That spirit was native to Holland. But that spirit was also widely in France. The old temper and enthusiasm for liberty, both civil and religious, had not passed away. Sixty years and more since the accession of Louis XV had perhaps only intensified this spirit. It had entered the higher philosophical minds. They were meditating the questions of the true social order, with daring disregard of all existing institutions, and their spirit and instructions found an echo even in our Declaration of Independence. They made it more theoretical than English state papers have usually been. Palpably, the same spirit which afterward broke into fierce exhibition, when the Bastille was stormed in 1789, or when the First Republic was declared in 1792, was already at work in France, at work there far more vitally and energetically than was yet recognized by those in authority; while it wrought perhaps in the field offered by this country, more eagerly and largely because it was repressed at home. So it was that so many brilliant Frenchmen came as glad volunteers. It was because of this electric and vital spirit looking toward freedom. Travelling was slow. Communication between continents was tardy and difficult. A sailing ship, dependent upon the wind, hugged the breeze or was driven before the blast across the stormy North Atlantic. The steamship was unknown. The telegraph wire was no more imagined than it was imagined that the Rhine might flow a river of flame or that the Jungfrau or the Weisshorn might go out on a journey.