ONNE DE STAEL-HOLSTEIN, May 24, 1818

TO MADAME LA BARONNE DE STAEL-HOLSTEIN.

United States of America,

May 24, 1818.

I received with great pleasure, my dear Madam and friend, your letter
of November the 10th, from Stockholm, and am sincerely gratified by the
occasion it gives me of expressing to you the sentiments of high respect
and esteem which I entertain for you. It recalls to my remembrance a
happy portion of my life, passed in your native city; then the seat
of the most amiable and polished society of the world, and of which
yourself and your venerable father were such distinguished members. But
of what scenes has it since been the theatre, and with what havoc has
it overspread the earth! Robespierre met the fate, and his memory
the execration, he so justly merited. The rich were his victims, and
perished by thousands. It is by millions that Bonaparte destroys
the poor, and he is eulogized and deified by the sycophants--even of
science. These merit more than the mere oblivion to which they will
be consigned; and the day will come when a just posterity will give to
their hero the only pre-eminence he has earned, that of having been the
greatest of the destroyers of the human race. What year of his military
life has not consigned a million of human beings to death, to poverty,
and wretchedness? What field in Europe may not raise a monument of the
murders, the burnings, the desolations, the famines, and miseries, it
has witnessed from him! And all this to acquire a reputation, which
Cartouche attained with less injury to mankind, of being fearless of God
or man.

To complete and universalize the desolation of the globe, it has been
the will of Providence to raise up, at the same time, a tyrant as
unprincipled and as overwhelming, for the ocean. Not in the poor maniac
George, but in his government and nation. Bonaparte will die, and his
tyrannies with him. But a nation never dies. The English government and
its piratical principles and practices, have no fixed term of duration.
Europe feels, and is writhing under the scorpion whips of Bonaparte. We
are assailed by those of England. The one continent thus placed under
the gripe of England, and the other of Bonaparte, each has to grapple
with the enemy immediately pressing on itself. We must extinguish the
fire kindled in our own house, and leave to our friends beyond the water
that which is consuming theirs. It was not till England had taken one
thousand of