AMERICA’S MARQUIS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 October 1942, Page 4

AMERICA’S MARQUIS

BRIDGE OF COMMUNICATION WITH FRANCE.

In America, at any rate, Lafayette had not failed. He remained the triumphant champion of liberty, the shining symbol of the French alliance that had made victory possible. “It is no trifling compliment,” wrote one of the officers of the American army,, “to say that, next to the Commander-in Chief and the intrepid Greene, no geleral stood higher in the public favour or more constantly commanded the admiration of the army than La Fayette.” Lafayette long afterward said to the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte that in the American Revolution “the world’s greatest concern were decided by a few skirmishes between patrols.’’ In that half-truth lay at' least one striking fact: The skirmishes in America provided dissatisfied Frenchmen of the next decade with a concrete example of “a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and with a young leader whose loyalties and personal ambitions led him. to strive for the realisation of those ideals in his own country. Two prerequisites for a successful revolution in France or elsewhere —a programme and leadership—were, if not created, at least developed to maturity in the “skirmishes between patrols” in America. The French Revolution might have come without Washington, Franklin, Adams. Greene, Jefferson, Laurens, Hamilton, McHenry, and other friends of “America’s marquis.” But it did come at the time it came and it did take the form it took largely because of them. And the channel of their influence, the chief bridge in the communication of their spirit to France, was furnished by Lafayette.—From “Lafayette and the Close of the American Revolution,” by Louis Gottschalk.