What an impulse was given to the same spirit in France we know.  At first, it fell upon a people not altogether prepared to receive it.  There was, therefore, a passionate effervescence, a fierce ebullition into popular violence and popular outrage which darkened for the time the world’s annals.  But we know that the spirit never died; and through all the winding and bloody paths in which it has marched, it has brought France the fair consummation of its present power and wealth and renown. [Cheers.] We rejoice in its multiform manufactures, which weave the woollen or silken fibre into every form and tissue of fabric; in the delicate, dainty skill which keeps the time of all creation with its watchwork and clockwork; which ornaments beauty with its jewelry, and furnishes science with its finest instruments; we rejoice in the 14,000 miles of railway there constructed, almost all of it within forty years; we rejoice in the riches there accumulated; we rejoice in the expansion of the population from the twenty-three millions of the day of Yorktown to the thirty-eight millions of the present; but we rejoice more than all in the liberal spirit evermore there advancing, which has built the fifteen universities, and gathered the 41,000 students into them; which builds libraries and higher seminaries, and multiplies common schools:  which gives liberty if not license to the press. [Cheers.]

We rejoice in the universal suffrage which puts the 532 deputies into the Chamber and which combines the Chamber of Deputies with the Senate into a National Assembly to elect the President of the Republic.  We rejoice in the rapid political education now and always going on in France, and that she is to be hereafter a noble leader in Europe, in illustrating the security and commending the benefits of Republican institutions. [Applause.]

France has been foremost in many things; she was foremost in chivalry, and the most magnificent spectacles and examples which that institution ever furnished were on her fields.  She was foremost in the Crusades and the volcanic country around Auvergne was not more full of latent fire than was the spirit of her people at the Council of Clermont or before the appeal of Peter the Hermit and St. Bernard.  She led the march of philosophical discussion in the Middle Ages.  She has been foremost in many achievements of science and art.  She is foremost to-day in piercing with tunnels the mountain-chains, that the wheels of trade may roll unobstructed through rocky barriers, and cutting canals through the great isthmuses that the keels of commerce may sweep unhindered across the seas.  But she has never yet had an office so illustrious as that which falls to her now—­to show Europe how Republican institutions stimulate industry, guarantee order, promote all progress in enterprise and in thought, and are the best and surest security for a nation’s grandest advancement.

That enthusiasm which has led her always to champion ideas, which led her soldiers to say in the first Revolution:  “With bread and iron we will march to China,” entering now into fulfilment of this great office, will carry her influence to China and beyond it; her peaceful influence on behalf of the liberty for which she fought with us at Yorktown, and for which she has bled and struggled with a pathetic and lofty stubbornness ever since. [Cheers.]