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Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

254.: DEATH OF LAFAYETTE EXAMINER, 25 MAY, 1834, P. 329 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II [1831]

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The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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254.

DEATH OF LAFAYETTE

EXAMINER, 25 MAY, 1834, P. 329

Lafayette died on 20 May, Mill’s birthday. This article is headed “London, May 25, 1834.” Though included in Mill’s bibliographic entry quoted in the headnote to No. 251 as a “summary of French news,” it is listed in Mill’s copy of the Examiner in Somerville College as “Obituary notice of Lafayette,” a more accurate description.

lafayette is no more. The last survivor of the illustrious founders of American independence—the last of the great names of the first French Revolution, has perished from among us: Europe has lost him, who, for forty years, has stood before the eyes of her people as the most virtuous of her public men.

Lafayette is, indeed, one of the most cheering examples in history of the influence exercised over the minds and affairs of mankind, by a life of consistent nobleness. His talents were respectable, but not eminent; neither as a man of action nor of speculation did he possess extraordinary mental endowments. He owed all his ascendancy to his heroic character. It was by his singleness of purpose, his chivalrous generosity, his undaunted courage, and his unfailing self-devotion, that he gained a larger share than has been possessed by any human being since Washington, of the veneration of mankind.

Those who could find no other flaw in his character have accused him of vanity: would to Heaven there were more persons in the world whose vanity was of the same kind! Never, we should imagine, was a man whom two great nations worshipped almost as a god so little intoxicated by his elevation. He never hesitated to confess an error; was never ashamed to retrace a false step; he never failed, when occasion required, to immolate to his country’s good, not only his ambition, his fortune, his liberty, and his personal safety, but what was far dearer to him, the ascendancy of his favourite opinions, and the love of that people whose honest sympathy had been the delight of his life.

A biography of Lafayette, by one capable of comprehending him, would be one of the most inspiring memorials of virtue since Plutarch’s Lives, and would have much of the same potency with that inestimable work, in forming great and good men.