Go forth, then, language of Milton and Hampden, language of my country, take possession of the North American continent!  Gladden the waste places with every tone that has been rightly struck on the English lyre, with every English word that has been spoken well for liberty and for man!  Give an echo to the now silent and solitary mountains; gush out with the fountains that as yet sing their anthems all day long without response; fill the valleys with the voices of love in its purity, the pledges of friendship in its faithfulness; and as the morning sun drinks the dewdrops from the flowers all the way from the dreary Atlantic to the Peaceful Ocean, meet him with the joyous hum of the early industry of freemen!  Utter boldly and spread widely through the world the thoughts of the coming apostles of the people’s liberty, till the sound that cheers the desert shall thrill through the heart of humanity, and the lips of the messenger of the people’s power, as he stands in beauty upon the mountains, shall proclaim the renovating tidings of equal freedom for the race!...

France, of all the states on the continent of Europe the most powerful by territorial unity, wealth, numbers, industry, and culture, seemed also by its place marked out for maritime ascendency.  Set between many seas, it rested upon the Mediterranean, possessed harbors on the German Ocean, and embraced within its wide shores and jutting headlands, the bays and open, waters of the Atlantic; its people, infolding at one extreme the offspring of colonists from Greece, and at the other, the hardy children of the Northmen, were called, as it were, to the inheritance of life upon the sea.  The nation, too, readily conceived or appropriated great ideas, and delighted in bold resolves.  Its travellers had penetrated farthest into the fearful interior of unknown lands; its missionaries won most familiarly the confidence of the aboriginal hordes; its writers described with keener and wiser observation the forms of nature in her wildness, and the habits and languages of savage man; its soldiers,—­and every lay Frenchman in America owed military service,—­uniting beyond all others celerity with courage, knew best how to endure the hardships of forest life and to triumph in forest warfare.  Its ocean chivalry had given a name and a colony to Carolina, and its merchants a people to Acadia.  The French discovered the basin of the St. Lawrence; were the first to explore and possess the banks of the Mississippi, and planned an American empire that should unite the widest valleys and most copious inland waters of the world.

But new France was governed exclusively by the monarchy of its metropolis; and was shut against the intellectual daring of its philosophy, the liberality of its political economists, the movements of its industrial genius, its legal skill, and its infusion of Protestant freedom.  Nothing representing the new activity of thought in modern France, went to America.  Nothing had leave to go there but what was old and worn out.