le evening
Baltimore alone was agitated. The large towns of the Union, New York,
Boston, Albany, Washington, Richmond, New Orleans, Charlestown, La
Mobile of Texas, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Florida, all shared in the
delirium. The thirty thousand correspondents of the Gun Club were
acquainted with their president's letter, and awaited with equal
impatience the famous communication of the 5th of October. The same
evening as the orator uttered his speech it ran along the telegraph
wires, across the states of the Union, with a speed of 348,447 miles a
second. It may, therefore, be said with absolute certainty that at the
same moment the United States of America, ten times as large as France,
cheered with a single voice, and twenty-five millions of hearts, swollen
with pride, beat with the same pulsation.

The next day five hundred daily, weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly
newspapers took up the question; they examined it under its different
aspects--physical, meteorological, economical, or moral, from a
political or social point of view. They debated whether the moon was a
finished world, or if she was not still undergoing transformation. Did
she resemble the earth in the time when the atmosphere did not yet
exist? What kind of spectacle would her hidden hemisphere present to our
terrestrial spheroid? Granting that the question at present was simply
about sending a projectile to the Queen of Night, every one saw in that
the starting-point of a series of experiments; all hoped that one day
America would penetrate the last secrets of the mysterious orb, and some
even seemed to fear that her conquest would disturb the balance of power
in Europe.

The project once under discussion, not one of the papers suggested a
doubt of its realisation; all the papers, treatises, bulletins, and
magazines published by scientific, literary, or religious societies
enlarged upon its advantages, and the "Natural History Society" of
Boston, the "Science and Art Society" of Albany, the "Geographical and
Statistical Society" of New York, the "American Philosophical Society"
of Philadelphia, and the "Smithsonian Institution" of Washington sent in
a thousand letters their congratulations to the Gun Club, with immediate
offers of service and money.

It may be said that no proposition ever had so many adherents; there was
no question of hesitations, doubts, or anxieties. As to the jokes,
caricatures, and comic songs that would have welcomed in Euro