ns, publicists, philosophers, painters, sculptors, musicians;
majesty, grace, power, force, splendour, colour, form, style; it renews
its strength in the real and in the ideal, and bears in its hand the
two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful. In science it
accomplishes unheard-of miracles; it makes of cotton saltpetre, of
steam a horse, of the voltaic battery a workman, of the electric fluid
a messenger, of the sun a painter; it waters itself with subterranean
streams, pending the time when it shall warm itself with the central
fire; it opens upon the two infinites those two windows, the telescope
upon the infinitely great, the microscope upon the infinitely little,
and it finds stars in the first abyss, and insects in the second, which
prove to it the existence of God. It annihilates time, it annihilates
space, it annihilates suffering; it writes a letter from Paris to
London, and has an answer in ten minutes; it cuts off a man's leg, the
man sings and smiles.

It has now only to realize--and it has nearly done it--a progress which
is nothing compared to the miracles it has already wrought; it has only
to find the means of directing through a mass of air a bubble of
lighter air; it has already obtained the bubble of air, and keeps it
imprisoned; it has now only to find the impulsive force, only to cause
a vacuum before the balloon, for instance, only to burn the air before
the aerostat, as the rocket does before itself; it has only to solve
this problem in some way or other; and it will solve it, and do you
know what will happen then? At that instant frontiers will vanish, all
barriers will be swept away; everything that constitutes a Chinese wall
round thought, round commerce, round industry, round nationalities,
round progress, will crumble; in spite of censorships, in spite of
_index expurgatorius_, it will rain books and journals upon every
country under the sun; Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, will fall like hail
upon Rome, Naples, Vienna, St. Petersburg; the human word is manna, and
the serf will gather it in the furrows; fanaticism will die, oppression
will be impossible; man dragged himself along the ground,--he will
escape; civilization changes itself into a flock of birds, and flies
away, and whirls about and alights joyously at the same moment upon
every point of the globe. Lo! yonder it passes; aim your cannons, old
despotisms, it disdains you; you are only the bullet, it is the
lightning; no more hatred