r,
Dieu juste! et fait entrer dans l'homme tant d'azur
Qu'elle a supprime les patries!

Faisant a l'homme avec le ciel une cite,
Une pensee avec toute l'immensite,
Elle abolit les vieilles regles;
Elle abaisse les monts, elle annule les tours;
Splendide, elle introduit les peuples, marcheurs lourds,
Dans la communion des aigles.

3.

Between 1830 and 1850 railway transport spread throughout Great Britain
and was introduced on the Continent, and electricity was subdued to
man's use by the invention of telegraphy. The great Exhibition of London
in 1851 was, in one of its aspects, a public recognition of the material
progress of the age and the growing power of man over the physical
world. Its aim, said a contemporary, was "to seize the living scroll
of human progress, inscribed with every successive conquest of man's
intellect."[Footnote: Edinburgh Review (October 1851), p. 562, in a
review of the Official Catalogue of the Exhibition.] The Prince Consort,
who originated the Exhibition, explained its significance in a public
speech:

"Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our
present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of
most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great
end to which indeed all history points--THE REALISATION OF THE UNITY
OF MANKIND.... The distances which separated the different nations and
parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of
modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the
languages of all nations are known, and their acquirements placed within
the reach of everybody; thought is communicated with the rapidity, and
even by the power, of lightning. On the other hand, the GREAT PRINCIPLE
OF DIVISION OF LABOUR, which may be called the moving power of
civilisation, is being extended to all branches of science, industry,
and art... Gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test
and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of
mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting-point from
which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions."
[Footnote: Martin, Life of the Prince Consort (ed. 3), iii. p. 247.
The speech was delivered at a banquet at the Mansion House on March 21,
1850.]

The point emphasised here is the "solidarity" of the world. The
Exhibition is to bring home to men's consciousness the community of a