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.]

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: 'Pe