Dantès, Edmond (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; France -- History -- February Revolution, 1848
Nor was the newspaper press alone active. The feuilleton press was also
at work; and magazines, reviews, pamphlets, whole libraries of volumes,
were flung like Sibylline leaves on the four winds of heaven. Fiction,
the drama, religion, art, literature, moral and mechanical science--all
departments of intellect--silently, unseen, yet surely exerted their
omnipotent influence for the attainment of one single glorious end--the
happiness, rights, freedom of man; all this was under the guidance of
one powerful mind and benevolent heart, wielding the resistless
necromancy of countless and exhaustless treasure! Not a point in all
Europe whence influence could radiate and be distributed was there at
which this man, in one brief year, had not set in motion the press and
the telegraph, those tremendous levers of the age to move the world, and
all the more powerfully to move it because oft unseen. Not a court was
there of emperor or prince, czar or kaiser, king, duke or potentate in
which dwelt not his emissary, who suspected, least of all, knew
everything that occurred, and, on the lightning's wing, dispatched it to
its destination, so that the most important decrees of the
cabinet-council of Vienna were exposed to the whole world by the
Parisian press long before they had been communicated by Metternich to
his sovereign. And thus, often, the ruler first learned the purposes of
the Minister. Not a city or village was there in all Europe which
nourished not in its bosom the germ of reform and revolution, while the
great principle of association combined, embodied, and concentrated into
a focus energies and influences which would otherwise have proved
comparatively powerless.
The click and buzz of the register ceased--the engine had revealed its
secret--the shadowy tale had been caught up as it fell and given to the
press of all Europe, thence to be laid before men's minds.
Exhausted by the severe mental toil, and by the lateness of the hour,
the Deputy sank back into his arm-chair and clasped his hands.
"Glorious, omnipotent science!" he exclaimed in low and trembling, yet
eager and enthusiastic tones. "Wealth must yield in power to thee, for
what wealth can rival thy achievements or secure thy results? Thou hast
girt the earth with web-work, forced the lightning to syllable the
unspoken thought and made man's mind ubiquitous like God's; ere long,
thou wilt have knit together with thy magic spells a world of mankind
into one vast brotherhood!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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