THE FRENCH A CADEMY. 3 1 1 



of faith, and verified in their liberal sense that lofty 

 saying : ' I say unto you that if ye have faith as a 

 grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say unto this moun- 

 tain, remove hence to yonder place, and it shall 

 remove.' The devotion of your staff was immense. 

 I spent a night at Chalouf-el-Terrabah, in a hut 

 inhabited only by one of your employe's. That man 

 filled me with admiration : he was convinced that he 

 was fulfilling a mission, he regarded himself as a 

 sentinel placed in an advanced post, as a missionary of 

 France, and an agent of civilisation. All of your 

 men believed that the eyes of the world were fixed 

 upon them and that every one was interested in their 

 doing their duty. 



"It is all this, Sir, that in electing you we were 

 anxious to recompence. "We are incompetent to 

 appreciate the work of the engineer; the merits of 

 the administrator, the financier, and the diplomatist are 

 not for us to discuss ; but we have been struck by the 

 moral grandeur of the work, by this resurrection of 

 the faith, not the faith in any particular dogma, but 

 the faith in humanity and its brilliant destinies. It is 

 not for the material work which we crown you, for 

 the blue riband which, as we are told, would earn for 

 us the esteem of the inhabitants of the moon, if 

 there were any. No, that is not what constitutes your 

 glory. Your glory consists in having set stirring this 

 latest movement of enthusiasm, this latest manifesta- 

 tion of self-devotion. You have renewed in our time 



