, who possessed then a whole world on the
continent of America. Well, twenty-four years later, France aided your
America in its struggle for independence; and oh! feel not offended in
your proud power of to-day, when I say that independence would not then
have been achieved without the aid of France.

Since that time, France has been twice a Republic, and changed its
constitutions thirteen times; and, though thirty-six millions strong, it
has lost every foot of land on the continent of America, and at home it
lies prostrated beneath the feet of the most inglorious usurper that
ever dared to raise ambition's bloody seat upon the ruins of liberty.
And your Republic? It has grown a giant of power. And Ohio? out of the
ruins of a trading-house into a mighty commonwealth of two millions of
free and happy men, who shout out with a voice like the thunderstorm, to
the despots of the Old World, "ye shall stop in your ambitious way
before the power of freedom, ready to protect the common laws of all
humanity."

What a glorious triumph of your institutions over the principles of
CENTRALIZED government!

Oh! may all the generations yet unborn, and all the millions who will
yet gather in this New World of the West, which soon will preponderate
in the scale of the Union, where all the west weighed nothing fifty
years ago--may they all ever and ever remember the high instruction
which the Almighty has revealed in this parallel of different results.

Sir, you say that Ohio can show no battle field connected with
recollections of your own glorious revolution. Let me answer, that the
whole West is a monument, and Cincinnati the fair cornice of it. If your
eastern sister States have instructed the world how nations become
independent and free, the West shows to the world what a nation once
independent and really free can become.

Allow me to declare, that by standing before the world as such an
instructive example, you exercise the most effective revolutionary
propaganda; for if the mis-result of French revolutions discourage the
nations from shaking off the 'oppressors' yoke, your victory,--and still
more, your unparalleled prosperity,--has encouraged oppressed nations to
dare what you dared.

Egotists and hypocrites may say that you are not responsible for it; you
have bid nobody to follow you:--and it may be true that you are not
responsible before a tribunal. Still, you are sufficiently free not to
feel offended by a true wor