its power with a hierarchy, a nobility, or a king. The popular voice is all-powerful with us; this is our oracle, and this, we acknowledge, is the voice of God. Invention is solitary, but who shall judge its results? Inquiry may pursue truth apart, but who shall decide if truth be overtaken? There is no safe criterion of opinion but the careful exercise of the public judgment; and in the science of government, as elsewhere, the deliberate convictions of mankind, reasoning on the cause of their own happiness, their own wants and interests, are the surest revelations of political truth. YORKTOWN AND OUR DEBT TO THE FRENCH ROBERT C. WINTHROP [From his centennial address at Yorktown, Virginia, October 18, 1881. The portrait here drawn of the young Lafayette is especially attractive. He commanded one section of Washington's army at the siege of Yorktown. Washington, Lafayette, and Rochambeau hemmed Cornwallis in on the land side, while the French fleet under De Grasse cut off his retreat by water. Cornwallis's surrender followed and the war was virtually ended.] YES, it is mine, and somewhat peculiarly mine, perhaps, notwithstanding the presence of the official representatives of my native State, to bear the greetings of Plymouth Rock to Jamestown; of Bunker Hill to Yorktown; of Boston, recovered from the British forces in '76, to Mount Vernon, the home in life and death of her illustrious Deliverer. . . Our earliest and our latest acknowledgments are due this day to France for the inestimable services which gave us the crowning victory of the 19th of October, 1781. It matters not for us to speculate now whether American independence might not have been ultimately achieved without her aid. We all know that, God willing, such a consummation was certain in the end, as to-morrow's sunrise, and that no earthly potentates or powers, single or conjoined, could have carried us back into a permanent condition of colonial dependence and subjugation. Nor need we be curious to inquire into any special inducements which France may have had to intervene thus nobly in our behalf. ... Nearly two years before the treaties of Franklin were negotiated and signed, the young Lafayette, then but nineteen years of age, a captain of French dragoons, stationed at Metz, at a dinner given by the commandant of the garrison to the Duke of Gloucester, a brother of George III, happened to hear the tidings of our Declaration of Independence, which had reached the duke that very day from London. It formed the subject of animated and excited conversation, in which the enthusiastic young soldier took part, and before he had left the table an inextinguishable spark had been struck and kindled in his breast, and his whole heart was on fire in the cause of American liberty. Regardless of the remonstrances of his friends, of the ministry, and of the king himself, in spite of every discouragement and obstacle, he soon tears himself away from a young and lovely wife, leaps on board a vessel which he had provided for himself, braves the perils of a voyage across the Atlantic, then swarming with cruisers, reaches Philadelphia by way of Charleston, South Carolina, and so wins at once the regard and confidence of the Continental Congress by his avowed desire to risk his life in our service, at his own expense, without pay or allowance of any sort, that, on the 31st of July, 1777, before he was yet quite twenty years of age, he was commissioned a major-general in the army of the United States. It is hardly too much to say that from that dinner at Metz, and that 31st of July, in Philadelphia, may be dated the train of influences and events which culminated four years afterwards in the surrender of Cornwallis to the allied forces of America and France. Presented to our great Virginian commander-inchief a few days only after his commission was voted by Congress, an intimacy, a friendship, an affection grew up between them almost at sight. Invited to become a member of his mili tary family, and treated with the tenderness of a son, Lafayette is henceforth to be not only the beloved and trusted associate of Washington, but a living tie between his native and his almost adopted country. Returning to France in January, 1779, after eighteen months of brave and valuable service here, during which he had been wounded at Brandywine, had exhibited signal gallantry and skill at Monmouth, and had received the thanks of Congress for important services in Rhode Island, he was now in the way of appealing personally to the French ministry to send an army and fleet to our assistance. He did appeal; and the zeal and force of his arguments at length prevailed. The young marquis, to whom alone the decision of the king was revealed, hastens back with eager joy to announce the glad tidings to Washington, and to arrange with him for the reception and employment of the auxiliary forces. Accordingly, on the 10th of July, 1780, a squadron of the ships of war brings Rochambeau with six thousand French troops into the harbor of Newport, with instructions "to act. under Washington, and live with the American officers as their brethren," and the American officers are forthwith desired by Washington, in General Orders, "to wear white and black cockades as a symbol of affection for their allies." Nearly a full year, however, was to elapse before the rich fruits of that alliance were to be developed, a year of the greatest discouragement and gloom for the American cause. The war on our side seemed languishing. As late as the 9th of April, 1781, Washington wrote to Colonel John Laurens, who had gone on a special mission to Paris, "If France delays a timely and powerful aid in the critical juncture of our affairs, it will avail us nothing should she attempt it hereafter. We are at this hour suspended in the balance. In a word, we are at the end of our tether, and now or never our deliverance must come." God's holy name be praised, deliverance was to come, and did come, now! On the third of September, 1781, the united armies reached Philadelphia, where, Congress being in session, the French army "paid it the honors which the king had ordered us to pay," as we are told in the journal of the gallant Count William de Deux Ponts. . . . On the 19th of October the articles were signed by which the garrisons of York and Gloucester, together with all the officers and seamen of the British ships in the Chesapeake, "surrender themselves prisoners of war to the combined forces of America and France." THE AMERICAN WORKMAN IN 17841 JOHN BACH MCMASTER THERE can, however, be no doubt that a wonderful amelioration has taken place since that day in the condition of the poor. Their houses were meaner, their food was coarser, their clothing was of common stuff; their wages were, despite the depreciation that has gone on in the value of money, lower by one half than at the present time. A man who performed what would now be called unskilled labor, who sawed wood, who dug ditches, who mended the roads, who mixed mortar, who carried boards to the carpenter and bricks to the mason, or helped to cut hay in the harvest-time, usually received as the fruit of his daily toil two shillings. Sometimes when the laborers were few he was paid more, and became the envy of his fellows if, at the end of a week, he took home to his family fifteen shillings, a sum now greatly exceeded by four dollars. Yet all authorities agree that in 1784 the hire of workmen was twice as great as in 1774. On such a pittance it was only by the strictest economy that a mechanic kept his children from starvation and himself from jail. In the low and dingy rooms which he called his home were wanting many articles of adornment and of use now to be found in the dwellings of the poorest of his class. Sand sprinkled on the floor did duty as a carpet. There was no glass on his table, there was no china in his cupboard, there were no 1 From A History of the People of the United States, vol. i; copyright by D. Appleton & Co. prints on his walls. What a stove was he did not know, coal he had never seen, matches he had never heard of. Over a fire of fragments of boxes and barrels, which he lit with the sparks struck from a flint, or with live coals brought from a neighbor's hearth, his wife cooked up a rude meal and served it in pewter dishes. He rarely tasted fresh meat as often as once in a week, and paid for it a much higher price than his posterity. Everything, indeed, which ranked as a staple of life was very costly. Corn stood at three shillings the bushel, wheat at eight and sixpence, an assize of bread was fourpence, a pound of salt pork was tenpence. Many other commodities now to be seen on the tables of the poor were either quite unknown or far beyond the reach of his scanty means. Unenviable is the lot of that man who cannot, in the height of the season, when the wharfs and markets are heaped with baskets and crates of fruit, spare three cents for a pound of grapes or five cents for as many peaches, or, when Sunday comes around, indulge his family with watermelons or cantaloupes. One hundred years ago the wretched fox-grape was the only kind that found its way to market, and was the luxury of the rich. Among the fruits and vegetables of which no one had then even heard are cantaloupes, many varieties of peaches, and pears, tomatoes and rhubarb, sweet corn, the cauliflower, the egg-plant, head lettuce and okra. On the window-benches of every tenement-house may be seen growing geraniums and verbenas, flowers not known a century ago. In truth, the best-kept gardens were then rank with hollyhocks and sunflowers, roses and snowballs, lilacs, pinks, tulips, and, above all, the Jerusalem cherry, a plant once much admired, but now scarcely seen. If the food of an artisan would now be thought coarse, his clothes would be thought abominable. A pair of yellow buckskin or leather breeches, a checked shirt, a red flannel jacket, a rusty felt hat cocked up at the corners, shoes of neat's-skin set off with huge buckles of brass, and a leather apron, comprised his scanty wardrobe. The leather he smeared with grease |