Dedication of the Statue of Liberty

In this article, published in the daily La Nación, Buenos Aires, January 1, 1887, Martí narrates in great detail the celebrations held on October 28, 1886, in New York, for the inauguration of the famous statue donated to the United States by the French people in recognition of the support given during the American War of Independence.

For him who enjoys thee not, Liberty, it is difficult to speak of thee. His anger is as great as that of a wild beast forced to bend his knees before his tamer. He knows the depths of hell while glancing up toward the man who lives arrogantly in the sun. He bites the air as a hyena bites the bars of his cage. Spirit writhes within his body as though it were poisoned.

The wretched man who lives without liberty feels that only a garment made of mud from the streets would benefit him. Those who have thee, oh Liberty! know thee not. Those who have thee not should not speak of thee but conquer thee.

But rise, oh insect, for the city swarms with eagles! Walk or at least crawl: look around, even if your eyes fill with shame. Like a smitten lackey, squirm among the hosts of brilliant lords. Walk, though you feel the flesh stripped off your body! Ah! If they only knew how you wept, they would pick you up, and you too, dying, would know how to lift your arms toward eternity!

Arise, oh insect, for the city is like an ode! Souls ring out like well-tuned instruments. If it is dark and there is no sun in the sky, it is because all light is in the souls; it flowers within men’s breasts.

Liberty, it is thine hour of arrival! The whole world, pulling the victorious chariot, has brought thee to these shores. Here thou art like the poet’s dream, as great as space, spanning heaven and earth!

That noise we hear — it is triumph resting.

That darkness we see — it is not the rainy day, nor gloomy October; it is the dust, tinted by death, thy chariot has raised up in its wake.

I can see them with drawn swords, holding their heads in their hands, their limbs a formless pile of bones, their bodies girded with flames, the stream of life oozing out of their broken foreheads like wings. Tunics, armor, scrolls of parchment, shields, books gather resplendently at thy feet, and thou commandest at last over the cities of interests and the phalanxes of war, oh aroma of the world! Oh goddess, daughter of man!

Man grows. Behold how he has outgrown churches and chosen the sky as the only temple worthy of sheltering his deity! But thou, oh marvelous one! growest with man; and armies, the whole city, the emblazoned ships about to exalt thee approach thy mist-veiled feet, like variegated shells dashed on the rocks by the somber sea when the fiend of tempest, wrapped in lightning, rides across the sky on a black cloud.

Thou hast done well, Liberty, in revealing thyself to the world on a dark day, for thou canst not yet be satisfied with thyself! Now you, my feast less heart, sing of the feast!

It was yesterday, October 28, that the United States solemnly accepted the Statue of Liberty which the people of France have donated to them in memory of July 4, 1776, when they declared their independence from England, won with the help of French blood. It was a raw day: the air was ashy, the streets muddy, the rain relentless; but seldom was man’s rejoicing so great.

One felt a peaceful joy as though a balm soothed one’s soul. From brows to which light is not lacking, light seemed to shine more brightly, and that fair instinct of human decency which illumines the dullest faces emerged even from opaque spirits, like a wave’s surge.

The emotion was immense. The movement resembled a mountain chain. Not an empty spot remained on the streets. The two rivers seemed like solid land. The steamers, pearly in the fog, maneuvered crowded from wheel to wheel. Brooklyn Bridge groaned under its load of people. New York and its suburbs, as though invited to a wedding, had risen early. Among the happy crowds that filled the streets there were none as beautiful — not the workmen forgetful of their troubles, nor the women, nor the children — as those old men who had come from the country with their flying cravats and greatcoats to salute in the commemorative statue the heroic spirit of the Marquis de Lafayette,¹ whom they as children had greeted with waving hands and boughs, because he loved Washington and helped him make this country free.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century. Who can forget that beautiful friendship? Washington was the graver and older of the two. There was scarcely a down on Lafayette’s upper lip. But they shared, under different appearances, the same blind determination and capacity of ascent common to all great personalities. That noble child had left wife and king to help the humble troops that in America were pushing the English king to the sea and phrasing, in sublime words, the teachings of the Encyclopedists, words through which the human race announced its coming of age with no less clatter than that which had accompanied the revelation of its infancy on Mount Sinai.

The blond hero kept company with the dawn. His strong soul preferred marching men to the iniquitous pomp with which his monarch paraded, shining opalescently on the shoulders of his hungry vassals like a saint carried on a litter by barefoot porters. His king persecuted him, England persecuted him, but his wife helped him.

God pity the heroic heart whose noble enterprises found no welcome at home! He left his house and regal wealth, armed his ship, wrote from his ship: “The happiness of America is intimately bound up with the happiness of Humanity. She is going to become a cherished and safe asylum of virtue, of tolerance, of equality and of peaceful liberty.” How great his soul, ready to give up all the privileges of fortune to follow a handful of poorly clad rebels on their march through the snow! He jumped off his ship, flew to the Continental Congress: “I wish to serve America as a volunteer and without pay.” Sometimes things happen on earth that shed a heavenly splendor over it.

Manhood seemed to have matured within that youthful body. He proved to be a general’s general. As he clutched his wound with the one hand, with the other he commanded his fleeing soldiers to turn about and win. With a flash of his sword he mustered a column that a traitor had dispersed.

If his soldiers were on foot, he was on foot. If the Republic had no money, he who was offering her his life, advanced his fortune. Behold a man who glittered as though he were all gold! When his fame restored to him his king’s affection, he realized France’s hatred toward England could be helpful in chasing the exhausted English out of America.

The Continental Congress girded on him a sword of honor and wrote to the King of France: “We recommend this noble man to Your Majesty’s notice, as one whom we know to be wise in counsel, gallant in the field, and patient under the hardships of war.” He borrowed the wings of the sea. France, the vanguard of nations, bedecked herself with roses to receive her hero.

“It is a wonder Lafayette is not taking with him to his America the furniture of Versailles,” exclaimed the French Minister, as Lafayette crossed the ocean with France’s help to the newborn Republic, with Rochambeau’s army and de Grasse’s navy.²

Even Washington was at the time despairing of victory. But French noble men and American farmers closed against Cornwallis³ and routed him at Yorktown.

Thus did the United States assure with France’s help the independence they had learned to wish for in terms of French thinking. The prestige of a heroic deed is such that this svelte marquis has sufficed to keep united during a century two nations that differ in spiritual warmth, in the idea of life, and in the very concept of liberty — egotistical and selfish in the United States, and generous and expansive in France. Blessed be the country that radiates its light!

Let us follow the throngs that fill the streets, coming from every direction. It is the day of the unveiling of the monument consecrating the friend ship between Washington and Lafayette. People of all tongues are present at the ceremony.

The rejoicing is to be found among the common people. Banners flourish in men’s hearts; a few on men’s houses. The emblazoned grand stand where the procession is to pass awaits the President of the Republic, the delegates from France, the diplomatic corps, the state governors, the army generals.

Sidewalks, portals, balconies, roofs begin to seethe with a joyous mass of people. Many fill the wharves to await the naval procession. The war ships, the fleet of steamers, the prattling tugboats that will carry the invited guests to Bedloe’s Island, where the statue stands waiting on her Cyclopean pedestal, her face covered by the French flag. But most gather along the route of the grand parade.

Here comes a band. Here comes a fire brigade with its ancient fire engine raised on stilts. The firemen wear black trousers and red shirts. The crowds make room for a group of deliriously happy Frenchmen. Then comes another group in beautiful uniforms garnished with gold braid, full, striped trousers, plumed cap, fierce mustachios, slender figures, bubbling palaver and very black eyes: they are a company of Italian volunteers. From around a corner juts the elevated railroad. Up above, a crowded train; down below policemen branching out to their beats, their blue frock coats well buttoned up with gilt buttons. The rain fails to wipe out everyone’s smiles.

Now the crowds step back onto the sidewalk, as the mounted police advance pushing against them with their horses’ haunches. A woman crosses the street, her oilcloth coat filled with commemorative medals bearing on one side the monument, on the other the sculptor Bartholdi’s⁴ pleasing likeness. There goes an anxious-looking man making notes as he walks.

But what about France? Here there is not much talk of France, nor of Lafayette. Little do they know of him. No one is aware of the fact that a magnificent gift of the modern French people to the American people is being celebrated.

There is another statue of Lafayette in Union Square, also the work of Bartholdi, a gift of France. Only the men of letters and the old men with the cravats remember the admirable marquis. There is a new life boiling in the enormous cauldron. This country where each man lives and toils for himself has really not much love for that other country which has fertilized every human seed with its blood.

“France,” says one ingrate “only helped us because her king was an enemy of England.” “France,” ruminates another in his corner, “gives us the Statue of Liberty so that we will let her finish the Panama Canal in peace.”

“It is Laboulaye,”⁵ says another, “who gave us the statue. He would apply English brakes to French liberty. Even as Jefferson learned from the Encyclopedists the principles of the Declaration of Independence, so did Laboulaye and Henri Martín try to take to France the methods of government the United States had inherited from the Magna Carta.”

Yes, indeed, it was Laboulaye who inspired Bartholdi. It was his idea: Go, he said, and propose to the United States the construction, jointly with us, of a superb monument in commemoration of their independence. Yes, the statue was to signify the prudent Frenchman’s admiration of the peaceful practices of American liberty.

Thus was born the idea which grew like the streamlet that swells along its course from the mountaintop until at last it reaches the sea. On the grandstand sit the delegates from France, the sculptor, the orator, the journalist, the general, the admiral, and this man who joins the seas and cleaves the land. French tunes flitter over the city; French flags flap against balconies and wave on the tops of buildings. But what livens all eyes and gladdens all souls is not the gift of a generous land, received perhaps with insufficient enthusiasm, but the brimming over of human pleasure on seeing the instinct of our own majesty, which resides in the marrow of our bones and constitutes the root and glory of our life, rise with stupendous firmness, a symbol of captivating beauty.

Behold, they all reveal the exhilaration of being reborn! Is not this nation, in spite of its rawness, the hospitable home of the oppressed? The voices that impel and counsel come from within, from deeper than the will. Flags are reflected on faces, heartstrings are plucked by a sweet love, a superior sense of sovereignty brings to countenances a look of peace, nay, of beauty. And all these luckless Irishmen, Poles, Italians, Bohemians, Germans, redeemed from oppression or misery, hail the monument to Liberty because they feel that through it they themselves are uplifted and restored.

Behold how they run toward the wharves from which the statue can be seen, elated as shipwrecked people who descry a hopeful sail! These are the humblest, those who fear the main streets and the clean people: pale tobacco workers, humpbacked stevedores, Italian women with their colored shawls. They do not run brutally, disorderly as on ordinary holidays, but in friendly equable groups. They come from the east side, the west side, the congested alleys of the poor neighborhoods. Sweethearts act like married couples, husbands offer their arms to their wives, mothers drag their young along. They question each other, encourage each other; cram into the positions from where they think they will see better.

In the meantime, among the crowd’s hurrahs, the lavishly decorated gun carriages roll along the broad streets; buildings seem to speak and hail each other with their flags; the elevated trains, like an aerial, disciplined, steaming cavalry seem to stop, paw, unload their riders on the beach; the steamers restlessly test the ties that hold them to their moorings, and out there, in the distance, wrapped in smoke, the enormous statue rises, greeted by all the incense burners on earth, crowned with clouds, like a mountain.

The greatest celebration is at Madison Square where, facing the impious monument of Farragut⁶ which commemorates the North Americans’ inglorious victory over Mexico, rises the grandstand bedecked with United States and French flags from where the President is to watch the parade. He has not yet arrived, but everyone is anxious. The brown helmets of policemen protrude above the dark mass. Tricolored festoons hang from house fronts.

The stand is like a bunch of roses on a black background. Now and then a murmur spreads over the nearby groups as though their collective soul had suddenly been enriched, for Lesseps⁷ has walked up, and then come: Spuller, Gambetta’s friend, with his steely eyes and powerful head; bold Jaurès who gloriously led 12,000 soldiers, closely pursued by the Germans, out of the battle of Mamers; Pellisier who although wounded at Nogent-sur-Marne applied his pale hand to the wheels of his cannon; Lieutenant Ney who, when his Frenchmen fled in panic from a trench on fire, opened his arms, steadied his feet firmly on the ground, his face embellished by the bronze-hued glare, pushed the cowards through the hellish mouth and then followed; Laussédat, the gray-haired colonel who with youthful hands built barriers against the Prussian arms; Bureaux de Pussy who kept his great-grandfather Lafayette’s sword from falling to the enemy; Deschamps, the Mayor of Paris, who three times fell prisoner to the Germans and three times got away; Villegente, the young naval officer like a figure out of a Neuville painting; Caubert, lawyer and soldier, who wanted to organize a legion of lawyers and judges to hold Prussia back; Bigot, Meunier, Desmons, Hielard, and Giroud, who have served the Fatherland bravely with purse or pen; and Bartholdi the creator of the statue, who planted on the buttress of Fort Belfort his sublime lion and cast in silver for Gambetta that pathetic, cursing Alsace, whose eyes, melancholy as great men’s eyes are, reveal all the sadness of the standard bearer dying on his Alsace’s bosom, and all the faith of the child by her side in whom the Motherland is reborn.

Familiarity with what is enormous cannot but engender light. The habit of conquering matter imparts to sculptors’ faces an air of triumph and rebellion. The very capacity to admire what is great makes one great, much more so to model it, caress it, give wings to it, to extract from our mind the idea which, by means of our arms, our deep glances, our loving strokes, gradually curves and illumines the marble or the bronze.

This creator of mountains was born a free soul in the Alsatian city of Colmar, stolen from him later by the German foe, and in his eyes, inured to the sight of Egyptian colossi, liberty’s beauty and grandeur took on the gigantic proportions and eminent majesty to which the Father land rises in the minds of those who live bereft of her. Bartholdi wrought his sovereign statue out of all his Fatherland’s hopes.

Never did man create anything of real beauty without deep suffering. That is why the statue advances as though to step onto the promised land; that is why she bows her head and there is a widow’s expression on her face; that is why she stretches her arm, as though to command and to guide, fiercely toward the sky.

Alsace! Alsace! cries every inch of her. The sorrowing virgin has come more to ask for a French Alsace than to light the way for world liberty.

Smiles and thoughts are but an abominable disguise, a tombstone when one lives without a Fatherland or when a part of it falls prey to the enemy’s clutch. An atmosphere of drunkenness perturbs judgment, shackles words, quenches verses, and then whatever a nation’s minds produce is deformed and empty, unless it expresses the soul’s craving. Who feels more deeply the absence of a good than he who has possessed it and lost it? From the vehemence of sorrows stems the greatness of their representation.

There is Bartholdi, greeted lovingly by his comrades as he takes his place on the grandstand. A vague sadness veils his face; in his eyes shines a chaste grief; he walks as in a daze; looks where there is nothing to see; his unruly locks falling across his forehead bring to mind cypresses and shattered banners.

And there are the deputies: all have been chosen from those who fought most bravely in the war in which Alsace was lost to France.

Over there sits Spuller, Gambetta’s friend. At the reception given by the French Circle of Harmony in honor of their compatriots there had been vague talk full of compliments, talk of historic brotherhood, of generous abstractions. Then Spuller appeared, a veritable lion. At first his speech was like a prayer, he spoke slowly, sadly as one burdened with some pain. Over the august, tearful silence he gradually draped his flaming words; when he drew them to a close the whole audience sprang to its feet; Spuller was sheathed in an invisible flag; the air seemed to vibrate like a smitten sword: Alsace! Alsace!

Now Spuller moves with bowed head, as those who are preparing to charge always do.

The French delegates gathered on that grandstand together with President Cleveland and the country’s personages surrounding him watched the gala parade with which New York celebrated the dedication of the statue: rivers of bayonets, miles of red shirts, gray, blue and green militiamen, a spot of white naval caps, a miniature model of the Monitor on a truck led by a boy in navy uniform.

The artillery in its blue uniforms passes by; the police, marching heavily; the cavalry, with their yellow lapels; on either hand the sidewalks black with people. The “hurrah!” raised at the foot of Central Park passed on from mouth to mouth and died amid the rumble of the Battery. Then pass Columbia University students wearing their square caps; then carriages bearing invalids, veterans and judges; and then Negro groups. Bands are heard; an anthem follows them all the way.

The gallant Seventh Regiment militia gets applause from the grandstand; the 22nd Regiment militiamen are handsome in their campaign capes; two German girls who came with one company hand the President two baskets of flowers; almost speechless, a child dressed in blue presents Lesseps with a silk banner for Bartholdi; the golden clarion notes of the Marseillaise fly over the procession; the President salutes bareheaded the tattered flags; as they pass the grandstand each company dips its colors and each French militia officer kisses the hilt of his sword. There are frantic cheers from the stand, sidewalks and balconies when armless sleeves, bullet-riddled flags, wooden legs pass by.

An old man in a dove-colored cloak drags himself along. Everyone wants to shake his hand. There was a time in his youth when he was a volunteer and pulled a fire engine as bravely as now he drags his old bones. He had broken his arms catching in them a child in flames, and his legs trying to protect an old man from a falling wall. He is followed by firemen dressed as in days of old and pulling their engines by means of ropes. Just as the oldest engine of all, lovingly cared for, brightly polished and laden with flowers, comes shaking on its fragile wheels behind the young redcoats, one of the formidable new engines dashes through the crowd to put out a fire nearby. It leaves the air stricken and warm in its wake. The smoke is black, the horses black. It knocks down carts, runs over people. Puffs of sparks redden its smoky mane.

Then the hook-and-ladder wagon flies by, followed by the enormous pumper as noisy as the artillery.

A bell sounding like an order is heard and the masses respectfully step aside to allow the passage of an ambulance with a wounded person. The regiments can still be heard far away. The golden clarion notes of the Marseillaise still hover over the city.

Then, when the hour came to draw away the flag that veiled the statue’s face, everyone’s heart swelled and it seemed as though the sky had become covered with a canopy of eagle wings. People rushed to the boats as impatiently as would bridegrooms.

Even the steamers, dressed to look like great wreaths, seemed to smile, chatter and bustle about as merrily as girls at a wedding feast.

Everyone’s thoughts were uplifted by a deep feeling of respect as though the festival of liberty evoked all those who have died in its quest. Over our heads a ghostly battle was being waged! Oh, the lances, the shields, the statuesque dead, the superb agonies! One fighter’s shadow alone was as great as a public square. They stood up straight, stretched out their arms, glanced down on men as if they were creating them, and then vanished.

The brightness which suddenly cleaved the dark atmosphere was not from the rays of the sun, but caused by clefts between the shields through which the splendor of the battle pierced the mist. They fought, they fell, they died singing. Such is the triumphal hymn which, better than the sounds of bells and cannon, becomes this statue made, rather than of bronze, of all the sunshine and poetry in the human soul.

From the time the parade was over, until dusk brought an end to the celebrations on the island where the monument stands, New York City and its bay were like one great cannon volley, a ringing of bells, a column of smoke.

The docks, bereft of their steamboats, looked like toothless gums. The continuous cannon volleys increased the rain. Two hundred ships made their way through the brown fog to the island like a procession of elephants. Like pregnant pigeons, the curious steamships crowded around the figure, which could be seen indistinctly towering above them. There was billing and cooing. Bursts of music came from the steam ships like detached wings. Even those who have not suffered for freedom can understand the frantic joy that crazed all souls when, at last, their eyes caught sight of that figure whom all address as a beloved mistress.

There she stands, at last, on her pedestal taller than the towers, splendid as a storm and kind as the sky! In her presence eyes once again knew what tears are. It was as though souls opened and flew to take refuge among the folds of her tunic, to whisper in her ear, to perch on her shoulders, to die like butterflies in her light. She seemed alive, wrapped in clouds of smoke, crowned by a vague brightness, truly like an altar with streamers kneeling at her feet! Not even Rhodes’s Apollo, with the urn of fire on his head and the dart of light in his hand, was higher; nor Phidias’s all gold-and-ivory Jupiter, son of the age when men were still women; nor the Hindus’ statue of Sumnat, inlaid with precious stones like their fancy; nor the two thirsty statues at Thebes, captive at the desert soul on their chiseled pedestals; nor the foul colossi guarding by the mouth of a cavern the temple at Ipsambul. She is greater than the Saint Charles Borromeo in crude bronze on the hill at Arona by the lake; greater than the Virgin at Puy, a low-flighted conception on the mount overlooking the hamlet; greater than the Cheruscian Armenius who rises over the Teutoburg gate summoning with his sword the German tribesmen to rout Varus’s legions; greater than the Niderwald “Germania,” a sterile armored beauty who opens not her arms; greater than Schwanthaler’s “Bavaria,” who proudly crowns herself on the Munich plain, with a lion at her feet; over and above the churches of all creeds and all the buildings of men. She rises from out of a star-shaped pedestal, “Liberty Enlightening the World,” without any lion or sword. She is made of all the art there is in the Universe, even as Liberty is made of all the sufferings of mankind.

She has Moses’s Tablets of the Law, Minerva’s uplifted arm, Apollo’s flaming torch, the Sphinx’s mysterious expression, Christianity’s airy diadem.

Even as mountains rise out of the depths of the earth, so has this statue, “an immense idea in an immense form,” sprung from the brave aspiration of the human soul.

Man’s soul is peace, light and purity. Simply clad, Liberty seeks heaven as her natural abode. Girdles are painful to Liberty; she disdains crowns that hide her forehead; she loves nakedness as symbolic of Nature; Liberty stands pure in the light from which she was born.

Thus the tunic and the peplum befit Liberty as a protection against unlove and impure desire. Sadness also becomes her, that sadness which will only leave her eyes when all men love each other. It is right that she be barefoot, as one who only feels life in her heart. The diadem, made of the fire of her thoughts, emerges naturally from her temples, and even as a mountain ends in its peak so does the statue taper to the torch above in a condensation of light.

At the foot of the statue, the grandstand built for the occasion from fresh pine trees and adorned with virgin flags seemed as small as a poppy. The more favored guests occupied the platform in front of the stand. The whole island was like one human being.

How the people roared when their President, who had come up as they had from the worker’s bench, stepped into the official launch to go and accept the image in which every man seems to see himself redeemed and uplifted! Only an earthquake is comparable to such an explosion.

The rumble of cannon smothered out the clamor of men. The steam compressed in the boilers of factories and ships escaped in unison with a mad, stirring, wild jubilation. At times it seemed as though the soul of the Indian charged across the sky yelling its war cry; or that churches knelt, their belfries bent over, their bells pealing; or that from the steamers’ chimneys came, now weak, now strident, the cock’s crow, the symbol of victory.

What was enormous became childlike: steam rushed in the boilers; lighters frolicked through the fog; the crowds on the steamers nagged the bands; stokers, garbed in gold by the glare of the fire, poked coal into the furnaces; through puffs of smoke one could see sailors standing on the yards of navy vessels.

At the grandstand the commander-in-chief of the American army called in vain for silence, waving his black three-cornered hat. Nor did the Reverend Storrs’s prayer, lost in the confusion, quiet the bustle. But Lesseps did conquer it, Lesseps with his 80-year-old head bare in the rain. The magnificent spectacle was unforgettable. The great old man had not simply stood but jumped to his feet.

A small man: he would fit in the hollow of the Statue of Liberty’s hand, started to speak. His voice was so firm and fresh that the illustrious gathering, fascinated, enraptured, hailed that human monument with an interminable cheer. Compared to this man, accustomed to severing continents in order to join seas, what was all that clatter, the clamor of machines, the cannonade from the ships, the monument which towered above him?

Why, he even provoked laughter there in front of the statue with his first words! “That steam, American citizens, which has done so much good to the world, at this moment I find very obnoxious and harmful.”

Marvelous old man! Americans do not like him because he is doing, in spite of them, what they have not had the courage to do. But with his first words he won them over. Then he read his speech written in his own hand on big, white, loose sheets of paper. He spoke familiarly or gave familiar form to graver matters. From the way he phrases his sentences we can see how it has been easy for him to reshape the earth. Within his every idea, no bigger than a nutshell, is contained a mountain.

As he speaks he moves incessantly; he turns to every side so as to face everyone. When he utters some phrases he drives them home with a movement of his head. He speaks a martial French, resonant like bronze. His favorite gesture is to raise his arm rapidly. He knows the land should be trodden victoriously. His voice as he talks on grows stronger instead of weaker. His short phrases are wavy and pointed like pennants. He was invited by the American government as the foremost Frenchman of his time.

“I have hastened to come,” he says as he lays his hand on the flag of France draped in front of the rostrum; “the idea of erecting the Statue of Liberty does honor to those who conceived it as it likewise does to those who with understanding have received it.” To him France is the mother of nations and with exceptional skill he mentions without contra diction the opinion expressed by Hepworth Dixon: “An English historian, Hepworth Dixon, in his book New America, after having said of your constitution that it is not a product of the soil, and that it does not emanate from the English idea, adds it can, on the contrary, be regarded as an exotic plant born in the atmosphere of France.”

He does not deal in symbols but in objects. Things exist, in his opinion, according to what they are good for. The Statue of Liberty leads him to his Panama Canal. “You like men who dare and persevere. I say, like you, ‘Go ahead!’ We understand each other when I use that term!”

Oh, benevolent old man! Before he sits down, rewarded by the applause even of his opponents, astounded and won over, let thanks reach him from us “down there,” from the America which has not yet had her fiesta, because he remembered our peoples and pronounced our for gotten name on that historic day when America consecrated Liberty, for who have better known how to die for her than we? Or loved her more?

“Until we meet again in Panama, where the 38 stars of North America will soon float at the side of the banners of the independent States of South America, and will form in the New World, for the benefit of all mankind, the peaceful and prolific alliance of the Franco-Latin and the Anglo-Saxon races!”

Good old serpent charmer! Lucid soul who sees the greatness of our hearts under our bloodstained garments! The other America loves you because you spoke of Liberty as though she were your daughter!

Before Senator Evarts got up to offer the statue to the President of the United States on behalf of the American Commission, the audience, stirred by Lesseps’s words, insisted on greeting Bartholdi, who, with becoming modesty, stood and gratefully acknowledged the tribute. Senator Evarts’s speeches are characterized by noble language and lofty content, and his eloquence, deft and genuine, reaches the heart because it is born of the heart.

But his voice fades when he read from narrow sheets his speech depicting France’s generosity in phrases like ribbons and pompons. After Lesseps he seemed a stooping reed: his head is all forehead; his inspiration finds difficulty in shining through his lean, parched face; he is dressed in a frock coat with turned-up collar and a black cap on his head.

Before he concluded his speech someone mistakenly thought the expected moment had arrived when the banner covering the face of the statue would be drawn, and the navy, the ships, the city broke out in a unanimous din that seemed to ascend to high heaven from a shield of resounding bronze. Astounding pomp! Sublime majesty! Never did a people incline with greater reverence before any altar! Men at the foot of the pedestal, stunned by their own smallness, looked at each other as if they had fallen from above. Far away the cannon boomed, masts disappeared in the smoke, the growing clamor spread through the air. In the distance the statue seemed like a huge mother among the clouds.

President Cleveland seemed entirely worthy of speaking in her presence. His style too has marrow, his accent is sincere, his voice warm, clear and powerful. He suggests more than he explains. He said such broad, lofty things as sound well before a monument. His left hand res ted on the rostrum rail, his right he sank under the lapel of his frock coat. His glance had that challenge which becomes honest winners.

Shall we not forgive for being haughty one who knows he is surrounded by enemies because he is pure? His mind is compensation for his overflowing fleshiness. He looks what he is, kind and strong. Lesseps glanced upon him affectionately as if wanting to make friends.

He too, like Lesseps, bared his head to speak. His words brought forth applause not so much for the pompous phrase and commanding gesture, as for their vibrating tone and sound sense. If the statue could be melted into words, they would say the same: “This token of the love and esteem of the French people proves the kinship between republics and assures us that we have a firm ally across the Atlantic in our efforts to recommend to all men the excellence of a government built on the will of the people.” “We are not here today to bow our heads before the image of a warlike and fearful god, full of wrath and vengeance, but to contemplate joyfully our own goddess guarding the gates of America, greater than all those the ancients worshiped, a goddess who instead of wielding the bolts of terror and death, raises to heaven the beacon that lights the way to man’s emancipation.” The long applause that rewarded this honest man came from loving hearts.

Then Chauncey Depew, “the silver orator,” began the main oration. It must have been good when he was able to hold untiringly the public’s attention at a late hour.

Who is Chauncey Depew? All that talent can be without generosity. Railroads are his business, millions his figures, emperors his public, the Vanderbilts his friends and Maecenas. Men are of little concern to him, railroads of much. He has a preying eye, a broad, haughty brow, a hooked nose, a thin, narrow upper lip, a long, pointed, close-shaven chin. He is idolized here because his speech is brilliant and harmonious, his will aggressive and sharp, his judgment keen and sure. On this occasion his fresh, versatile style did not sparkle as it often does in his much praised after-dinner talks, nor did he present a point with irrefutable logic as when he pleads a case as lawyer and rail road executive, nor had he adversaries to browbeat mercilessly as he is reputed doing at the malignant, fearful performances of political meetings. Instead, he told in fiery phrases the generous life of him who, not satisfied with having helped Washington found his nation, returned — blessed be the Marquis de Lafayette! — to ask the North American Congress to free “his Negro brothers.”

In ardent paragraphs he described the friendly talks between Lafayette and Washington at the latter’s modest Mount Vernon home and the speech with which the Marquis, “purified by battles and privations,” took leave of the American Congress, in which he saw “an immense temple of liberty, a lesson to all the oppressors and a hope to all the oppressed of the world.”

The year of 1793 did not appall him, nor the dungeon at Olmütz tame him, nor Napoleon’s victory convince him. To one who really feels liberty in his heart, what are persecutions but challenges, or unjust empires but soap bubbles? It is such men of instinct that guide the world. They act first and reason after. Thought corrects their errors, but lacks the virtue of sudden action. The feel and push. Thus by the will of nature it is written that things should be in the history of man!

Chauncey Depew looked like a magistrate when, shaking his arm and a trembling forefinger over his head covered with a silk cap, he summarized admirably the benefits man enjoys in this land founded on liberty; and with all the fire of a charger that feels his loins sorely spurred, he transformed his hidden fear into bravery, rose up in the name of free institutions to attack the fanatics who, under their protection, would seek to defeat them, and having learned the lesson of the social problem spreading over the United States, this “silver-worded” gentleman humbled the pride for which he is noted and drew out inspired strains to utter as his own the very phrases which are the gospel of the workers’ revolution.

Oh, Liberty, how convincing is thy shadow: those who hate thee or use thee bow before the commanding gesture!

Then a bishop appeared on the rostrum. He raised an age-bitten hand; all around the men of genius and of power stood up. There was a magnificent silence while he blessed in the name of God the redeeming statue. Guided by the bishop the audience intoned a slow, soft hymn, a mystic doxology. A sign from the top of the torch indicated the ceremony was over.

Streams of people, fearful of grim night, rushed to the narrow wharves, without concern for age or rank. Bands were heard vaguely as though lulled by the evening twilight.

The weight of joy rather than the weight of people seemed to load down the ships. Cannon smoke covered the official launch that carried the president back to the city. High above, the astonished birds circled fearfully around the statue as though it were the top of a new mountain. Men felt their hearts were firmer within their breasts.

When, among shadows, the last boats left the shores of the island, now transformed into an altar, a crystal-clear voice breathed out a popular melody which passed from ship to ship. Garlands of lights, reddening the sky’s canopy, shone from the cornices of buildings. A song, at once soft and formidable, spread at the statue’s feet and along the river. A united people, pressed together on the sterns of ships, gazing toward the island, with an unction fortified by night, sang: “Farewell, my only love!”

New York, October 29, 1886