During his absence Congress met and received a message from the President which set forth Lafayette’s past services to the country, the great enthusiasm with which the people had welcomed him, and recommended that a gift should be made him which should be worthy of the character and greatness of the American nation. Senator Hayne described how the rights and pay belonging to his rank in the army had never been claimed by Lafayette and how the land that had been given him in 1803 had afterward through a mistake been granted to the city of New Orleans. Then Congress unanimously passed a bill directing the treasurer of the United States to pay to General Lafayette, as a recognition of services that could never be sufficiently recognized or appreciated, the sum of two hundred thousand dollars. When he returned to Washington he went to the Capitol, where Congress received him in state, every member springing to his feet in welcome to the nation’s guest. Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, held out his hand to the gallant Frenchman. “The vain wish has been sometimes indulged,” said Henry Clay to Lafayette, “that Providence would allow the patriot, after death, to return to his country and to contemplate the immediate changes which had taken place; to view the forests felled, the cities built, the mountains leveled, the canals cut, the highways constructed, the progress of the arts, the advancement of learning, and the increase of population. General, your present visit to the United States is a realization of the consoling object of that wish. You are in the midst of posterity. Everywhere you must have been struck with the great changes, physical and moral, which have occurred since you left us. Even this very city, bearing a venerated name, alike endeared to you and to us, has since emerged from the forest which then covered its site. In one respect you behold us unaltered, and this is the sentiment of continued devotion to liberty, and of ardent affection and profound gratitude to your departed friend, the Father of his Country, and to you, and to your illustrious associates in the field and in the Cabinet, for the multiplied blessings which surround us, and for the very privilege of addressing you which I now exercise. This sentiment, now fondly cherished by more than ten millions of people, will be transmitted with unabated vigor down the tide of time, through the countless millions who are destined to inhabit this continent to the latest posterity.” Henry Clay was a great prophet as well as a great orator. We know now how the affection of the United States for Lafayette has grown and grown during the century in which the republic has stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and its people increased from ten millions to more than a hundred millions.