Gouverneur Morris Part 8

As soon as he was appointed he went to see the French minister of foreign affairs; and in answer to an observation of the latter stated with his customary straightforwardness that it was true that, while a mere private individual, sincerely friendly to France, and desirous of helping her, and whose own nation could not be compromised by his acts, he had freely taken part in pa.s.sing events, had criticised the const.i.tution, and advised the king and his ministers; but he added that, now that he was a public man, he would no longer meddle with their affairs. To this resolution he kept, save that, as already described, sheer humanity induced him to make an effort to save the king's life. He had predicted what would ensue as the result of the exaggerated decentralization into which the opponents of absolutism had rushed; when they had split the state up into more than forty thousand sovereignties, each district the sole executor of the law, and the only judge of its propriety, and therefore obedient to it only so long as it listed, and until rendered hostile by the ignorant whim or ferocious impulse of the moment; and now he was to see his predictions come true.

In that brilliant and able state paper, the address he had drawn up for Louis to deliver when, in 1791, the latter accepted the const.i.tution, the key-note of the situation was struck in the opening words: "It is no longer a king who addresses you, Louis XVI. is a private individual"; and he had then scored off, point by point, the faults in a doc.u.ment that created an unwieldy a.s.sembly of men unaccustomed to govern, that destroyed the principle of authority, though no other could appeal to a people helpless in their new-born liberty, and that created out of one whole a jarring mult.i.tude of fractional sovereignties. Now he was to see one of these same sovereignties rise up in successful rebellion against the government that represented the whole, destroy it and usurp its power, and establish over all France the rule of an anarchic despotism which, by what seems to a free American a gross misnomer, they called a democracy.

All through June, at the beginning of which month Morris had been formally presented at court, the excitement and tumult kept increasing.

When, on the 20th, the mob forced the gates of the chateau, and made the king put on the red cap, Morris wrote in his Diary that the const.i.tution had given its last groan. A few days afterwards he told Lafayette that in six weeks everything would be over, and tried to persuade him that his only chance was to make up his mind instantly to fight either for a good const.i.tution or for the wretched piece of paper which bore the name. Just six weeks to a day from the date of this prediction came the 10th of August to verify it.

Throughout July the fevered pulses of the people beat with always greater heat. Looking at the maddened mob the American minister thanked G.o.d from his heart that in his own country there was no such populace, and prayed with unwonted earnestness that our education and morality should forever stave off such an evil. At court even the most purblind dimly saw their doom. Calling there one morning he chronicles with a matter of fact brevity, impressive from its very baldness, that nothing of note had occurred except that they had stayed up all night expecting to be murdered. He wrote home that he could not tell "whether the king would live through the storm; for it blew hard."

His horror of the base mob, composed of people whose kind was absolutely unknown in America, increased continually, as he saw them going on from crimes that were great to crimes that were greater, incited by the demagogues who flattered them and roused their pa.s.sions and appet.i.tes; and blindly raging because they were of necessity disappointed in the golden prospects held out to them. He scorned the folly of the enthusiasts and doctrinaires who had made a const.i.tution all sail and no ballast, that overset at the first gust; who had freed from all restraint a ma.s.s of men as savage and licentious as they were wayward; who had put the executive in the power of the legislature, and this latter at the mercy of the leaders who could most strongly influence and inflame the mob. But his contempt for the victims almost exceeded his anger at their a.s.sailants. The king, who could suffer with firmness, and who could act either not at all, or else with the worst possible effect, had the head and heart that might have suited the monkish idea of a female saint, but which were hopelessly out of place in any rational being supposed to be fitted for doing good in the world. Morris wrote home that he knew his friend Hamilton had no particular aversion to kings, and would not believe them to be tigers; but that if Hamilton came to Europe to see for himself, he would surely believe them to be monkeys; the Empress of Russia was the only reigning sovereign whose talents were not "considerably below par." At the moment of the final shock the court was involved in a set of paltry intrigues "unworthy of anything above the rank of a footman or a chambermaid. Every one had his or her little project, and every little project had some abettors.

Strong, manly counsels frightened the weak, alarmed the envious, and wounded the enervated minds of the lazy and luxurious." The few such counsels that appeared were always approved, rarely adopted, and never followed out.

Then in the sweltering heat of August, the end came. A raving, furious horde stormed the chateau, and murdered, one by one, the brave mountaineers who gave their lives for a sovereign too weak to be worthy of such gallant bloodshed. King and queen fled to the National a.s.sembly, and the monarchy was over. Immediately after the awful catastrophe Morris wrote to a friend: "The voracity of the court, the haughtiness of the n.o.bles, the sensuality of the church, have met their punishment in the road of their transgressions. The oppressor has been squeezed by the hands of the oppressed; but there remains yet to be acted an awful scene in this great tragedy, played on the theatre of the universe for the instruction of mankind."

Not the less did he dare everything, and jeopardize his own life in trying to save some at least among the innocent who had been overthrown in the crash of the common ruin. When on the 10th of August the whole city lay abject at the mercy of the mob, hunted men and women, bereft of all they had, and fleeing from a terrible death, with no hiding-place, no friend who could shield them, turned in their terror-struck despair to the one man in whose fearlessness and generous gallantry they could trust. The shelter of Morris's house and flag was sought from early morning till past midnight by people who had nowhere else to go and who felt that within his walls they were sure of at least a brief safety from the maddened savages in the streets. As far as possible they were sent off to places of greater security; but some had to stay with him till the storm lulled for a moment. An American gentleman who was in Paris on that memorable day, after viewing the sack of the Tuileries, thought it right to go to the house of the American minister. He found him surrounded by a score of people, of both s.e.xes, among them the old Count d'Estaing, and other men of note, who had fought side by side with us in our war for independence, and whom now our flag protected in their hour of direst need. Silence reigned, only broken occasionally by the weeping of the women and children. As his visitor was leaving, Morris took him to one side, and told him that he had no doubt there were persons on the watch who would find fault with his conduct as a minister in receiving and protecting these people; that they had come of their own accord, uninvited. "Whether my house will be a protection to them or to me, G.o.d only knows; but I will not turn them out of it, let what will happen to me; you see, sir, they are all persons to whom our country is more or less indebted, and had they no such claim upon me, it would be inhuman to force them into the hands of the a.s.sa.s.sins." No one of Morris's countrymen can read his words even now without feeling a throb of pride in the dead statesman, who, a century ago, held up so high the honor of his nation's name in the times when the souls of all but the very bravest were tried and found wanting.

Soon after this he ceased writing in his Diary, for fear it might fall into the hands of men who would use it to incriminate his friends; and for the same reason he had also to be rather wary in what he wrote home, as his letters frequently bore marks of being opened, thanks to what he laughingly called "patriotic curiosity." He was, however, perfectly fearless as regards any ill that might befall himself; his circ.u.mspection was only exercised on behalf of others, and his own opinions were given as frankly as ever.

He pictured the French as huddled together, in an unreasoning panic, like cattle before a thunderstorm. Their every act increased his distrust of their capacity for self-government. They were for the time agog with their republic, and ready to adopt any form of government with a huzza; but that they would adopt a good form, or, having adopted it, keep it, he did not believe; and he saw that the great ma.s.s of the population were already veering round, under the pressure of acc.u.mulating horrors, until they would soon be ready to welcome as a blessing even a despotism, if so they could gain security to life and property. They had made the common mistake of believing that to enjoy liberty they had only to abolish authority; and the equally common consequence was, that they were now, through anarchy, on the high road to absolutism. Said Morris: "Since I have been in this country I have seen the worship of many idols, and but little of the true G.o.d. I have seen many of these idols broken, and some of them beaten to the dust. I have seen the late const.i.tution in one short year admired as a stupendous monument of human wisdom, and ridiculed as an egregious production of folly and vice. I wish much, very much, the happiness of this inconstant people. I love them, I feel grateful for their efforts in our cause, and I consider the establishment of a good const.i.tution here as the princ.i.p.al means, under Divine Providence, of extending the blessings of freedom to the many millions of my fellow-men who groan in bondage on the continent of Europe. But I do not greatly indulge the flattering illusions of hope, because I do not yet perceive that reformation of morals without which liberty is but an empty sound."

These words are such as could only come from a genuine friend of France, and champion of freedom; from a strong, earnest man, saddened by the follies of dreamers, and roused to stern anger by the licentious wickedness of scoundrels who used the name of liberty to cloak the worst abuses of its substance.

His stay in Paris was now melancholy indeed. The city was shrouded in a gloom only relieved by the frenzied tumults that grew steadily more numerous. The ferocious craving once roused could not be sated; the thirst grew ever stronger as the draughts were deeper. The danger to Morris's own person merely quickened his pulses, and roused his strong, brave nature; he liked excitement, and the strain that would have been too tense for weaker nerves keyed his own up to a fierce, half-exultant thrilling. But the woes that befell those who had befriended him caused him the keenest grief. It was almost unbearable to be seated quietly at dinner, and hear by accident "that a friend was on his way to the place of execution," and to have to sit still and wonder which of the guests dining with him would be the next to go to the scaffold. The vilest criminals swarmed in the streets, and amused themselves by tearing the earrings from women's ears, and s.n.a.t.c.hing away their watches. When the priests shut up in the _carnes_, and the prisoners in the _abbaie_ were murdered, the slaughter went on all day, and eight hundred men were engaged in it.

He wrote home that, to give a true picture of France, he would have to paint it like an Indian warrior, black and red. The scenes that pa.s.sed were literally beyond the imagination of the American mind. The most hideous and nameless atrocities were so common as to be only alluded to incidentally, and to be recited in the most matter-of-fact way in connection with other events. For instance, a man applied to the Convention for a recompense for damage done to his quarry, a pit dug deep through the surface of the earth into the stone bed beneath: the damage consisted in such a number of dead bodies having been thrown into the pit as to choke it up so that he could no longer get men to work it.

Hundreds, who had been the first in the land, were thus destroyed without form or trial, and their bodies thrown like dead dogs into the first hole that offered. Two hundred priests were killed for no other crime than having been conscientiously scrupulous about taking the prescribed oath. The guillotine went smartly on, watched with a devilish merriment by the fiends who were themselves to perish by the instrument their own hands had wrought. "Heaven only knew who was next to drink of the dreadful cup; as far as man could tell, there was to be no lack of liquor for some time to come."

Among the new men who, one after another, sprang into the light, to maintain their unsteady footing as leaders for but a brief time before toppling into the dark abyss of death or oblivion that waited for each and all, Dumouriez was for the moment the most prominent. He stood towards the Gironde much as Lafayette had stood towards the Const.i.tutionalists of 1789: he led the army, as Lafayette once had led it; and as the const.i.tutional monarchists had fallen before his fellow-republicans, so both he and they were to go down before the even wilder extremists of the "Mountain." For the factions in Paris, face to face with the banded might of the European monarchies, and grappling in a grim death-struggle with the counter-revolutionists of the provinces, yet fought one another with the same ferocity they showed towards the common foe. Nevertheless, success was theirs; for against opponents only less wicked than themselves they moved with an infinitely superior fire and enthusiasm. Reeking with the blood of the guiltless, steeped in it to the lips, branded with fresh memories of crimes and infamies without number, and yet feeling in their very marrow that they were avenging centuries of grinding and intolerable thralldom, and that the cause for which they fought was just and righteous; with shameless cruelty and corruption eating into their hearts' core, yet with their foreheads kindled by the light of a glorious morning,--they moved with a ruthless energy that paralyzed their opponents, the worn-out, tottering, crazy despotisms, rotten with vice, despicable in their ludicrous pride of caste, moribund in their military pedantry, and fore-doomed to perish in the conflict they had courted. The days of Danton and Robespierre are not days to which a French patriot cares to look back; but at any rate he can regard them without the shame he must feel when he thinks of the times of Louis Quinze. Danton and his like, at least, were men, and stood far, far above the palsied coward--a eunuch in his lack of all virile virtues--who misruled France for half a century; who, with his followers, indulged in every crime and selfish vice known, save only such as needed a particle of strength, or the least courage, in the committing.

Morris first met Dumouriez when the latter was minister of foreign affairs, shortly before the poor king was driven from the Tuileries. He dined with him, and afterwards noted down that the society was noisy and in bad style; for the grace and charm of French social life were gone, and the raw republicans were ill at ease in the drawing-room. At this time Morris commented often on the change in the look of Paris: all his gay friends gone; the city sombre and uneasy. When he walked through the streets, in the stifling air of a summer hot beyond precedent, as if the elements sympathized with the pa.s.sions of men, he met, instead of the brilliant company of former days, only the few peaceable citizens left, hurrying on their ways with frightened watchfulness; or else groups of lolling ruffians, with sinister eyes and brutalized faces; or he saw in the Champs de Mars squalid ragam.u.f.fins signing the pet.i.tion for the _decheance_.

Morris wrote Washington that Dumouriez was a bold, determined man, bitterly hostile to the Jacobins and all the extreme revolutionary clubs, and, once he was in power, willing to risk his own life in the effort to put them down. However, the hour of the Jacobins had not yet struck, and the Revolution had now been permitted to gather such headway that it could be stopped only by a master genius; and Dumouriez was none such.

Still he was an able man, and, as Morris wrote home, in his military operations he combined the bravery of a skilled soldier and the arts of an astute politician. To be sure, his victories were not in themselves very noteworthy; the artillery skirmish at Valmy was decided by the reluctance of the Germans to come on, not by the ability of the French to withstand them; and at Jemappes the imperialists were hopelessly outnumbered. Still the results were most important, and Dumouriez overran Flanders in the face of hostile Europe. He at once proceeded to revolutionize the government of his conquest in the most approved French fashion, which was that all the neighbors of France should receive liberty whether or no, and should moreover pay the expense of having it thrust upon them: accordingly he issued a proclamation to his new fellow-citizens, "which might be summed up in a few words as being an order to them to be free forthwith, according to his ideas of freedom, on pain of military execution."

He had things all his own way for the moment, but after a while he was defeated by the Germans; then while the Gironde tottered to its fall, he fled to the very foes he had been fighting, as the only way of escaping death from the men whose favorite he had been. Morris laughed bitterly at the fickle people. One anecdote he gives is worth preserving: "It is a year ago that a person who mixed in tumults to see what was doing, told me of a _sans culottes_ who, bellowing against poor Lafayette, when Petion appeared, changed at once his note to '_Vive Petion!_' and then, turning round to one of his companions, 'Vois tu! C'est notre ami, n'est ce pas? Eh bien, il pa.s.sera comme les autres.' And, lo! the prophecy is fulfilled; and I this instant learn that Petion, confined to his room as a traitor or conspirator, has fled, on the 24th of June, 1793, from those whom he sent, on the 20th of June, 1792, to a.s.sault the king in the Tuileries. In short you will find, in the list of those who were ordered by their brethren to be arrested, the names of those who have proclaimed themselves to be the prime movers of the revolution of the 10th of August, and the fathers of the republic."

About the time the _sans culottes_ had thus bellowed against Lafayette, the latter met Morris, for the first time since he was presented at court as minister, and at once spoke to him in his tone of ancient familiarity. The Frenchman had been brought at last to realize the truth of his American friend's theories and predictions. It was much too late to save himself, however. After the 10th of August he was proclaimed by the a.s.sembly, found his troops falling away from him, and fled over the frontier; only to be thrown into prison by the allied monarchs, who acted with their usual folly and baseness. Morris, contemptuously impatient of the part he had played, wrote of him: "Thus his circle is completed. He has spent his fortune on a revolution, and is now crushed by the wheel which he put in motion. He lasted longer than I expected."

But this momentary indignation soon gave way to a generous sympathy for the man who had served America so well, and who, if without the great abilities necessary to grapple with the tumult of French affairs, had yet always acted with such unselfish purity of motive. Lafayette, as soon as he was imprisoned, wrote to the American minister in Holland, alleging that he had surrendered his position as a French subject, and was now an American citizen, and requesting the American representatives in Europe to procure his release. His claim was of course untenable; and, though the American government did all it could on his behalf through its foreign ministers, and though Washington himself wrote a strong letter of appeal to the Austrian emperor, he remained in prison until the peace, several years later.

All Lafayette's fortune was gone, and while in prison he was reduced to want. As soon as Morris heard this, he had the sum of ten thousand florins forwarded to the prisoner by the United States bankers at Amsterdam; pledging his own security for the amount, which was, however, finally allowed by the government under the name of compensation for Lafayette's military services in America. Morris was even more active in befriending Madame de Lafayette and her children. To the former he lent from his own private funds a hundred thousand livres, enabling her to pay her debts to the many poor people who had rendered services to her family. To the proud, sensitive lady the relief was great, much though it hurt her to be under any obligation: she wrote to her friend that he had broken the chains that loaded her down, and had done it in a way that made her feel the consolation, rather than the weight, of the obligation. But he was to do still more for her; for, when she was cast into prison by the savage Parisian mob, his active influence on her behalf saved her from death. In a letter to him, written some time later, she says, after speaking of the money she had borrowed: "This is a slight obligation, it is true, compared with that of my life, but allow me to remember both while life lasts, with a sentiment of grat.i.tude which it is precious to feel."

There were others whose fortunes turned with the wheel of fate, for whom Morris felt no such sympathy as for the Lafayettes. Among the number was the Duke of Orleans, now transformed into _citoyen Egalite_. Morris credited this graceless debauchee with criminal ambitions which he probably did not possess, saying that he doubted the public virtue of a profligate, and could not help distrusting such a man's pretensions; nor is it likely that he regretted much the fate of the man who died under the same guillotine which, with his a.s.sent, had fallen on the neck of the king, his cousin.

It needed no small amount of hardihood for a man of Morris's prominence and avowed sentiments to stay in Paris when Death was mowing round him with a swath at once so broad and so irregular. The power was pa.s.sing rapidly from hand to hand, through a succession of men fairly crazy in their indifference to bloodshed. Not a single other minister of a neutral nation dared stay. In fact, the foreign representatives were preparing to go away even before the final stroke was given to the monarchy, and soon after the 10th of August the entire _corps diplomatique_ left Paris as rapidly as the various members could get their pa.s.sports. These the new republican government was at first very reluctant to grant; indeed, when the Venetian amba.s.sador started off he was very ignominiously treated and brought back. Morris went to the British amba.s.sador's to take leave, having received much kindness from him, and having been very intimate in his house. He found Lord Gower in a tearing pa.s.sion because he could not get pa.s.sports; he had burned his papers, and strongly advised his guest to do likewise. On this advice the latter refused to act, nor would he take the broad hints given him to the effect that honor required him to quit the country. Morris could not help showing his amus.e.m.e.nt at the fear and anger exhibited at the amba.s.sador's, "which exhibition of spirits his lordship could hardly bear." Talleyrand, who was getting his own pa.s.sport, also did all in his power to persuade the American minister to leave, but without avail.

Morris was not a man to be easily shaken in any determination he had taken after careful thought. He wrote back to Jefferson that his opinion was directly opposed to the views of such people as had tried to persuade him that his own honor, and that of America, required him to leave France; and that he was inclined to attribute such counsel mainly to fear. It was true that the position was not without danger; but he presumed that, when the president named him to the emba.s.sy, it was not for his own personal pleasure or safety, but for the interests of the country; and these he could certainly serve best by staying.

He was able to hold his own only by a mixture of tact and firmness. Any signs of flinching would have ruined him outright. He would submit to no insolence. The minister of foreign affairs was, with his colleagues, engaged in certain schemes in reference to the American debt, which were designed to further their own private interests; he tried to bully Morris into acquiescence, and, on the latter's point-blank refusal, sent him a most insulting letter. Morris promptly retorted by demanding his pa.s.sports. France, however, was very desirous not to break with the United States, the only friend she had left in the world; and the offending minister sent a sullen letter of apology, asking him to reconsider his intention to leave, and offering entire satisfaction for every point of which he complained. Accordingly Morris stayed.

He was, however, continually exposed to insults and worries, which were always apologized for by the government for the time being, on the ground, no doubt true, that in such a period of convulsions it was impossible to control their subordinate agents. Indeed, the changes from one form of anarchy to another went on so rapidly that the laws of nations had small chance of observance.

One evening a number of people, headed by a commissary of the section, entered his house, and demanded to search it for arms said to be hidden therein. Morris took a high tone, and was very peremptory with them; told them that they should not examine his house, that it held no arms, and moreover that, if he had possessed any, they should not touch one of them; he also demanded the name of "the blockhead or rascal" who had informed against him, announcing his intention to bring him to punishment. Finally he got them out of the house, and the next morning the commissary called with many apologies, which were accepted.

Another time he was arrested in the street for not having a _carte de citoyen_, but he was released as soon as it was found out who he was.

Again he was arrested while traveling in the country, on the pretence that his pa.s.sport was out of date; an insult for which the government at once made what amends they could. His house was also visited another time by armed men, whom, as before, he persuaded to go away. Once or twice, in the popular tumults, even his life was in danger; on one occasion it is said that it was only saved by the fact of his having a wooden leg, which made him known to the mob as "a cripple of the American war for freedom." Rumors even got abroad in England and America that he had been a.s.sa.s.sinated.

Morris's duties were manifold, and as hara.s.sing to himself as they were beneficial to his country. Sometimes he would interfere on behalf of America as a whole, and endeavor to get obnoxious decrees of the a.s.sembly repealed; and again he would try to save some private citizen of the United States who had got himself into difficulties. Reports of the French minister of foreign affairs, as well as reports of the _comite de salut public_, alike bear testimony to the success of his endeavors, whenever success was possible, and unconsciously show the value of the services he rendered to his country. Of course it was often impossible to obtain complete redress, because, as Morris wrote home, the government, while all-powerful in certain cases, was in others not merely feeble, but enslaved, and was often obliged to commit acts the consequences of which the nominal leaders both saw and lamented. Morris also, while doing all he could for his fellow-citizens, was often obliged to choose between their interests and those of the nation at large; and he of course decided in favor of the latter, though well aware of the clamor that was certain to be raised against him in consequence by those who, as he caustically remarked, found it the easiest thing in the world to get anything they wanted from the French government _until they had tried_.

One of his most important transactions was in reference to paying off the debt due by America for amounts loaned her during the war for independence. The interest and a part of the princ.i.p.al had already been paid. At the time when Morris was made minister, the United States had a large sum of money, destined for the payment of the public debt, lying idle in the hands of the bankers at Amsterdam; and this sum both Morris and the American minister to Holland, Mr. Short, thought could be well applied to the payment of part of our remaining obligation to France.

The French government was consulted, and agreed to receive the sum; but hardly was the agreement entered into before the monarchy was overturned. The question at once arose as to whether the money could be rightfully paid over to the men who had put themselves at the head of affairs, and who, a month hence, might themselves be ousted by others who would not acknowledge the validity of a payment made to them. Short thought the payment should be stopped, and, as it afterwards turned out, the home authorities agreed with him. But Morris thought otherwise, and paid over the amount. Events fully justified his course, for France never made any difficulty in the matter, and even had she done so, as Morris remarked, America had the staff in her own hands, and could walk which way she pleased, for she owed more money, and in the final adjustment could insist on the amount paid being allowed on account of the debt.

The French executive council owed Morris grat.i.tude for his course in this matter; but they became intensely irritated with him shortly afterwards because he refused to fall in with certain proposals they made to him as to the manner of applying part of the debt to the purchase of provisions and munitions for San Domingo. Morris had good reason to believe that there was a private speculation at the bottom of this proposal, and declined to accede to it. The urgency with which it was made, and the wrath which his course excited, confirmed his suspicions, and he persisted in his refusal although it almost brought about a break with the men then carrying on the government. Afterwards, when these men fell with the Gironde, he wrote home: "I mentioned to you the plan of a speculation on drafts to have been made on the United States, could my concurrence have been procured. Events have shown that this speculation would have been a good one to the parties, who would have gained (and the French nation of course have lost) about fifty thousand pounds sterling in eighty thousand. I was informed at that time that the disappointed parties would attempt to have me recalled, and some more tractable character sent, who would have the good sense to look after his own interest. Well, sir, nine months have elapsed, and now, if I were capable of such things, I think it would be no difficult matter to have some of them hanged; indeed it is highly probable that they will experience a fate of that sort."

Much of his time was also taken up in remonstrating against the attacks of French privateers on American shipping. These, however, went steadily on until, half a dozen years afterwards, we took the matter into our own hands, and in the West Indies inflicted a smart drubbing, not only on the privateers of France, but on her regular men-of-war as well. He also did what he could for the French officers who had served in America during the War of Independence, most of whom were forced to flee from France after the outbreak of the Revolution.

His letters home, even after his regular duties had begun to be engrossing, contained a running commentary on the events that were pa.s.sing around him. His forecasts of events within France were remarkably shrewd, and he displayed a wonderful insight into the motives and characters of the various leaders; but at first he was all at sea in his estimate of the military situation, being much more at home among statesmen than soldiers. He had expected the allied sovereigns to make short work of the raw republican armies, and was amazed at the success of the latter. But he very soon realized how the situation stood; that whereas the Austrian and Prussian troops simply came on in well-drilled, reluctant obedience to their commanding officers, the soldiers of France, on the contrary, were actuated by a fiery spirit the like of which had hardly been seen since the crusades. The bitterness of the contest was appalling, and so was the way in which the ranks of the contestants were thinned out. The extreme republicans believed in their creed with a furious faith; and they were joined by their fellow-citizens with an almost equal zeal, when once it had become evident that the invaders were hostile not only to the Republic but to France itself, and very possibly meditated its dismemberment.

When the royal and imperial forces invaded France in 1792, they threatened such ferocious vengeance as to excite the most desperate resistance, and yet they backed up their high sounding words by deeds so faulty, weak, and slow as to make themselves objects of contempt rather than dread. The Duke of Brunswick in particular, as a prelude to some very harmless military manoeuvres, issued a singularly lurid and foolish manifesto, announcing that he would deliver up Paris to utter destruction and would give over all the soldiers he captured to military execution. Morris said that his address was in substance, "Be all against me, for I am opposed to you all, and make a good resistance, for there is no longer any hope;" and added that it would have been wiser to have begun with some great success and then to have carried the danger near those whom it was desired to intimidate. As it was, the Duke's campaign failed ignominiously, and all the invaders were driven back, for France rose as one man, her warriors overflowed on every side, and bore down all her foes by sheer weight of numbers and impetuous enthusiasm. Her government was a despotism as well as an anarchy; it was as totally free from the drawbacks as from the advantages of the democratic system that it professed to embody. Nothing could exceed the merciless energy of the measures adopted. Half-way wickedness might have failed; but a wholesale murder of the disaffected, together with a confiscation of all the goods of the rich, and a vigorous conscription of the poor for soldiers, secured success, at least for the time being.

The French made it a war of men; so that the price of labor rose enormously at once, and the condition of the working cla.s.ses forthwith changed greatly for the better--one good result of the Revolution, at any rate.

Morris wrote home very soon after the 10th of August that the then triumphant revolutionists, the Girondists or party of Brissot, who had supplanted the moderate party of Lafayette exactly as the latter had succeeded the aristocracy, would soon in their turn be overthrown by men even more extreme and even more bloodthirsty; and that thus it would go on, wave after wave, until at last the wizard arose who could still them. By the end of the year the storm had brewed long enough to be near the bursting point. One of the promoters of the last outbreak, now himself marked as a victim, told Morris that he personally would die hard, but that most of his colleagues, though like him doomed to destruction, and though so fierce in dealing with the moderate men, now showed neither the nerve nor hardihood that alone could stave off the catastrophe.

Meanwhile the king, as Morris wrote home, showed in his death a better spirit than his life had promised; for he died in a manner becoming his dignity, with calm courage, praying that his foes might be forgiven and his deluded people be benefited by his death,--his words from the scaffold being drowned by the drums of Santerre. As a whole, the Gironde had opposed putting the king to death, and thus capping the structure whose foundations they had laid; they held back all too late. The fabric of their system was erected on a quagmire, and it now settled down and crushed the men who had built it. "All people of morality and intelligence had long agreed that as yet republican virtues were not of Gallic growth;" and so the power slipped naturally into the grasp of the lowest and most violent, of those who were loudest to claim the possession of republican principles, while in practice showing that they had not even the dimmest idea of what such principles meant.

The leaders were quite at the mercy of the gusts of fierce pa.s.sion that swayed the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of their brutal followers. Morris wrote home that the nominal rulers, or rather the few by whom these rulers were directed, had finally gained very just ideas of the value of popular opinion; but that they were not in a condition to act according to their knowledge; and that if they were able to reach harbor there would be quite as much of good luck as of good management about it, and, at any rate, a part of the crew would have to be thrown overboard.

Then the Mountain rose under Danton and Marat, and the party of the Gironde was entirely put down. The leaders were cast into prison, with the certainty before their eyes that the first great misfortune to France would call them from their dungeons to act as expiatory victims.

The Jacobins ruled supreme, and under them the government became a despotism in principle as well as in practice. Part of the Convention arrested the rest; and the revolutionary tribunals ruled red-handed, with a whimsical and ferocious tyranny. Said Morris: "It is an emphatical phrase among the patriots that _terror is the order of the day_; some years have elapsed since Montesquieu wrote that the principle of arbitrary governments is _fear_." The prisons were choked with _suspects_, and blood flowed more freely than ever. Terror had reached its highest point. Danton was soon to fall before Robespierre. Among a host of other victims the queen died, with a brave dignity that made people half forget her manifold faults; and Philippe Egalite, the dissolute and unprincipled scoundrel, after a life than which none could be meaner and more unworthy, now at the end went to his death with calm and unflinching courage.

One man had a very narrow escape. This was Thomas Paine, the Englishman, who had at one period rendered such a striking service to the cause of American independence, while the rest of his life had been as ign.o.ble as it was varied. He had been elected to the Convention, and, having sided with the Gironde, was thrown into prison by the Jacobins. He at once asked Morris to demand him as an American citizen; a t.i.tle to which he of course had no claim. Morris refused to interfere too actively, judging rightly that Paine would be saved by his own insignificance and would serve his own interests best by keeping still. So the filthy little atheist had to stay in prison, "where he amused himself with publishing a pamphlet against Jesus Christ." There are infidels and infidels; Paine belonged to the variety--whereof America possesses at present one or two shining examples--that apparently esteems a bladder of dirty water as the proper weapon with which to a.s.sail Christianity.

It is not a type that appeals to the sympathy of an onlooker, be said onlooker religious or otherwise.

Morris never paid so much heed to the military events as to the progress of opinion in France, believing "that such a great country must depend more upon interior sentiment than exterior operations." He took a half melancholy, half sardonic interest in the overthrow of the Catholic religion by the revolutionists; who had a.s.sailed it with the true French weapon, ridicule, but ridicule of a very grim and unpleasant kind. The people who five years before had fallen down in the dirt as the consecrated matter pa.s.sed by, now danced the carmagnole in holy vestments, and took part in some other mummeries a great deal more blasphemous. At the famous Feast of Reason, which Morris described as a kind of opera performed in Notre Dame, the president of the Convention, and other public characters, adored on bended knees a girl who stood in the place _ci-devant_ most holy to personate Reason herself. This girl, Saunier by name, followed the trades of an opera dancer and harlot; she was "very beautiful and next door to an idiot as to her intellectual gifts." Among her feats was having appeared in a ballet in a dress especially designed, by the painter David, at her bidding, to be more indecent than nakedness. Altogether she was admirably fitted, both morally and mentally, to personify the kind of reason shown and admired by the French revolutionists.

Writing to a friend who was especially hostile to Romanism, Morris once remarked, with the humor that tinged even his most serious thoughts, "Every day of my life gives me reason to question my own infallibility; and of course leads me further from confiding in that of the pope. But I have lived to see a new religion arise. It consists in a denial of all religion, and its votaries have the superst.i.tion of not being superst.i.tious. They have this with as much zeal as any other sect, and are as ready to lay waste the world in order to make proselytes."

Another time, speaking of his country place at Sainport, to which he had retired from Paris, he wrote: "We are so scorched by a long drought that in spite of all philosophic notions we are beginning our procession to obtain the favor of the _bon dieu_. Were it proper for _un homme public et protestant_ to interfere, I should be tempted to tell them that mercy is before sacrifice." Those individuals of arrested mental development who now make pilgrimages to our Lady of Lourdes had plenty of prototypes, even in the atheistical France of the Revolution.

In his letters home Morris occasionally made clear-headed comments on American affairs. He considered that "we should be unwise in the extreme to involve ourselves in the contests of European nations, where our weight could be but small, though the loss to ourselves would be certain. We ought to be extremely watchful of foreign affairs, but there is a broad line between vigilance and activity." Both France and England had violated their treaties with us; but the latter "had behaved worst, and with deliberate intention." He especially laid stress upon the need of our having a navy; "with twenty ships of the line at sea no nation on earth will dare to insult us;" even aside from individual losses, five years of war would involve more national expense than the support of a navy for twenty years, and until we rendered ourselves respectable, we should continue to be insulted. He never showed greater wisdom than in his views about our navy; and his party, the federalists, started to give us one; but it had hardly been begun before the Jeffersonians came into power, and, with singular foolishness, stopped the work.

Washington heartily sympathized with Morris's views as to the French Revolution; he wrote him that events had more than made good his gloomiest predictions. Jefferson, however, was utterly opposed to his theories, and was much annoyed at the forcible way in which he painted things as they were; characteristically enough, he only showed his annoyance by indirect methods,--leaving Morris's letters unanswered, keeping him in the dark as to events at home, etc. Morris understood all this perfectly, and was extremely relieved when Randolph became secretary of state in Jefferson's stead. Almost immediately afterwards, however, he was himself recalled. The United States, having requested the French government to withdraw Genet, a harlequin rather than a diplomat, it was done at once, and in return a request was forwarded that the United States would reciprocate by relieving Morris, which of course had to be done also. The revolutionary authorities both feared and disliked Morris; he could neither be flattered nor bullied, and he was known to disapprove of their excesses. They also took umbrage at his haughtiness; an unfortunate expression he used in one of his official letters to them, "ma cour," gave great offense, as being unrepublican--precisely as they had previously objected to Washington's using the phrase "your people" in writing to the king.

Washington wrote him a letter warmly approving of his past conduct.

Nevertheless Morris was not over-pleased at being recalled. He thought that, as things then were in France, any minister who gave satisfaction to its government would prove forgetful of the interests of America. He was probably right; at any rate, what he feared was just what happened under his successor, Monroe--a very amiable gentleman, but distinctly one who comes in the category of those whose greatness is thrust upon them. However, under the circ.u.mstances, it was probably impossible for our government to avoid recalling Morris.

He could say truthfully: "I have the consolation to have made no sacrifice either of personal or national dignity, and I believe I should have obtained everything if the American government had refused to recall me." His services had been invaluable to us; he had kept our national reputation at a high point, by the scrupulous heed with which he saw that all our obligations were fulfilled, as well as by the firm courage with which he insisted on our rights being granted us. He believed "that all our treaties, however onerous, must be strictly fulfilled according to their true intent and meaning. The honest nation is that which, like the honest man, 'hath to its plighted faith and vow forever firmly stood, and though it promise to its loss, yet makes that promise good;'" and in return he demanded that others should mete to us the same justice we meted to them. He met each difficulty the instant it arose, ever on the alert to protect his country and his countrymen; and what an ordinary diplomat could barely have done in time of peace, he succeeded in doing amid the wild, shifting tumult of the Revolution, when almost every step he made was at his own personal hazard. He took precisely the right stand; had he taken too hostile a position, he would have been driven from the country, whereas had he been a sympathizer, he would have more or less compromised America, as his successor afterwards did. We have never had a foreign minister who deserved more honor than Morris.

One of the noteworthy features in his letters home was the accuracy with which he foretold the course of events in the political world.

Luzerne once said to him, "Vous dites toujours les choses extraordinaires qui se realisent;" and many other men, after some given event had taken place, were obliged to confess their wonder at the way in which Morris's predictions concerning it had been verified. A notable instance was his writing to Washington: "Whatever may be the lot of France in remote futurity ... it seems evident that she must soon be governed by a single despot. Whether she will pa.s.s to that point through the medium of a triumvirate or other small body of men, seems as yet undetermined. I think it most probable that she will." This was certainly a remarkably accurate forecast as to the precise stages by which the already existing despotism was to be concentrated in a single individual. He always insisted that, though it was difficult to foretell how a single man would act, yet it was easy with regard to a ma.s.s of men, for their peculiarities neutralized each other, and it was necessary only to pay heed to the instincts of the average animal. He also gave wonderfully clear-cut sketches of the more prominent actors in affairs; although one of his maxims was that "in examining historical facts we are too apt to ascribe to individuals the events which are produced by general causes." Danton, for instance, he described as always believing, and, what was worse for himself, maintaining, that a popular system of government was absurd in France; that the people were too ignorant, too inconstant, too corrupt, and felt too much the need of a master; in short, that they had reached the point where Cato was a madman, and Caesar a necessary evil. He acted on these principles; but he was too voluptuous for his ambition, too indolent to acquire supreme power, and he cared for great wealth rather than great fame; so he "fell at the feet of Robespierre." Similarly, said Morris, there pa.s.sed away all the men of the 10th of August, all the men of the 2d of September; the same mob that hounded them on with wild applause when they grasped the blood-stained reins of power, a few months later hooted at them with ferocious derision as they went their way to the guillotine. Paris ruled France, and the _sans culottes_ ruled Paris; factions continually arose, waging inexplicable war, each in turn acquiring a momentary influence which was founded on fear alone, and all alike unable to build up any stable or lasting government.

Each new stroke of the guillotine weakened the force of liberal sentiment, and diminished the chances of a free system. Morris wondered only that, in a country ripe for a tyrant's rule, four years of convulsions among twenty-four millions of people had brought forth neither a soldier nor yet a statesman, whose head was fitted to wear the cap that fortune had woven. Despising the mob as utterly as did Oliver Cromwell himself, and realizing the supine indifference with which the French people were willing to accept a master, he yet did full justice to the pride with which they resented outside attack, and the enthusiasm with which they faced their foes. He saw the immense resources possessed by a nation to whom war abroad was a necessity for the preservation of peace at home, and with whom bankruptcy was but a starting-point for fresh efforts. The whole energy and power lay in the hands of the revolutionists; the men of the old regime had fled, leaving only that "waxen substance," the propertied cla.s.s, "who in foreign wars count so much, and in civil wars so little." He had no patience with those despicable beings, the traders and merchants who have forgotten how to fight, the rich who are too timid to guard their wealth, the men of property, large or small, who need peace, and yet have not the sense and courage to be always prepared to conquer it.