of freemen! Utter boldly and spread widely through the world the
thoughts of the coming apostles of the people's liberty, till the sound
that cheers the desert shall thrill through the heart of humanity, and
the lips of the messenger of the people's power, as he stands in beauty
upon the mountains, shall proclaim the renovating tidings of equal
freedom for the race!...

France, of all the states on the continent of Europe the most powerful
by territorial unity, wealth, numbers, industry, and culture, seemed
also by its place marked out for maritime ascendency. Set between many
seas, it rested upon the Mediterranean, possessed harbors on the German
Ocean, and embraced within its wide shores and jutting headlands, the
bays and open, waters of the Atlantic; its people, infolding at one
extreme the offspring of colonists from Greece, and at the other,
the hardy children of the Northmen, were called, as it were, to the
inheritance of life upon the sea. The nation, too, readily conceived or
appropriated great ideas, and delighted in bold resolves. Its travellers
had penetrated farthest into the fearful interior of unknown lands;
its missionaries won most familiarly the confidence of the aboriginal
hordes; its writers described with keener and wiser observation the
forms of nature in her wildness, and the habits and languages of savage
man; its soldiers,--and every lay Frenchman in America owed military
service,--uniting beyond all others celerity with courage, knew best how
to endure the hardships of forest life and to triumph in forest warfare.
Its ocean chivalry had given a name and a colony to Carolina, and its
merchants a people to Acadia. The French discovered the basin of the
St. Lawrence; were the first to explore and possess the banks of the
Mississippi, and planned an American empire that should unite the widest
valleys and most copious inland waters of the world.

But new France was governed exclusively by the monarchy of its
metropolis; and was shut against the intellectual daring of its
philosophy, the liberality of its political economists, the movements of
its industrial genius, its legal skill, and its infusion of Protestant
freedom. Nothing representing the new activity of thought in modern
France, went to America. Nothing had leave to go there but what was old
and worn out.

The colonists from England brought over the forms of the government of
the mother country, and the purpose of giving them a better de