them as the unavoidable consequences of such a struggle,
and to charge all the blood that was spilt in France, to the tyrants,
abroad and at home, who chose to resist, to death, the rightful
demands of the people.

Those "wonderful people," too, (as they were characterised by Gen.
Washington in '96,) in the midst of the terrific scenes which they
were daily enacting, contrived to throw a grace and a beauty around
their public acts, and to gild even their wildest projects with a
moral sublimity that effectually concealed, at the time, all their
folly and injustice, and gave them a rapturous reception throughout
the United States. Thus, when, in the rage of reformation which seemed
determined to leave nothing of the old order of things remaining,
they resolved to abolish the calendar, and, in lieu of the barbarous
names by which the months had been distinguished, to introduce a new
nomenclature, founded on the exhibitions of nature, in the different
seasons: there was a poetic beauty in the conception and a felicity
of taste in the execution of which no other nation on earth seemed
capable. Their months of buds, flowers and meadows, of harvest, heat
and fruit, of vintage, fog and sleet, of snow, rain and wind, were so
beautiful and so expressive, that they extorted the admiration even
of the reluctant world. Even the wild project of propagating liberty
by the sword, and folding the whole human family in their fraternal
embrace, was so bold and generous and grand, that, in the contemplation
of its magnificence, we forgot its folly. And when, in execution of
this project, the young hero of the republic crossed the Alps, and by
a series of victories that eclipsed the brightest boasts of ancient
history, brought Italy, Austria and Prussia to his feet, it seemed
as if heaven itself had set its seal to the high resolve.

Those days come fresh upon our recollection in consequence of the
recent movement in France. There are not many of us now alive who were
old enough then to understand and recollect them. The first shock
of the revolution, the storming of the bastile, struck this whole
continent, from one end to the other, like an electric flash, and I
believe that there was not a man in the United States whose first
impulse it was not to rush to the side of the gallant people of France,
and to triumph or die in their cause. Had it not been for the barrier
of the ocean, there were hundreds and thousands of our countrymen who
w