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Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2009, 19 February 1907, Page 3

A week or two ago we gave a pro- | gross report of an interesting plebiscite conducted by the Petit Pans. , to determine who are considered the greatest men of Franco. .Hie final result leaves the first four in the Older in which they appeared in our columns. Pasteur is first 1 308,425 votes, ami is rolloviod Victor Hugo with 1,227,103. Had an Englishman been invited to forecast the holder of the first place in the hearts of Frenchmen, he would ceitainlv have said Napoleon, for does ho not typify that special kind of •dorv which is supposed to he pcculiarlv French? But Napoleon conies fourth, being beaten for third place by another mail of action, Oarubetta. Thiers follows Napoleon closely, l or sixth place.,, what foreigner, asks the Paris correspondent of the Times, would have suggested the name of Lazare Carnot? 'Vet if Ihn is deserves to come fitli, the organiser of the Republican arios of the Revolution deserves to be sixth. The correspondent remarks that the French soul to-day “vibrates between the primordial patriotic concern as to the defence of the integrity of French soil and its emotion of gratitude in presence of the great peaceful benefactors of the nation m the fields either of science or of art '-'tirio, the discoverer of radium, follows bjinot, and then come Dumas, Dr. Roux the inventor of the dipUtheitic serum; Parmentjer, the introducer of the potato into France; Ampeie, the father of dynamic electricity; Brazza, the founder of French West Africa; Zola, whose place shows conclusively what France Hunks of ins courage in the Dreyfus case; Lamartine, the author; AragO, the astio- . nomer and physicist; Sarali .Bernhardt. Wal d eck-11 o n ssc-a u, Marshal Macmahon, and President Carnot. Twenty-second on the list is de Desseps, the creator of the Suez Canal, which great achievement was forgotten for a time in the tempest of the Panama scandals. Ten years ago no plebiscite would have given de Res seps such a place, Fifteen million answers wore received, and the lesult is the opinion of average France, pot of any political coterie or cultivated class. “It is a revelation to the foreigner of an idealism certainly unsuspected. Only those obsei who have had the privilege of studying the evolution of the French mind and feeling over an unbroken series of years on the spot were aware of the profound trail-formation which the Republican school system and stable Republican Government in general have affected in the points of view of the present generation of Frenchmen,”