them! How few men, who sincerely love the people, who labour for their happiness and amelioration, without regard to their personal interest! These true friends, these real brothers of the people, are not to be formed in those infamous gambling houses, where the representatives sport with the blood of their fellow citizens; they are not found among those vile courtesans who, preserving their disposition, have only changed their mask: they are not found among those patriots of a day, who, while they are preaching the Rights of Man, are gravely occupied with a gilded phæton, or an embroidered vest. The man of this frivolous taste has never descended into those profound meditations, which make of humanity, and the exercise of reason, a constant pleasure and a daily duty. The simplicity of wants and of pleasures, may be taken as a sure sign of patriotism. He that has few wants, has never that of felling himself; while the citizen, who has the rage of ostentation, the fury of gambling, and of expensive frivolities, is always to be sold to the highest bidder; and everything around him betrays his corruption!

Would you prove to me your patriotism? Let me penetrate into the interior of your house. What! I see your antechamber full of insolent lackies, who regard me with disdain, because I am like Curius, incomptis capillis : they address you with the appellation of lordship; they give you still those vain titles which liberty treads under foot, and you suffer it, and you call yourself a patriot!-I penetrate a little further: your ceilings are gilded; magnificent vases adorn your chimney pieces; I walk upon the richest carpets; the most costly wines, the most exquisite dishes, cover your table; a crowd of servants surround it; you treat them with haughtiness:-No, you are not a patriot, the most consummate pride reigns in your heart, the pride of birth, of riches, and of talents, With this triple pride, a man never believes in the doctrine of equality: you belie your conscience, when you prostitute the word patriot.

But whence comes this display of wealth? you are not rich. Is it from the people? they are still poor. Who will prove to me that it is not the price of their blood? Who will assure me that there is not this moment existing, a secret contract between you and the court? Who will assure me that you have not said to the court, Trust to me the power which remains to you, and I will bring back the people to your feet; I will attach them to your car; I will enchain the tongues and pens of those independent men who brave you. A people may sometimes be subjugated without the aid of bastilles.

I do not know if so many pictures as every day strike our eyes, will convince us of the extreme difficulty of connecting public incorruptibility with corruption of morals; but I am convinced, that if we wish to preserve our constitution, it will be easy, it will be necessary, to demonstrate this maxim: "Without 'private virtue, there can be no public' virtue, no public spirit, no liberty."

But how can we create private virtue among a people who have just risen suddenly from the dregs of servitude, dregs which have been settling for twelve centuries on their heads?

Numerous means offer themselves to our hands; laws, instruction, good examples, education, encouragement to a rural life, parceling of real property among heirs, respect to the useful arts.

Is it not evident, for instance, that private morals associate naturally with a rural life; that, of consequence, manners would much improve, by inducing men to return from the city to the country, and by discouraging them from migrating from the country to the city? The reason why the Americans possess such pure morals is, because nine-tenths of them live dispersed in the country. I do not say that we should make laws direct to force people to quit the town, or to fix their limits; all prohibition, all restraint is unjust, absurd, and ineffectual. Do you wish a person to do well? make it for his interest to do it. Would you re-people the country? make it his interest to keep his children at home. Wife laws and taxes well distributed will produce this effect. Laws which tend to an equal distribution of real property, to diffuse a certain degree of ease among the people, will contribute much to the resurrection of private and public morals; for misery can take no interest in the public good, and want is often the limit of virtue.

Would you extend public spirit through all France? Into all the departments, all the villages, favour the propagation of knowledge, the low price of books and of newspapers. How rapidly would the revolution consolidate, if the government had the wisdom to frank the public papers from the expense of postage! It has often been repeated, that three or four millions of livres expended in this way, would prevent a great number of disorders which ignorance may countenance or commit; and the reparation of which costs many more millions. The communication of knowledge would accelerate a number of useful undertakings, which greatly diffuse public prosperity.

I will still propose another law, which would infallibly extend public spirit and good morals; it is the short duration of public functioners in their office, and the impossibility of re-electing them without an interval. By that the legislative body would send out every two years, into the provinces, three or four hundred patriots, who, during their abode at Paris, would have arisen to the horizon of the revolution, and obtained instruction, activity in business, and a public spirit. The commonwealth, better understood, would become thus successively the benefits of all; and it is thus that you would repair repair the defect with which representative republics are reproached, that the commonwealth is the business of but few.

I cannot enlarge upon all the means; but it would be rendering a great service to the Revolution, to seek and point out those which may give us morals and public spirit.-

Yet I cannot leave this subject without indulging one reflection, which appears to me important; Liberty, either political or individual, cannot exist a long time without personal independence. There can be no independence without a property, a profession, a trade, or an honest industry, which may insure against want and dependence.

I assure you that the Americans are and will be for a long time free; it is because nine tenths of them live by agriculture; and when there shall be five hundred millions of men in America, all may be proprietors.

We are not in that happy situation in France: the productive lands in France amount to fifty millions of acres; this, equally divided, would be two acres to a person; these two acres would not be sufficient for his subsistence; the nature of things calls a great number of the French to live in cities. Commerce, the mechanic arts, and diverse kinds of industry, procure their subsistence to the inhabitants; for we must not count much at present on the produce of public offices. Salaries indemnify, but do not enrich; neither do they insure against future want. A man who should speculate upon salaries for a living, would only be the slave of the people, or of foreign powers: every man, therefore, who wishes sincerely to be free, ought to exercise some art or trade. At this word, trade, the patriots still shiver; they begin to pay some respect to commerce; but though they pretend to cherish equality, they do not feel themselves frankly the equals of a mechanic. They have not yet abjured the prejudice which regards the tradesman, as below the banker or the merchant. This vulgar aristocracy will be the most difficult to destroy[2]. -If you wish to honour the mechanic arts, give instruction to those who exercise them: choose among them the best instructed, and advance them in public employments; and disdain not to confer upon them distinguished places in the assemblies.

I regret that the National Assembly has not yet given this salutary example; that they have not yet crowned the genius of agriculture, by calling to the president's chair the good cultivator, Gerard; that the merchants and other members of the Assembly, who exercise mechanic arts, have not enjoyed the same honour. Why this exclusion? It is very well to insert in the Declaration of Rights, that all men are equal; but we must practise this equality, engrave it in our hearts, consecrate it in all our actions, and it belongs to the National Assembly to give the great example. It would perhaps force the executive power to respect it likewise. Has he ever been known to descend into the class of professions, there to choose his ministers, his agents, from men of simplicity of manners, not rich, but well instructed, and no courtiers? Our democrats of the court praise indeed, with a borrowed enthusiasm, a Franklin or an Adams; they say, and even with a silly astonishment, that one was a printer, and the other a schoolmaster! But do they go to seek in the workshops. the men of information? No.-But what signifies at present the conduct of an administration, whose detestable foundation renders them antipopular, and consequently perverse? they can never appear virtuous, but by hypocrisy. To endeavour to convert them, is a folly; to oppose to them independent adversaries, is wisdom: the secret of independence is in this maxim, Have few wants, and a steady employment to satisfy them.

With these ideas man bends not his front before man. The artizan glories in his trade that supports him: he envies not places of honour; he knows he can attain them, if he deserves them: he idolizes no man; he respects himself too much to be an idolator: he esteems not men because they are in place, but because they deserve well from their country. The leaders of the revolution in Holland, in the sixteenth century, seated on the grass at a repast of herrings and onions, received, with a stern simplicity, the deputies of the haughty Spaniard. This is the portrait of men who feel their dignity and know the superiority of freemen over the slaves of kings.

Quem neque pauperies, neque mors, neque vincula terrent.

When shall we have this elevated idea of ourselves? When will all the citizens look with disdain on those idols on whom they formerly prostituted their adoration? Indeed, when shall we experience a general diffusion of public spirit?

I have no uneasiness about the rising generation: the pure souls of our young men breathe nothing but liberty; the contagious breath of personal interest has not yet infected them. An education truly national, will create men surpassing the Greeks and Romans; but people advanced in life, accustomed to servitude, familiarized with the idolatry of the great-What will reclaim them? What will strip them of the old man? Instruction; and the best means of diffusing it, is to multiply popular clubs, where all those citizens so unjustly denominated passive, come to gain information on the principles of the Constitution, and on the political occurrences of every day. It is there that may be placed under the eyes of the people, the great examples of virtue furnished by ancient and modern history; it is there that detached parts of the work, which I now publish, may serve to shew my fellow-citizens the means of preserving their liberty.

O Frenchmen! who wish for this valuable instruction, study the Americans of the present day. Open this book: you will here see to what degree of prosperity the blessings of freedom can elevate the industry of man; how they dignify his nature and dispose him to universal fraternity: you will here learn by what means liberty is preserved; that the great secret of its duration is in good morals. It is a truth that the observation of the present state of America demonstrates at every step. Thus you will see, in these Travels, the prodigious effects of liberty on morals, on industry, and on the amelioration of men. You will see those stern Presbyterians, who, on the first settlement of their country, infected with the gloomy superstitions of Europe, could erect gibbets for those who thought differently from themselves. You will see them admitting all sects to equal charity and brotherhood, rejecting those superstitions which, to adore the Supreme Being, make martyrs of part of the human race. Thus you will see all the Americans, in whose minds the jealousy of the mother country had disseminated the most absurd prejudices against foreign nations, abjure those prejudices, reject every idea of war, and open the way to an universal confederation of the human race. You will see independent America contemplating no other limits but those of the universe, no other restraint but the laws made by her representatives. You will see them attempting all sorts of speculations; opening the fertile bosom of the soil, lately covered by forests; tracing unknown seas; establishing new communications, new markets; naturalizing, in their country, those precious manufactures which England had reserved to herself; and, by this accumulation of the means of industry, they change the balance that was formerly against America, and turn it to their advantage. You will see them faithful to their engagements, while their enemies are proclaiming their bankruptcy. You will see them invigorating their minds, and cultivating their virtues; reforming their government, employing only the language of reason to convince the refractory; multiplying every-where moral institutions and patriotic establishments; and, above all, never separating the idea of public from private virtues. Such is the consoling picture, which these Travels will offer to the friend of liberty.

The reverse is not self-consoling; if liberty is a sure guarantee of prosperity; if, in perfecting the talents of man, it gives him virtues, these virtues, in their turn, become the surest support of liberty. A people of universal good morals would have no need of government; the law would have no need of an executive power. This is the reason why liberty in America is safely carried to so high a degree that it borders on a state of nature, and why the government has so little force. This, by ignorant men, is called anarchy: enlightened men, who have examined the effects on the spot, discern in it the excellence of the government; because, notwithstanding its weakness, society is there in a flourishing state. The prosperity of a society is always in proportion to the extent of liberty; liberty is in the inverse proportion to the extent of the governing power: the latter cannot increase itself, but at the expense of the former. Can a people without government be happy? Yes; if you can suppose a whole people with good morals; and this is not a chimera. Will you see an example? observe the Quakers of America. Though numerous, though dispersed over the surface of Pennsylvania, they have passed more than a century, without municipal government, without police, without coercive measures, to administer to the State, or to govern the hospitals. And why? See the picture of their manners; you will there find the explanation of the phenomenon.

Coercive measures and liberty never go together: a free people hates the former; but if these measures are not employed, how will you execute the law? By the force of reason and good morals;-take away these, and you must borrow the arm of violence, or fall into anarchy. If, then, a people wishes to banish the dishonourable means of coercion, they must exercise their reason, which will shew them the necessity of a constant respect for the law.

The exercise of this faculty produces among the Americans, a great number of men designated by the name of principled men. This appellation indicates the character of a class of men so little known among us, that they have not acquired a name. There will be one formed, I have no doubt; but, in the meantime, I see none but vibrating, vacillating beings, who do good by enthusiasm, and never by reflection. There can be no durable revolution, but where reflection marks the operation, and matures the ideas. It is amongst those men of principle that you find the true heroes of humanity, the Howards, Fothergills, Penns, Franklins, Washingtons, Sidneys, and Ludlows.

Shew me a man of this kind, whose wants are circumscribed, who admits no luxury, who has no secret passion, no ambition, but that of serving his country-a man who, as Montaigne says, aie des opinions supercelestes, sans avoir des moeurs souterreines; -a man whom reflection guides in everything; this is the man of the people.

In a word, my countrymen, would you be always free, always independent in your elections, and in your opinions? Would you confine the executive power within narrow limits, and diminish the number of your laws? -have morals!- inpessima republica plurimæ leges. Morals supply perfectly, the necessity of laws; laws supply but imperfectly, and in a miserable manner, the place of morals. Would you augment your population, that chief wealth of nations? Would you augment the ease of individuals, industry, agriculture, and everything that contributes to general prosperity?- have morals!

Such is the double effect of morals in the United States, whose form of government still frightens pusillanimous and superstitious men. The portraits offered to view, in these Travels, will justify that republicanism which knaves calumniate with design, which ignorant men do not understand, but which they will learn to know and respect. How can we better judge of a government than by its effects? Reasoning[3] may deceive; experience is always right. If liberty produces good morals, and diffuses information, why do freemen continue to carp at that kind of government, which being founded on the greatest degree of liberty, secures the greatest degree of prosperity?

I thought it very useful and very necessary to prove these principles from great examples; and this is my reason for publishing these Travels. Examples are more powerful than precepts. Morality, put in action, carries something of the dramatic, and the French love the drama.

This, then, is my first object; it is national, it is universal: for, when it is demonstrated that liberty creates morals, and morals, in their turn, extend and maintain liberty, it is evident, that, to restrain the progress of liberty, is an execrable project; since it is to restrain the happiness, the prosperity, and the union of the human race.

A second object which guides me in this publication, is likewise national. I wished to describe to my countrymen a people with whom we ought, on every account, to connect ourselves in the most intimate manner. The moral relations which ought to connect the two nations, are unfolded in the two first volumes; the third comprises particularly the commercial connections. This third volume was published in 1787, by Mr. Clavière and me.

There is still wanting, to complete this work, a fourth volume, which ought to treat of the political connections, and of the present federal government of the United States. I have the materials, but I have not the time to reduce them to order. The comparative view of their constitution with ours, requires a critical and profound examination. Experience has already determined the qualities of one; the other is still in its infancy. Perhaps, indeed, it requires a time of more calmness, less ignorance and prejudice in the public mind, to judge wisely of the American constitution. We must prepare the way for this maturity of judgment; and these Travels will accelerate it, in setting forth with truth the advantages of the only government which merits any confidence.

If I had consulted what is called the Love of Glory, and the Spirit of Ancient Literature, I could have spent several years in polishing this Work; but I believed, that though necessary at present, it might be too late, and, perhaps, useless, in a few years. We have arrived at the time when men of letters ought to study, above all things, to be useful; when they ought, for fear of losing time, to precipitate the propagation of truths, which the people ought to know; when, of consequence, we ought to occupy ourselves more in things than in words; when the care of style, and the perfection of taste, are but signs of a trifling vanity, and a literary aristocracy. Were Montesquieu to rise from the dead, he would surely blush at having laboured twenty years in making epigrams on laws: he would write for the people; for the revolution cannot be maintained but by the people, and by the people instructed: he would write, then, directly and simply from his own soul, and not torment his ideas to render them brilliant.

When a man would travel usefully, he should study, first, men; secondly, books; and thirdly, places. To study men he should see them of all classes, of all parties, of all ages, and in all situations.

I read in the Gazettes, that the ambassadors of Tippo Sultan were feasted by everybody; they were carried to the balls, to the spectacles, to the manufactures, to the arsenals, to the palaces, to the camps. After being thus feasted for six months, I wonder if, on returning home, they conceived that they knew France. If such was their opinion, they were in an error; for they saw only the brilliant part, the surface; and it is not by the surface that one can judge of the force of a nation. The ambassador should descend from his dignity, travel in a common carriage without his attendants, go into the stables to see the horses, into the barns to see the grain and other productions of the country. It is thus that Mr. Jefferson travelled in France and Italy; he had but one servant with him; he saw everything with his own eyes. I believe that few voyages have been made with so much judgment and utility, as those of that philosopher. But his modestly conceals his observations from the public eye.

People disguise everything, to deceive men in place. A prince goes to a hospital; he tastes the soup and the meat. Does anyone suppose that the superintendant was fool enough not to have given orders to the cook that day?

True observation is that of every day. A traveller, before setting out, ought to know from books and men the country he goes to visit.

He will have some data; he will confront what he sees, with what he has heard.

He ought to have a plan of observation; if he wishes that nothing should escape him, he should accustom himself to seize objects rapidly, and to write, every night, what he has seen in the day.

The choice of persons to consult, and to rely upon, is difficult.

The inhabitants of a country have generally a predilection in favour of it, and strangers have prejudices against it. In America I found this prejudice in almost every stranger. The American revolution confounds them. They cannot familiarize the idea of a king-people and an elective chief, who shakes hands with a labourer, who has no guards at his gate, who walks on foot, &c. The foreign consuls are those who decry, with the most virulence, the American constitution; and, I say it with grief, I saw much of this virulence among some of ours. According to them, the United States, when I landed in America, were just falling to ruin. They had no government left, the constitution was detestable; there was no confidence to be placed in the Americans, the public debt would never be paid; and there was no faith, no justice among them.

Being a friend of liberty, these calamities against the American government were revolting to me: I combated them with reasoning. My adversaries, who objected to me then their long abode there, and the shortness of mine, ought to be convinced by this time that the telescope of reason is rather better than the microscope of office. They have, in general, some abilities and some information; but they have generally been educated in the inferior places in the French administration, and they have well imbibed its prejudices. A republic is a monstrous thing in their sight; a minister is an idol that they adore; the people, in their view, is a herd that must be governed with rigour. A man who lives upon the rapines of despotism, is always a bad judge of a free country; and feel that they should be nothing in such a state; and a man does not like to fall into nothing[4].

I met in our French travellers, the same prejudices as in the consuls. The greater part of Frenchmen who travel or emigrate, have little information, and are not prepared to the art of observation. Presumptuous to excess, and admirers of their own customs and manners, they ridicule those of other nations. Ridicule gives them a double pleasure; it feeds their own pride and humbles others. At Philadelphia, for instance, the men are grave, the women serious, no sinical airs, no libertine wives, no coffee-houses, no agreeable walks. My Frenchman finds everything detestable at Philadelphia; because he could not strut upon a boulevard, babble in a coffee-house, nor seduce a pretty woman by his important airs and fine curls. He was almost offended that they did not admire them; that they did not speak French.

He was greatly troubled that he could speak American with the same facility; he lost so much in not being able to show his wit.

If, then, a person of this cast attempts to describe the Americans, he shows his own character, but not theirs. A people grave, serious, and reflecting, cannot be judged of and appreciated, but by a person of a like character.

It is to be hoped that the revolution will change the character of the French. If they ameliorate their morals, and augment their information, they will go far; for it is the property of reason and enlightened liberty to perfect themselves without ceasing, to substitute truth to error, and principle to prejudice. They will then insensibly lay aside their political prejudices, which tarnish still the glorious constitution which they have founded. They will imitate the Americans as far as local and physical circumstances will permit;-they will imitate them, and they will be the happier for it; for general happiness does not conflict with absurdities and contradictions; it cannot arise from the complication, nor from the shock of powers. There is but one real power in government, and it is in referring it back to its source as often as possible, that it is to be rendered beneficent; it becomes dangerous in proportion as it is distant from its source: in one word, the less active and powerful the government, the more active, powerful, and happy is the society. This is the phenomenon demonstrated in the present History of the United States.

These Travels give the proof of the second part of this political axiom; they prove the activity, the power, the happiness of the Americans; that they are destined to be the first people on earth, without being the terror of others.

To what great chain are attached these glorious destinies? To three principles: 1. All power is elective in America. 2. The legislative is frequently changed. 3. The executive has, moreover, but little force.[5] It will be easy for me one day to deduce from these three principles, all the happy effects which I have observed in America. At present I content myself with describing their effects, because I wish to leave to my Readers the pleasure of recurring to the causes, and then of descending from those causes, and making the application to France. I have not even told all the facts; I had so little time both to detail the facts and draw the consequences. I am astonished to have been able to finish a work so voluminous, in the midst of so many various occupations which continually surround me; charged alone with compiling and publishing a daily paper, undertaken with the sole desire of establishing, in the public opinion, this powerful instrument of revolutions; a paper in which the defence of good principles, the watching over a thousand enemies, and repulsing perpetual attacks, occupy my attention without ceasing. Much of my time is likewise taken up by my political and civil functions; by many particular pamphlets; by the necessity of assisting at clubs, where truths are prepared for the public eye; by the duty which I have prescribed to myself, to defend the men of colour and the blacks.

I mention these facts to my Readers, to prove to them that I have still some right to their indulgence. I merit it, likewise, for the motive which directs me. Confilium futuri ex praeterito venit: Great prospects are opening before us. Let us hasten, then, to make known, that people whose happy experience ought to be our guide.

Paris, April 21, 1791.

LETTER I.

From M Claviere to M. Brissot de Warville

PLAN OF OBSERVATIONS

On the Political, Civil, and Military State of the Free Americans; their Legislation, &c.

May 18, 1788.

THE voyage that you are going to undertake, my dear friend, will doubtless form the most interesting period of your contemplative life. You are going to transport yourself into a part of the globe, where a person may, with the least obstruction, bring into view the most striking and interesting scenes that belong to humanity. It is with a little courage, much patience, a continual dissidence of his own habits of mind and manners, a total oblivion of his most cherished opinions, and of himself, and with a determination to be cautious and slow in judging that he may conclude, what is the situation where man, child of the earth, may assemble the greatest sum, and the longest duration of public and private happiness.

In a few years, and without great dangers, you may contemplate the most varied scenes; you may pass in America, from a soil the best cultivated, and grown old with an active population, into the deserts, where the hand of man has modified nothing, where time, vegetation, and the dead mass of matter, seem to have furnished the expense of the theatre.

Between these extremes, you will find intermediate stages of improvement; and it is doubtless, in contemplating these, that reason and sensibility will find the happiest situation in life.

The present state of independent America, will, perhaps, give us a glance at the highest perfection of human life that we are permitted to hope for; but who, in judging of it, can separate himself from his age, from his temperament, from his education, from the impression of certain circumstances? Who can silence his imagination, and govern the sensations which excite it? I hope, my friend, that you may have this power; and you ought to neglect nothing to acquire it, if you wish to answer the end of your Travels. You wish to enlighten mankind, to smooth the way to their happiness; for this reason, you ought to be more on your guard than anyone, not to deceive yourself by appearances.

When, therefore, you shall form your opinion on the spot, of those celebrated American constitutions, do not exaggerate too much either the vices of Europe, to which you compare them, or the virtues of America, which you bring into the contrast. Make it a principle to determine whether it may not be said, in reality things are here as they are with us; the difference is so small, that it is not worth the change. This is a proper method to guard against error. It is well, at the same time, to form a just idea of the difficulty of change; this should be always present to the mind. Voltaire says,

La patrie est aux liex òu l'ame est enchainée.

You wish to contemplate the effects of liberty on the progress of men, of society, and of government. May you, in this examination, never lose sight of impartiality and cool circumspection, that your friends not be exposed either to incredulity, or to deception.

I do not imagine that you can find in America, new motives to engage every reasonable European to the love of liberty. What they will most thank you for is, to describe to us what America in fact is, and what, in opinion, she may be, in a given time, making a reasonable allowance for those accidents which trouble the repose of life.

Men always dispute; they are every where formed of the same materials, and subject to the same passions: but the matters on which they dispute, are, given country, more or less fitted to disturb the general harmony and individual happiness. Thus a state of universal toleration renders harmless the diversity opinion in religious matters.

In proportion as political institutions submit the ruling power to well-defined forms, at the same time that they have the public opinion in their favour, political distentions are less dangerous. This, my friend, is the point of view under which the political state of America ought to be known to us. Let us know, above all, what we have to expect, for the present and future, from that variety which distinguishes so considerably some states from others, and whether some great inconvenience will not result from it; whether the federal tranquility will ever be shaken by it; whether this variety will corrupt the justice of some states towards others in their ordinary commerce, and in those cases where the confederation is the judge; whether some states will not give themselves commotions and agitations, for the sake of forming their governments, similar, or dissimilar, to that of some others; whether state jealousies do not already exist, occasioned by these varieties. Such jealousies greatly injure the Swiss cantons; they have ruined Holland and will prevent its restoration. If these jealousies are unknown to the Americans, and will never arise there, explain to us this phenomenon, why it exists, and why it will continue; for you know, that from what you may observe to us on this single point, your friends may be induced either to stay where they are, or to give the preference to one state in the union over another.

There is one advantage in America which Europe does offer; a man may settle himself in the desert and be safe from political commotions. But is there no danger in this? Endeavour to explain to us the state of the savages on that great continent, the most certain account of their numbers, their manners the causes, more or less, inevitable, of wars with them. This part of your accounts will not be the least interesting. Forget not to give us, as far as you have opportunity, all that can be known relative to the ancient state of America.

Observe what are the remains of the military spirit among the Americans; what are their prejudices in this respect; are there men among them who with to see themselves at the head of armies? Do they enlist any soldiers? Can you perceive any germ, which, united to the spirit of idleness, would make the profession of a soldier preferable to that of a cultivator, or an artizan? for it is this wretched situation of things in other countries, which furnishes the means of great armies. Inform us about those cincinnati, a body truly distressing to the political philosopher.

Solomon says, there is nothing new under the sun. This may be true; but are we yet acquainted with ail political revolutions, in order to make the circle complete? History furnishes the picture of no revolution like that of the United States, nor any arrangements similar to theirs. Thus you may look into futurity, and see what perseverances or changes may contradict the philosophy of history.