“MY DEAR MARQUIS: You will be astonished to see so ancient a date upon the letter which I send you, if I did not say to you that the ship which was to have carried this letter has since returned. Nothing new has occurred since then, and I would not give you the weariness of a second epistle, if I had not forgotten to say to you that Madam Washington sends to Madame de La Fayette a cask of ham. I know not if these are better, or even as good, as those in France, but these are of our own making, and you know that the ladies of Virginia pride themselves upon the excellence of their ham, and we remember that it was a dish much to your taste. She has therefore desired that I offer them to you. I had wished to send with them a barrel of old brandy peaches, but I have not been able to procure enough of good quality to be placed by the side of your luscious wines, and so I send them not. After all, these two gifts would be more proper to offer as a ration after a long march in the rain than to figure upon your table in Paris.” The Honorable Chauncey M. Depew, in his memorial address, delivered at the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, the gift of France to America, thus ably comments upon the French alliance, and the character of General La Fayette:— “The French alliance, which enabled us to win our independence, is the romance of history. It overcame improbabilities impossible in fiction, and its results surpass the dreams of imagination. The most despotic of kings, surrounded by the most exclusive of feudal aristocracies, sending fleets and armies officered by the scions of the proudest of nobilities to fight for subjects in revolt and the liberties of the common people, is a paradox beyond the power of mere human energy to have wrought or solved. The march of this mediæval chivalry across our states, respecting persons and property as soldiers never had before, never taking an apple or touching a fence-rail without permission and payment, treating the ragged Continentals as if they were knights in armor and of noble ancestry, captivating our grandmothers by their gallantry, and our grandfathers by their courage, remains unequalled in the poetry of war. It is the most magnificent tribute in history to the volcanic force of ideas and the dynamitic power of truth, though the crust of the globe imprison them. In the same ignorance and fearlessness with which a savage plays about a powder magazine with a torch, the Bourbon king and his court, buttressed by the consent of centuries and the unquestioned possession of every power to the state, sought relief from cloying pleasures and vigor for enervated minds in permitting and encouraging the loftiest genius and the most impassioned eloquence of the time to discuss the rights and liberties of man. With the orator the themes were theories which fired only his imagination, and with the courtiers they were pastimes or jests. Neither speakers nor listeners saw any