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 given by that victory to the same spirit is one on which we can never look back without gratitude and gladness.  It was an impulse not confined to one nation but common to all which had had part in the struggle.  We know what an impulse it gave to everything greatest and best in our own country.  The spirit of popular exhilaration, rising from that victory at Yorktown, was a force which really established and moulded our national Government.  The nation rose to one of those exalted points, those supreme levels, in its public experience, where it found a grander wisdom, where it had nobler forecast than perhaps it otherwise could have reached.  In consequence of it, our Government came, which has stood the storm and stress of a hundred years.  We may have to amend its Constitution in time to come, as it has been amended in the past; but we have become a nation by means of it.  It commands the attention—­to some extent, the admiration—­of other people of the earth; at all events, it is bound to endure upon this continent as long as there remains a continent here for it to rest upon. [Cheers.]

Then came the incessant movement westward:  the vast foreign immigration, the occupation of the immense grainfields, which might almost feed the hungry world; the multiplication of manufacturers, supplying everything, nearly, that we need; the uncovering of mines, bringing out the wealth which has actually disturbed the money standards of the world; the transforming of territories into States by a process as swift and magical almost as that by which the turbid mixture of the chemist is crystallized into its delicate and translucent spars; the building of an empire on the Western coast, looking out toward the older continent of Asia. [Cheers.]