subjugated lands. He called forth the young and brave - one from every household from the Pyrenees to the Zuyder Zee — from Jura to the ocean. He marshalled them into long and majestic columns, and went forth to seize that universal dominion which seemed almost within his grasp. But ambition had tempted fortune too far. The nations of the earth resisted, repelled, pursued, surrounded him. The pageant was ended. The crown fell from his presumptuous head. The wife who had wedded him in his pride forsook him when the hour of fear came upon him. His child was ravished from his sight. His kinsmen were degraded to their first estate, and he was no longer emperor, nor consul, nor general, nor even a citizen, but an exile and a prisoner, on a lonely island, in the midst of the wild Atlantic. Discontent attended him here. The wayward man fretted out a few long years of his yet unbroken manhood, looking off at the earliest dawn and in evening's latest twilight, toward that distant world that had only just eluded his grasp. His heart corroded. Death came, not unlooked for, though it came even then unwelcome. He was stretched on his bed within the fort which constituted his prison. A few fast and faithful friends stood around, with the guards who rejoiced that the hour of relief from long and wearisome watching was at hand. As his strength wasted away, delirium stirred up the brain from its long and inglorious inactivity. The pageant of ambition returned. He was again a lieutenant, a general, a consul, an emperor of France. He filled again the throne of Charlemagne. His kindred pressed around him, again invested with the pompous pageantry of

royalty. The daughter of the long line of kings again stood proudly by his side, and the sunny face of his child shone out from beneath the diadem that encircled its flowing locks. The marshals of Europe awaited his command. The legions of the Old Guard were in the field, their scarred faces rejuvenated, and their ranks thinned in many battles replenished. Russia, Prussia, Denmark, and England, gathered their mighty hosts to give him battle. Once more he mounted his impatient charger and rushed forth to conquest. He waved his sword aloft and cried, "TÊTE D'ARMÉE." The feverish vision broke the mockery was ended. The silver cord was loosened, and the warrior fell back upon his bed a lifeless corpse. THIS was the END OF THE CORSICAN WAS NOT CONTENT.

EARTH.

XVI

TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE1

BY WENDELL PHILLIPS

[Wendell Phillips, the silver-tongued orator, is the most mellifluous of American speakers, Webster hardly excepted. But he was not a great statesman, nor a great preacher, nor a great writer; hence he is in danger of losing credit for being a great orator.]

F I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I

find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I to tell you,

1 The negro patriot eulogized in this oration, after freeing his country, was, in violation of the treaty of peace, seized and conveyed to France, where he died of starvation in a dungeon.

the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts, you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his country. But I am to tell you the story of a negro, Toussaint L'Ouverture, who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of his enemies, men who despised him because he was a negro and a slave, hated him because he had beaten them in battle.

Cromwell-manufactured his own army. Napoleon, at the age of twenty-seven, was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty, Cromwell manufactured his own army out of what? Englishmen, the best blood in Europe. Out-of-the middle class of Englishmen, the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered what? Englishmen, their equals. This man manufactured his army out of what? 'Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery; one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed, and, as you say, despicable mass, he forged a thunderbolt, and hurled it at what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, 'and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, "and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now, if Cromwell was a general, at least this man was a soldier.

Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go

back with me to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let him be either American or European; let him have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the silver locks of seventy years, and show me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel, rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro, rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of its sons,

anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and tak ing his station by the side of Roger Williams, before any Englishman or American had won the right; and yet this is the record which the history of rival states/makes up for this inspired black of St. Domingo.

Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Haiti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro's sword.

I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word! I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the State he founded went down with him into his grave.) I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave trade in the humblest village of his dominions.

You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty

years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE.