In that hour of fate France appeared willingly on the scene as our champion. She succored us. Whatever may have been her motive, she put her ægis over our head. She sent her heroes to our camps; she gave us Lafayette and Rochambeau. She placed her fleets at our ports, with guns pointed seaward for protection. Then, when the fight was won, she aided us to enlarge our territories, to confirm our new republican empire. Though in the afterdays of her monarchical gloom France sometimes looked askance at our flag, the French nation was never once disloyal to us--never once indifferent to the fate of our great democracy. In our institutional development for more than a century we have proceeded on the same general lines with the French. If we are satisfied with the result--if we _believe_ in our republic--we ought, in good reason, to believe in the republic of France; for the republic is a universal fact, little trammelled by locality. The barrier of race ought not to predominate over political and social sympathies. The barrier of race ought not to separate us from our own. The fact that we are allied in ethnic descent with the English people ought not to make us enamored of the social life and civil institutions of Great Britain. Much less should the industrial and commercial life of England allure us as if to provoke a like manner of life in ourselves. Least of all should the financial method of Great Britain lead us by imitation to fix upon ourselves a similar incubus and horror. This leads us to say that to break away from Great Britain, even when incited thereto by the antipathy and prejudice which we must needs hold against her; to leave her behind; to treat her as a historical fact not favorable, but inimical rather, to our progress and independent destiny,--seems to be the hardest task imposed upon the American democracy. The preference of race and language is so profound, the influences of the commercial life are so far-reaching, the admiration for political stability is so natural, the domination of centralized wealth is so overwhelming, and the allurements of consolidated power so well calculated to fascinate the masses, that even American democracy has found it hard to break the British tie and sail away uncabled and disenchanted on the sea.