is still surpassed by his
more marvellous mastery over the judgments and the hearts of those who
hear him use it. [Cheers.]

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