Faisant a l’homme avec le ciel une cite,
 Une pensee avec toute l’immensite,
 Elle abolit les vieilles regles;
 Elle abaisse les monts, elle annule les tours;
 Splendide, elle introduit les peuples, marcheurs lourds,
 Dans la communion des aigles.

3.

Between 1830 and 1850 railway transport spread throughout Great Britain and was introduced on the Continent, and electricity was subdued to man’s use by the invention of telegraphy.  The great Exhibition of London in 1851 was, in one of its aspects, a public recognition of the material progress of the age and the growing power of man over the physical world.  Its aim, said a contemporary, was “to seize the living scroll of human progress, inscribed with every successive conquest of man’s intellect."[Footnote:  Edinburgh Review (October 1851), p. 562, in a review of the Official Catalogue of the Exhibition.] The Prince Consort, who originated the Exhibition, explained its significance in a public speech: 

“Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which indeed all history points—­the realisation of the unity of mankind. ...  The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the languages of all nations are known, and their acquirements placed within the reach of everybody; thought is communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power, of lightning.  On the other hand, the great principle of division of labour, which may be called the moving power of civilisation, is being extended to all branches of science, industry, and art...  Gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting-point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.” [Footnote:  Martin, Life of the Prince Consort (ed. 3), iii. p. 247.  The speech was delivered at a banquet at the Mansion House on March 21, 1850.]

The point emphasised here is the “solidarity” of the world.  The Exhibition is to bring home to men’s consciousness the community of all the inhabitants of the earth.  The assembled peoples, wrote Thackeray, in his “May-day Ode,” [Footnote:  Published in the Times, April 30, 1851.  The Exhibition was opened on May I.] See the sumptuous banquet set, The brotherhood of nations met Around the feast.

And this was the note struck in the leading article of the Times on the opening day:  “The first morning since the creation that all peoples have assembled from all parts of the world and done a common act.”  It was claimed that the Exhibition signified a new, intelligent, and moral movement which “marks a great crisis in the history of the world,” and foreshadows universal peace.