date, which, by the daily use of the
universal date, the nations will or may finally accept, to the
exclusion of all others, for the ordinary purposes of life. Well, now,
gentlemen, we should bring our own choice into discredit. We could not
sign, according to these three dates. As regards the last, we should
find that half the table and half the Congress were under one date,
and the other half under another; even our chairman, if seated in the
middle, would find that he had been presiding over our sessions with
his right side in one day and his left in the next.

I may be told that this would happen, whatever might be the meridian
chosen, but we could afford to allow it to happen at sea, or in some
isolated and uninhabited region where congresses never sit, and where
no ray of civilization ever penetrates.

But to return to the reform, what are you going to do? I will say that
if, instead of the meridian of Greenwich, you designate the
anti-meridian for the reckoning of universal time and for the initial
point of cosmopolitan dates for the present, but for the future as the
initial point also of local dates, the reform will amount to about an
hour only, but it will still be a reform. In a word, the anti-meridian
of Rome is the one which now furnishes dates to the entire world, and
you propose to make the meridian of Greenwich or the anti-meridian do
so in future.

I therefore tell you, if you desire a common hour for postal and
commercial purposes, designate no meridian at all; let the railway and
telegraph companies, the postal authorities and the governments make
an arrangement and select an artificial hour, so to speak, whatever
it be the hour of Rome, London, Paris, or even that of Greenwich, but
do not make a premature declaration which will be an authoritative one
as emanating from this Congress, an apparently insignificant reform,
but in reality one of very great importance, since, giving the
preference to determinate localities in the face of what is
scientific, historical, and logical, you render difficult, in the
future, the adoption of that very reform, which will, perhaps, then be
more necessary, and which can perhaps then be introduced more
intelligently.

You see that I am not speaking in behalf of any special meridian, not
even that of Rome, since I admit that the reform may be necessary. You
see, and I assure you, that I have not the slightest wish that the
meridian which is to be the initial point