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EFFECT OF THE PRESIDENT’S COMMUNICATION
It is impossible to describe the effect produced by the last words of
the honorable president— the cries, the shouts, the succession of roars,
hurrahs, and all the varied vociferations which the American language is
capable of supplying. It was a scene of indescribable confusion and uproar.
They shouted, they clapped, they stamped on the floor of the hall. All the
weapons in the museum discharged at once could not have more violently set in
motion the waves of sound. One need not be surprised at this. There are some
cannoneers nearly as noisy as their own guns.
Barbicane remained calm in the midst of this enthusiastic clamor;
perhaps he was desirous of addressing a few more words to his colleagues, for
by his gestures he demanded silence, and his powerful alarum was worn out by
its violent reports. No attention, however, was paid to his request. He was presently
torn from his seat and passed from the hands of his faithful colleagues into
the arms of a no less excited crowd.
Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the
word “impossible” in not a French one. People have evidently been deceived
by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for
mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise. Between
Barbicane’s proposition and its realization no true Yankee would have
allowed even the semblance of a difficulty to be possible. A thing with them is
no sooner said than done.
The triumphal progress of the president continued throughout the
evening. It was a regular torchlight procession. Irish, Germans, French,
Scotch, all the heterogeneous units which make up the population of Maryland
shouted in their respective vernaculars; and the “vivas,”
“hurrahs,” and “bravos” were intermingled in
inexpressible enthusiasm.
Just at this crisis, as though she comprehended all this agitation
regarding herself, the moon shone forth with serene splendor, eclipsing by her
intense illumination all the surrounding lights. The Yankees all turned their
gaze toward her resplendent orb, kissed their hands, called her by all kinds of
endearing names. Between eight o’clock and midnight one optician in
Jones’-Fall Street made his fortune by the sale of opera-glasses.
Midnight arrived, and the enthusiasm showed no signs of diminution. It
spread equally among all classes of citizens— men of science,
shopkeepers, merchants, porters, chair-men, as well as
“greenhorns,” were stirred in their innermost fibres. A national
enterprise was at stake. The whole city, high and low, the quays bordering the
Patapsco, the ships lying in the basins, disgorged a crowd drunk with joy, gin,
and whisky. Every one chattered, argued, discussed, disputed, applauded, from
the gentleman lounging upon the barroom settee with his tumbler of
sherry-cobbler before him down to the waterman who got drunk upon his
“knock-me-down” in the dingy taverns of Fell Point.
About two A.M., however, the excitement began to subside. President
Barbicane reached his house, bruised, crushed, and squeezed almost to a mummy.
Hercules could not have resisted a similar outbreak of enthusiasm. The crowd
gradually deserted the squares and streets. The four railways from Philadelphia
and Washington, Harrisburg and Wheeling, which converge at Baltimore, whirled
away the heterogeneous population to the four corners of the United States, and
the city subsided into comparative tranquility.
On the following day, thanks to the telegraphic wires, five hundred
newspapers and journals, daily, weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly, all took up the
question. They examined it under all its different aspects, physical,
meteorological, economical, or moral, up to its bearings on politics or
civilization. They debated whether the moon was a finished world, or whether it
was destined to undergo any further transformation. Did it resemble the earth
at the period when the latter was destitute as yet of an atmosphere? What kind
of spectacle would its hidden hemisphere present to our terrestrial spheroid?
Granting that the question at present was simply that of sending a projectile
up to the moon, every one must see that that involved the commencement of a
series of experiments. All must hope that some day America would penetrate the
deepest secrets of that mysterious orb; and some even seemed to fear lest its
conquest should not sensibly derange the equilibrium of Europe.
The project once under discussion, not a single paragraph suggested a
doubt of its realization. All the papers, pamphlets, reports— all the
journals published by the scientific, literary, and religious societies
enlarged upon its advantages; and the Society of Natural History of Boston, the
Society of Science and Art of Albany, the Geographical and Statistical Society
of New York, the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, and the Smithsonian of
Washington sent innumerable letters of congratulation to the Gun Club, together
with offers of immediate assistance and money.
From that day forward Impey Barbicane became one of the greatest
citizens of the United States, a kind of Washington of science. A single trait
of feeling, taken from many others, will serve to show the point which this
homage of a whole people to a single individual attained.
Some few days after this memorable meeting of the Gun Club, the manager
of an English company announced, at the Baltimore theatre, the production of
“Much ado about Nothing.” But the populace, seeing in that title an
allusion damaging to Barbicane’s project, broke into the auditorium,
smashed the benches, and compelled the unlucky director to alter his playbill.
Being a sensible man, he bowed to the public will and replaced the offending
comedy by “As you like it”; and for many weeks he realized fabulous
profits.
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