anissaries rather than for
soldiers of a free State; that it would be, in his judgment,
"superlatively detestable" to aid in any way to overcome the Americans,
whom he regarded as a brave people, righting in a manly, honorable,
religious manner, not for the rights which had come to them, not from
any British legislation but from God Almighty. [Applause.]

That spirit was native to Holland. But that spirit was also widely in
France. The old temper and enthusiasm for liberty, both civil and
religious, had not passed away. Sixty years and more since the accession
of Louis XV had perhaps only intensified this spirit. It had entered the
higher philosophical minds. They were meditating the questions of the
true social order, with daring disregard of all existing institutions,
and their spirit and instructions found an echo even in our Declaration
of Independence. They made it more theoretical than English state papers
have usually been. Palpably, the same spirit which afterward broke into
fierce exhibition, when the Bastille was stormed in 1789, or when the
First Republic was declared in 1792, was already at work in France, at
work there far more vitally and energetically than was yet recognized by
those in authority; while it wrought perhaps in the field offered by
this country, more eagerly and largely because it was repressed at home.
So it was that so many brilliant Frenchmen came as glad volunteers. It
was because of this electric and vital spirit looking toward freedom.
Travelling was slow. Communication between continents was tardy and
difficult. A sailing ship, dependent upon the wind, hugged the breeze or
was driven before the blast across the stormy North Atlantic. The
steamship was unknown. The telegraph wire was no more imagined than it
was imagined that the Rhine might flow a river of flame or that the
Jungfrau or the Weisshorn might go out on a journey.

But there was this distributed spirit of freedom, propagating itself by
means which we cannot wholly trace, and to an extent which was scarcely
recognized, which brought volunteers in such numbers to our shores, that
Washington, you know, at one time, expressed himself as embarrassed to
know what to do with them; and there were fervent and high aspirations
going up from multitudes of households and of hearts in Central and in
Western Europe, which found realization in what we claim as the greatest
and most fruitful of American victories. [Applause.] The impulse