schools of the time.  They were amply provided with the last and choicest equipments of war.  They had gallantly achieved victory, or as gallantly sustained defeat on almost every principal battle-field in Europe.  They were now confronting an enemy whom that army had faced in previous centuries on sea and land; and very likely something of special exhilaration and animation went into their spirit from thought of this, as they assailed the English breastworks, swarming into the trenches, capturing the redoubts, storming the lines with that strange battle-shout, in our republican American air:  “Vive le Roi!” [Applause.]

A singular combination!  Undoubtedly, to unfold the influences which had led to it would take months instead of minutes, and occupy volumes rather than sentences.  I think however, that we reckon too much on national rivalry, or national animosity, when we seek to explain it, although these no doubt had their part in it.  Doubtless the eager efforts of Silas Dean, our first diplomatic representative in Europe—­efforts too eager for courtesy or wisdom—­had a part in it; and the skilful diplomacy of Franklin had, as we know, a large and important influence upon it.  The spirit of adventure, the desire for distinction upon fresh fields, had something to do with it.  But the principal factor in that great effort was the spirit of freedom—­the spirit that looked to the advancement and the maintenance of popular liberty among the peoples of the earth, wherever civilization had gone; that spirit which was notably expressed by Van der Capellen, the Dutch orator and statesman, when he vehemently said, in presence of the States-General of Holland, in reply to an autograph letter of George III soliciting their aid, that this was a business for hired janissaries 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