A complete history of the Marquis de Lafayette, major-general in the American army in the war of the revolution. Embracing an account of his tour through the United States, to the time of his departure, September, 1825. By an officer in the late army.

180 HISTORY OF THE
beheld family preferred to merit, influence to justice, wealth
to worth; they began to examine into a constitution in which
the monarch, whom they were now accustomed to consider
as only the first magistrate, was every thing, and the people,
the fountain of all power, merely cyphers:; and they may
well be supposed to have wished, andg.even languished for a
cllange.i
In fine, the people being left entirely destitute of redress
or protection, the royal authority paramountand unbounded;
the laws venal; the peasantry oppressed; agriculture in a
languishing state, commerce considered as degrading; the
public revenues farmed out to greedy financiers; the public
money consumed by a court wallowing in luxury; and every
institution at variance with justice, policy, and reason;-a
change became inevitable in the ordinary course of human
events; and, like all sudden:alterations in corrupt states
was accompanied with temporary evils and crimes, that made
many good men look back on the ancient despotism with a
sigh. But, at this period, the cry of liberty resounded in
every direction from Paris, the city where the revolution was
engendered, to the Alps, the Pyrennees, the plains of Flanders, the borders of the Channel, and the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.t
The heroic Lafayette could not fail to attract the attention of his countrymen at this important period;-a period
pregnant too with men of extraordinary parts. -. Yet vast as
was the genius of many of those who stept forth;to:regenerate the ill-fated land, and actuated, as they were, by motives
and systems of the most opposite kind, they all united in
fixing the marquis in the foremost rank. Actuated exclusively by the love of his country, his motives have, however,
been alike calumniated by the emigrants and the Jacobins;
to whose selfishness and personality, his example and his in'
fluence were equally opposed: and, while the family of Louis
XVI. rejected his proffered assistance, in distrust of his exf Wars French Rev. vol. i. Introd. xlii.
i Wars French Rev. vol. i. Introd. liv.