Brissot reached Boston in July, 1788, and found that America was exactly what he had expected it to be: "Sanctuary of liberty," he wrote on landing, "I salute thee!... Would to heaven thou wert nearer Europe; fewer friends of liberty would vainly bewail its absence there." The inhabitants, he wrote, "have an air of simplicity and kindness, but they are full of human dignity, conscious of their liberty, and seeing in all men their brothers and equals.... I thought I was in that Salente, so attractively depicted by Fénelon."
Equality is what strikes him most, as it does the mass of his compatriots; this was the particularly American trait which, as mentioned before, was imported from the United States into France on the eve of our Revolution.
Luxury, the visitor admits, is, of course, a danger; but they know it and arm against it: "The most respectable inhabitants of the State of Massachusetts have formed a society to prevent the increase of luxury"—an attempt which, however, never succeeded, but at Salente.
After having seen the chief cities and paid a visit to Franklin, found very ill but with his great mind unimpaired, Brissot reached Mount Vernon in November, and remained there three days. Different from Houdon, he luckily took notes on the place and on the inhabitants thereof: "The general arrived only in the evening; he returned very tired from a tour over part of his domains where he was having a road traced. You have often heard him compared to Cincinnatus; the comparison is a just one. This celebrated general is now but a good farmer, ever busy with his farm, as he calls it, improving cultivation and building barns. He showed me one of enormous dimensions, just being erected from a plan sent him by the famous English agriculturist Arthur Young, but greatly improved by him....
"All is simple in the house of the general. His table is good, without luxury; regularity is everywhere apparent in his domestic economy. Mrs. Washington has her eye on everything, and joins to the qualities of an excellent housekeeper the simple dignity which befits a woman whose husband has played a great rôle. She adds to it that amenity, those attentions toward strangers which lend so much sweetness to hospitality. The same virtues shine in her niece, so interesting, but who, unluckily, seems to be in a very delicate state of health."
As for the general himself, "kindness appears in his looks. His eyes have no longer that lustre which his officers noticed when he was at the head of his army, but they get enlivened in conversation.... Good sense is the dominant trait in all his answers, great discretion and diffidence of himself goes with it, and at the same time a firm and unshakable disposition when he has once made up his mind."
His modesty is great: "He talks of the American war as if he had not been the leader thereof, and of his victories with an indifference which strangers could not equal.... The divisions in his country break his heart; he feels the necessity of calling together all the friends of liberty around one central point, the need of imparting energy to the government. He is still ready to give up that quiet which causes his happiness.... He spoke to me of Mr. de Lafayette with emotion; he considers him as his child."
Not only on agriculture and government, but also on manners the future President gave his visitor much information: "The general told me that a great reform was going on among his compatriots; people drank much less; they no longer forced their guests to drink; it had ceased to be good form to send them home inebriated; those noisy parties at taverns so frequent in former times were not to be the fashion any more; dress was becoming simpler."
On receiving news of the convocation of the French States General, Brissot, who felt that this was the beginning of immense changes, hastened back to France and published an account of his journey. He stated in his preface, written in 1790, why he had undertaken it, and what lessons we might learn from our neighbors of over the sea:
"The object of this journey has not been to study antique statues, or to find unknown plants, but to observe men who had just conquered their liberty: to Frenchmen free men can no longer be strangers.
"We, too, have conquered our liberty. We have not to learn from Americans how to conquer it, but how to preserve it. This secret consists especially in morality.... What is liberty? It is the most perfect state of society, a state in which man depends only upon the laws made by himself;[191] and to make good ones, he must improve his reason; and to apply them he must again have recourse to his reason.... Morals are but reason applied to all the acts of life.... They are among free men what irons, whipping-posts, and gibbets are among peoples in slavery.... This journey will show you the wondrous effects of liberty on morals, on industry, and on the amelioration of men.... My desire has been to depict to my compatriots a people with whom it behooves, from every point of view, that they become intimately united."[192]
IV
During the early stages of the French Revolution, Washington had followed with the keenest sympathy and anxiety the efforts of our ancestors, taking pride in the thought that the American example had something to do, as it undoubtedly had, with what was happening. "The young French nobility enrolled for the cause of [American] independence," wrote Talleyrand in his memoirs, "attached itself afterward to the principles it had gone to fight for." Pontgibaud, who remained a royalist, who hated the Revolution and became an émigré, observes the same fact, although deploring what occurred: "The officers of Count de Rochambeau had nothing better to do [after Yorktown], I believe, than to visit the country. When one thinks of the false ideas of government and philanthropy with the virus of which these youths were infected in America, and which they were to enthusiastically propagate in France, with such lamentable success—since that mania for imitation has powerfully helped toward the Revolution, without being its unique cause—people will agree that all those red-heeled young philosophers had much better, for their sake and ours, have stayed at court.... Each of them fancied he would be called upon to play the part of Washington." Asked to join Lafayette and "his former brothers-in-arms of beyond the sea," he refused: "It has been justly said that in a revolution the difficulty lies not in doing one's duty, but in knowing where it is. I did mine because I knew where it was," and he joined the princes and emigrated.[193]
Of this American influence Washington was aware, and spoke, as may be surmised, in terms nearer those of Talleyrand than those of Pontgibaud. "I am glad to hear," he wrote to Jefferson, "that the Assemblée des Notables has been productive of good in France.... Indeed the rights of mankind, the privileges of the people, and the true principles of liberty seem to have been more generally discussed and better understood throughout Europe since the American Revolution than they were at any former period."[194]
Few of Washington's observations are a greater credit to him, as a statesman, than those concerning this extraordinary upheaval. From the first he felt that the change would not prove a merely local one, but would have world-wide consequences; that, in fact, a new era was beginning for mankind. "A spirit for political improvements seems to be rapidly and extensively spreading through the European countries," he wrote to La Luzerne. "I shall rejoice in seeing the condition of the human race happier than ever it has been." But let the people at the helm be careful not to make "more haste than good speed in their innovations."[195]