Mounting his horse, and riding to the eastern end of the island, Samana, he looked out on a sight such as no native had ever seen before.  Sixty ships of the line, crowded by the best soldiers of Europe, rounded the point.  They were soldiers who had never yet met an equal, whose tread, like Caesar’s, had shaken Europe,—­soldiers who had scaled the Pyramids, and planted the French banners on the walls of Rome.  He looked a moment, counted the flotilla, let the reins fall on the neck of his horse, and, turning to Christophe, exclaimed:  “All France is come to Hayti; they can only come to make us slaves; and we are lost.”  He then recognized the only mistake of his life,—­his confidence in Bonaparte, which had led him to disband his army.  Returning to the hills, he issued the only proclamation which bears his name and breathes vengeance:  “My children, France comes to make us slaves.  God gave us liberty; France has no right to take it away.  Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, tear up the roads with cannon, poison the wells, show the white man the hell he comes to make”; and he was obeyed.  When the great William of Orange saw Louis XIV. cover Holland with troops, he said, “Break down the dykes, give Holland back to ocean”; and Europe said, “Sublime!” When Alexander saw the armies of France descend upon Russia, he said:  “Burn Moscow, starve back the invaders”; and Europe said, “Sublime!” This black saw all Europe marshalled to crush him, and gave to his people the same heroic example of defiance.

* * * * *

=_Thomas Starr King, 1824-1864._= (Manual, p. 532.)

From “Patriotism and other Papers.”

=_174._= GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES.

If we go to Nature for our morals, we shall learn the necessity of perfection in the smallest act.  Infinite skill is not exhausted nor concentrated in the structure of a firmament, in drawing the orbit of a planet, in laying the strata of the earth, in rearing the mountain cone.  The care for the bursting flower is as wise as the forces displayed in the rolling star; the smallest leaf that falls and dies unnoticed in the forest is wrought with a beauty as exquisite as the skill displayed in the sturdy oak.  All the wisdom of Nature is compressed and revealed in the sting of the bee; and the pride of human art is mocked by the subtile mechanism and cunning structure of a fly’s foot and wing.  However minute the task, it reveals the polish of perfection.  Omnipotent skill is stamped on the infinitely small, as on the infinitely great.  It is a moral stenography like this which we need in daily life....  The lesson of Christianity, then, urged and enforced by Nature, is the inestimable worth of common duties, as manifesting the greatest principles; it bids us attain perfection, not by striving to do dazzling deeds, but by making our experience divine; it tells us that the Christian hero will ennoble the humblest field of labor; that nothing is mean which can be performed as duty; but that religious virtue, like the touch of Midas, converts the humblest call of conscience into spiritual gold.