This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1870 Excerpt: ... said: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of the talent of M. Thiers is a powerful faculty of assimilation in the presence of things the most unlike, the relations of which he is able to seize at once, and which he is able to unite into a system full of lucidity and practical utility. The different consulative ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1870 Excerpt: ... said: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of the talent of M. Thiers is a powerful faculty of assimilation in the presence of things the most unlike, the relations of which he is able to seize at once, and which he is able to unite into a system full of lucidity and practical utility. The different consulative committees of commerce, manufactures, and agriculture, which he frequently called together, under his presidency as Minister of Public Works, and whose apparently opposite interests he sought to reconcile, brought out particularly this eminent quality." If the views of a statesman so eminently practical, upon the most practical of all public questions, outweigh all the theories of schoolmen and closet essayists, the passages which follow, and which we have translated from "L'Opinion Nationale," are the truest expression of the protective sentiment of France. The question of an inquiry into the operation of the commercial treaties being before the Corps LSgislatif, M. Thiers, on the 22d of January, 1870, after calling attention to the gravity of the question before the Assembly, addressed it as follows: --"Every nation has three great affairs, which should be the object of its ardent and constant solicitude: liberty first, its greatness next, and finally its material prosperity. Liberty, which consists not merely in the right of the nation to criticise its government, but in the right of governing itself by its own hands, and conformably to its own ideas; greatness, which does not consist in subjecting its neighbors by brute force, but in exercising over them so much influence that no question shall be resolved in the world against its interests and security; prosperity, finally, which consists in drawing from its own s...
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