We know, too, what an impulse was given to popular rights and hopes in England.  We rejoice in all the progress of England.  That salute fired at the British flag the other day at Yorktown [cheers] was a stroke of the hammer on the horologe of time, which marks the coming of a new era, when national animosities shall be forgotten, and only national sympathies and good-will shall remain.  It might seem, perhaps, to have in it a tone of the old “diapason of the cannonade”; but on the thoughtful ear, falls from the thundering voice of those guns, a note of that supreme music which fell on the ear of Longfellow, when “like a bell with solemn sweet vibration” he heard “once more the voice of Christ say:  ‘Peace!’” [Loud applause.]

We rejoice in the progress of English manufactures, which extracts every force from each ounce of coal, and pounds or weaves the English iron into nearly everything for human use except boots and brown-bread [laughter]; in the commerce which spreads its sails on all seas; in the wealth and splendor that are assembled in her cities; but we rejoice more than all in the constant progress of those liberal ideas to which such an impulse was given by this victory of Yorktown. [Cheers.] You remember that Fox is said to have heard of it “with a wild delight”; and even he may not have anticipated its full future outcome.  You remember the hissing hate with which he was often assailed, as when the tradesman of Westminster whose vote he had solicited, flung back at him the answer:  “I have nothing for you, sir, but a halter,” to which Fox, by the way, with instant wit and imperturbable good-nature, smilingly responded:  “I could not think, my dear sir, of depriving you of such an interesting family relic.” [Laughter.] Look back to that time and then see the prodigious advance of liberal ideas in England, the changed political condition of the workingman.  Look at the position of that great Commoner, who now regulates the English policy, who equals Fox in his liberal principles and surpasses him in his eloquence—­Mr. Gladstone. [Cheers.] The English troops marched out of Yorktown, after their surrender, to that singularly appropriate tune, as they thought it, “The World Turned Upside Down.” [Laughter.] But that vast disturbance of the old equilibrium which had balanced a King against a Nation, has given to England the treasures of statesmanship, the treasures of eloquence, a vast part of the splendor and the power which are now collected under the reign of that one royal woman in the world, to whom every American heart pays its eager and unforced fealty—­Queen Victoria. [Loud applause.]

We know what an impulse was given to the same spirit in Germany.  Mr. Schurz will tell us of it in eloquent words.  But no discourse that he can utter, however brilliant in rhetoric; no analysis, however lucid; no clear and comprehensive sweep of his thought, though expressed in words which ring in our ears and live in our memories, can so fully and fittingly illustrate it to us as does the man himself, in his character and career—­an Old World citizen of the American Republic whose marvellous mastery of our tough English tongue is still surpassed by his more marvellous mastery over the judgments and the hearts of those who hear him use it. [Cheers.]