148                               THE UNITED STATES.
to see it ! Fortunate, indeed, if he lives to see nothing that
shall vary the prospect, and cloud the setting of his day."*
Ah ! what would the immortal authors of American inde-
pendence have said, in their turn, — what would Washing-
ton have said, if, seeing in spirit with inexpressible admira-
tion the marvellous destiny of the nation which he had just
founded,—become in less than a century one of the rulers
of the world, — he had sorrowfully perceived at the same
time upon its brow a stain that only extended with time ?
We comprehend the existence of slavery in heathen com-
munities, we explain it also in the small colonial settlements
whose place in the world is so limited and exceptional.
But that an illustrious, Christian, generous nation, which
possesses orators, poets, historians, publicists, economists,
and novelists, which knows how to use the language of
good sense with Franklin, and of pity with Channing, should
contain, tolerate, justify, and authorize men that buy men,
fathers that sell their offspring, magistrates that hunt slaves,
priests that absolve servitude, women that serve only to
reproduce children to be sold, manners that would have
blighted, laws that would have been reproved by Pagan
antiquity, — ah ! I do not believe that there is found in
history a more painful contradiction to human wisdom,.a
harsher disappointment of generous hopes J Less than a
century after a revolution which was so fruitful because it
was so honest, we are forced to tremble lest this great work
should fail, and so young and vigorous a community be
about to step beyond the pale of civilization.
To believe in so lamentable a future is to banish from
one's mind the sacred hope of the triumph of justice on
earth.
A generous spirit, the friend of America and the enemy
of slavery,  M.  Agénor de Gasparin,f fitly reproves the
* Works, Vol. HI. p. 249.
t The Uprising of a Great People, or the United States in 1861.   By Count
Agénor de Gasparin.