who now count over fifty millions, but it has
made happier than they were before the nations of the Old World, too;
who, combined, count a great many more. [Applause.]

American Independence was declared at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, by
those who were born upon this soil, but American Independence was
virtually accomplished by that very warlike event I speak of, on the
field of Yorktown, where the Old World lent a helping hand to the New.
[Applause.] To be sure, there was a part of the Old World consisting of
the British, and I am sorry to say, some German soldiers, who strove to
keep down the aspirations of the New, but they were there in obedience
to the command of a power which they were not able to resist, while that
part of the Old World which fought upon the American side was here of
its own free will as volunteers. [Cheers.]

It might be said that most of the regular soldiers of France were here
also by the command of power, but it will not be forgotten that there
was not only Lafayette, led here by his youthful enthusiasm for the
American cause, but there was France herself, the great power of the Old
World appearing as a volunteer on a great scale. [Cheers.] So were there
as volunteers those who brought their individual swords to the service
of the New World. There was the gallant Steuben, the great organizer who
trained the American army to victory, a representative of that great
nation whose monuments stand not only upon hundreds of battle-fields of
arms, but whose prouder monuments stand upon many more battle-fields of
thought. [Cheers.] There was Pulaski, the Pole, and DeKalb who died for
American Independence before it was achieved. And there were many more
Frenchmen, Germans, Swedes, Hollanders, Englishmen even, who did not
obey the behests of power. [Cheers.] And so it may be said that the
cause of the New World was the cause of the volunteers of the Old. And
it has remained the cause of volunteers in peace as well as in war, for
since then we have received millions of them, and they are arriving now
in a steady stream, thousands of them every week; I have the honor to
say, gentlemen, that I am one of them. [Cheers.]

Nor is it probable that this volunteering in mass will ever stop, for it
is in fact drawn over here by the excitement of war as much as by the
victories of peace. It was, therefore, natural that the great
celebration of that warlike event should have been turned or rather that
it shou