On the record
But the people of France, shut up in darkness during centuries of misrule, passed at a step from abject servitude to unlimited freedom.
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gutenberg.orgEditor's note · Context
Seward contrasts the rapid transition of the French people from servitude to freedom with the American experience.
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Although no sculptured marble should rise to their memory, nor engraved stone bear record to their deeds, yet will their remembrance be as lasting as the land they honored.
The American colonists had been trained to rational conceptions of freedom, by lessons of wisdom and sagacity read them by their Puritan fathers, and by the experience in self-government, afforded during a century and a half of enjoyment…
These walls, which were consecrated, so long ago, to the cause of American liberty, which witnessed her infant struggles and rung with the shouts of her earliest victories, proclaim now, that distinguished friends and champions of that…
There are events, the monuments of which, surviving every other memorial of human existence, eternize the nation to whose history they belong, after all other vestiges of its glory have disappeared from the globe.
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