Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/236

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS whether they be practical inventions of science and industry.

No, France is not old; all that she needs is self-confidence. Come to visit her; you will render her the most important service by revealing to herself the resources she has not yet developed. Come all of you, not to Paris only, but to the towns of our provinces—from the ocean beaches to the shore of the Mediterranean, from the Alps to the Pyrenees, from Brittany to Provence, from Touraine to Dauphine; regions which are already rich, not only in incomparable memories of the past—museums, castles, cathedrals—but in promises and hope. Come, you will be received fraternally, with open arms; you will see that France, far from being a country coming to an end, opens, on the contrary, to the future; veritable garden of Europe; holiday country, nursery of ideas and of inventions; land of rest and labor; an oasis where every man in the world who works ought, some day or another, to come to renew his activity. Come and bring back some of us with you to your own land. We have moved far, to-day, from the times of Christopher Columbus; and it is here in Chicago, of all places, that one feels this most.

In very truth, the miracle of your transformation, as your cordiality and the magnificence of your welcome, surpasses anything that could have been conceived—even by a French imagination.

America, during the last fifty years, seems to