The thirty thousand correspondents of the Gun Club were acquainted with their president's letter, and awaited with equal impatience the famous communication of the 5th of October.

The same evening as the orator uttered his speech it ran along the telegraph wires, across the states of the Union, with a speed of 348,447 miles a second.

It may, therefore, be said with absolute certainty that at the same moment the United States of America, ten times as large as France, cheered with a single voice, and twenty-five millions of hearts, swollen with pride, beat with the same pulsation.
The next day five hundred daily, weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly newspapers took up the question; they examined it under its different aspects--physical, meteorological, economical, or moral, from a political or social point of view.

They debated whether the moon was a finished world, or if she was not still undergoing transformation.

Did she resemble the earth in the time when the atmosphere did not yet exist?
What kind of spectacle would her hidden hemisphere present to our terrestrial spheroid?
Granting that the question at present was simply about sending a projectile to the Queen of Night, every one saw in that the starting-point of a series of experiments; all hoped that one day America would penetrate the last secrets of the mysterious orb, and some even seemed to fear that her conquest would disturb the balance of power in Europe.
The project once under discussion, not one of the papers suggested a doubt of its realisation; all the papers, treatises, bulletins, and magazines published by scientific, literary, or religious societies enlarged upon its advantages, and the "Natural History Society" of Boston, the "Science and Art Society" of Albany, the "Geographical and Statistical Society" of New York, the "American Philosophical Society" of Philadelphia, and the "Smithsonian Institution" of Washington sent in a thousand letters their congratulations to the Gun Club, with immediate offers of service and money.
It may be said that no proposition ever had so many adherents; there was no question of hesitations, doubts, or anxieties.