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[457] the thoughts of the coming apostles of the people's
chap. XX.} 1763.
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!

England exulted in its conquests; enjoying the glory of extended dominion in the confident expectation of a boundless increase of wealth. But its success was due to its haying taken the lead in the good old struggle for liberty; and was destined to bring fruits, not so much to itself, as to the cause of freedom and mankind.

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,

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