Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 May 1888 — France Past and Present. [ARTICLE]

France Past and Present.

The bittereSt enemies of Napoleon lll.—the Rocheforts, the Hugos, the Gambettas, etc., warned the French people over and over again of the rottenness and venality of his government, but how little did even they dream that that same government rested on so very frail props as the year 1870 demonstrated that it did! It is past seventeen years since the chronic Bonapartist self-ambition has drained French blood and French sinews, and the Republic still lives. In calamity, and under the humiliation of defeat, the French spirit has grown chastened and wonderfully wiser, and what hot-headedness made an impossibility in the eighteenth century, the cooler judgment of the nineteenth century has made a glorious reality. Vive la Republique! — Alexander N. De Mt nil, in the St. Louis Magazine.

The microphone, an instrument constructed to magnify slight sounds, is made so delicate that the otherwise imperceptible noise made by drawing a hair across some part of it resembles the harsh grating of a saw, and the footsteps of a fly may be distinctly heard.