In entering upon the threshold of life, a career was to open before him.  He had the option of the court and the camp.  An office was tendered to him in the household of the King’s brother, the Count de Provence, since successively a royal exile and a reinstated king.  The servitude and inaction of a court had no charms for him; he preferred a commission in the army, and, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, was a captain of dragoons in garrison at Metz.

There, at an entertainment given by his relative, the Marechal de Broglie, the commandant of the place, to the Duke of Gloucester, brother to the British king, and then a transient traveler through that part of France, he learns, as an incident of intelligence received that morning by the English Prince from London, that the congress of rebels at Philadelphia had issued a Declaration of Independence.  A conversation ensues upon the causes which have contributed to produce this event, and upon the consequences which may be expected to flow from it.  The imagination of Lafayette has caught across the Atlantic tide the spark emitted from the Declaration of Independence; his heart has kindled at the shock, and, before he slumbers upon his pillow, he has resolved to devote his life and fortune to the cause.

You have before you the cause and the man.  The self-devotion of Lafayette was twofold.  First to the people, maintaining a bold and seemingly desperate struggle against oppression, and for national existence.  Secondly, and chiefly, to the principles of their declaration, which then first unfurled before his eyes the consecrated standard of human rights.  To that standard, without an instant of hesitation, he repaired.  Where it would lead him, it is scarcely probable that he himself then foresaw.  It was then identical with the Stars and Stripes of the American Union, floating to the breeze from the Hall of Independence, at Philadelphia.  Nor sordid avarice, nor vulgar ambition, could point his footsteps to the pathway leading to that banner.  To the love of ease or pleasure nothing could be more repulsive.  Something may be allowed to the beatings of the youthful breast, which make ambition virtue, and something to the spirit of military adventure, imbibed from his profession, and which he felt in common with many others.  France, Germany, Poland, furnished to the armies of this Union, in our revolutionary struggle, no inconsiderable number of officers of high rank and distinguished merit.  The names of Pulaski and De Kalb are numbered among the martyrs of our freedom, and their ashes repose in our soil side by side with the canonized bones of Warren and of Montgomery.  To the virtues of Lafayette, a more protracted career and happier earthly destinies were reserved.  To the moral principle of political action, the sacrifices of no other man were comparable to his.  Youth, health, fortune; the favor of his king; the enjoyment of ease and pleasure; even the choicest blessings of domestic felicity—­he gave them all for toil and danger in a distant land, and an almost hopeless cause; but it was the cause of justice, and of the rights of human kind. ...