but a desire
to consult the Court of Madrid being allowed to retard them; and on the
6th of February, 1778, the first treaty between the United States and a
foreign power was signed with all the formalities which custom has
attached to these acts. On the 20th of March the Commissioners were
presented to the King.

Nor was it mere curiosity which filled the halls of the royal palace
with an eager throng on that eventful day. These were the halls which
had witnessed the gathering of powerful men and of great men to the
footstool of the haughtiest of French kings,--which had seen a Conde and
a Turenne lay down their laurels at the royal feet, a Bossuet and a
Boileau check the flow of independent thought to bask them in the beams
of the royal smile, a Fenelon retiring with saddened brow to record for
posterity the truths which he was not permitted to utter to the royal
ear, a Racine shrinking from the cold glance of the royal eye and going
home to die of a broken heart. Here Louis had signed the decree which
sent his dragoons to force his Protestant subjects to the mass and the
confessional; here he had received with a smile of triumph the tidings
that the Pope himself had been compelled to yield to his arrogant
pretensions; and here he had listened in haughty state, when one of the
last of the glorious republics of the Middle Ages, the city of Columbus
and Andrew Doria, which had once covered the Mediterranean with her
ships, and sent forth her hardy mariners, as from a nursery of brave
men, to impart their skill and communicate their enterprising genius to
the rest of Europe, humbled herself before him through her Doge, as,
bowing his venerable head, the old man asked pardon in her name, not for
the wrongs that she had committed, but for the wrongs that she had
borne.

And now, up those marble stairs, through those tapestried halls, came
three men of humble birth, two of whom had wrought for their daily bread
and eaten it in the sweat of their brows, to receive their recognition
as the representatives of a power which had taken its place among the
nations, not by virtue of the divine right of kings, but in the name of
the inalienable rights of the people. Happy would it have been for the
young King who sat in Louis's seat, if he could have understood the full
meaning of his act, and recognized at the same moment the claims of his
own people to participate in that government which derived its strength
from their labor an