In this connection, I cannot but notice, to the credit of the French
republican provisional government, how much more consistent they were
in their attachment to the principles of liberty than ever our own has
been.
What do we see in our own history? Our northern free states
denouncing slavery as a crime, confessedly inconsistent with their
civil and religious principles, yet, for commercial and pecuniary
considerations, deliberately entering into a compact with slaveholders
tolerating a twenty years' perpetuation of the African slave trade,
the rendition of fugitives, the suppression of servile insurrections,
and allowing to the slaveholders a virtual property basis of
representation. It should qualify the contempt which some Americans
express of the French republic, that when the subject of the slave
colonies was brought up, and it was seen that consistency demanded
immediate emancipation, they immediately emancipated; and not only so,
but conferred at once on the slaves the elective franchise.
This point strongly illustrates the difference, in one respect,
between the French and the Anglo-Saxons. As a race the French are less
commercial, more ideal, more capable of devotion to abstract
principles, and of following them out consistently, irrespective of
expediency.
There is one thing which cannot but make one indignant here in Paris,
and which, I think, is keenly felt by some of the best among the
French; and that is, the indifference of many Americans, while here,
to their own national principles of liberty. They seem to come to
Paris merely to be hangers on and applauders in the train of that
tyrant who has overthrown the hopes of France.
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