World's Fair, and have seen, and will conquer, in their studios and shops, by making the busy activities of useful art yet more ministrative to man's enjoyments and progress. If, in the language of the old Spectator, "The arts have heretofore been the servants of commerce," now commerce must be the servant of the arts, and both the arts and commerce become more than ever the servants of humanity. If the first efforts of industry were chiefly animal, successive exertions have taught them to become scientific. Arts give birth to Science; and Science, in her turn, like a dutiful child, ministers to Art. Many of the great inventions of our race are the works of operative laborers. And as the Great Exhibition is the result of a desire to stimulate industrial progress, to elevate the position and to increase the perfection of the useful arts, so its influence will also tend to embody the genius of the fine arts in the products of industrial labor. "Souls cannot, like bodies, be embalmed to withstand the influence of time." Ages are like successive spring seasons, involving the perpetual uprising of new life and fresh beauty. The human spirit cannot be kept in the prison bounds of past ages. "One mighty to save" stands by every sepulchre in which man is entombed, and says, with authority-"Loose him and let him go." Events may retard human progress, but nothing can prevent it. Man does not yet know himself. He is capable of discoveries, inventions, and improvements, that are not yet dreamed of. The vast future is for him. There is no conqueror but God.

2. The World's Fair has enlarged the knowledge of mankind, by enlarging the knowledge of one nation of another. The great gathering has, undoubtedly, made Europe better acquainted with America, and America with Europe. The visitors to the Great Exhibition have enlarged their knowledge of each other, of human nature, and of the world. Narrow and contracted modes of thought incident to a very circumscribed abode, or limited knowledge of men and things, have been expanded into more generous dimensions. A deep and luminous insight into scenes of nature, works of art, and ways of men, was afforded, which none but the most stupid could wholly neglect to improve. The Exposition is calculated to promote and increase the free interchange of raw material and manufactured commodities between all the nations of the earth, and thereby to advance their industrial skill, taste, knowledge, and science. The producer-to use Mr. Babbage's classification-the consumer, and the middle-man were there brought together, and made to know each other, and to feel in some degree their kindred, and their mutual dependence. And being thus brought into contact with one another, they have doubtless become better acquainted with each other's good qualities, and their jealousies, animosities, and prejudices are greatly modified. As there are many good people in the

world that we do not love, simply because we do not know them, so there is much ingenuity, skill, and taste among other people and nations that we do not appreciate, because we are not acquainted with them. Every man is our brother, yet knowledge must precede our love for him. The first step to bring forth affection is acquaintance. The Congress of the Nations to show to each other their advance in the arts and sciences was one of the happiest methods that could have been devised for making them acquainted, and to make them feel that they "are one body, and members in particular." The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates have ever dared to hope, and contribute to the permanent prosperity and strength of a country far more than the most splendid victories of successful war. "The influences thus engendered, the arts thus developed, will long continue to shed their beneficent effects over countries more extensive than those which the sceptre of England rules." It seems scarcely within the reach of the human mind to grasp the results accruing to mankind upon the triumph of the industrial arts over those of war. In this world-assemblage, nature, art, and utility were seen to struggle for the victory; and as utility is the basis of man's existence, at least in our age, the department of useful art seems to have triumphed in the contest. Even a London journal is so irreverent as to call the Koh-i-Noor "a large piece of carbon ;" and another says, most ungallantly, that, for the pleasure of sight, we would not change a drinking glass resembling a blue convolvulus for the Koh-i-Noor itself." The huge compendium of human civilization recently exhibited in London could not have been but in an age of peace, and could not have taken place without the means of transit which distinguish our day. Without railroads and their appliances, the use of iron and glass in buildings could not have been in such a state of progress, and without them the heavy masses of goods and wares, and the immense multitudes of the world's denizens that have been up to London, on a visit to the tutelary saints of the human race, could not have been transported, and thus collected together.

3. The World's fair is to be regarded as a solemn contract of peace amongst the nations of the earth. Its tendency is to establish universal international peace. It may be safely taken as a maxim, that such vast multitudes of the human race could not be brought together in peaceful rivalry, for one great common, peaceful purpose, and separate in peace, with mutual good will, if not with greatly increased mutual admiration, without its tending to some desirable end. There is a bond of consanguinity which encompasses all the descendants of Adam. And this gathering together of the nations has shown them that God has indeed made of one blood all the families of men, though of

many varying colors and faculties and tongues. There are sympathies in all human hearts, which are like the srtings of a concert of harps attuned in harmony, incontestibly proving their unity. For "as in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man.' When nations have measured strength with one another on the battle field, how deadly were the passions evoked, "Like warring winds, like flames from various points, That mate each other's fury, there is nought

Of elemental strife, were fiends to guide it,
Can mate the wrath of man."

But when men are marahaled under their banners, lifted up towards heaven as the incense clouds of accepted peace offerings; when these bloody symbols of war, that have floated over them on so many fields of slaughter, and rallied them to battle, death and glory, are the symbols of peace, "woven and lifted up by the hand of industry," hanging in unruffled unity-untorn by violence, unstained with blood-the emblems, indeed, of strife, but of that noble strife in which nations contend for victory in the fields of science, in the schemes of philanthropy, and in the arts of life-then the kindly instincts of the human breast, amid the glories of nature and the beauties of art, must have been unfolded, and mutual good will have brightened and blessed the interview. Then the better feelings of an inner and higher life are awakened, and man reflects the divinity of his original as a stream reflects the stars. "If in the material world the most repulsive elements may be permanently compressed within their sphere of mutual attraction--if the world of instinct, natures the most ferocious may be softened, and even tamed, when driven into a common retreat by their deadliest foe-may we not expect, in the world of reason and of faith, that men, served by national and personal enmities, who have been toiling under the same impulse, and acting for the same end, who are standing in the porch of the same hall of judgment, and panting for the same eternal home-may we not expect that such men, thus temporally united in heart and in purpose, will never again consent to banish the deadly cutlass or throw the hostile spear?" Their mutual acquaintance with each other, which the nations have gained by the interview of the World's Fair, must have a decided tendency to wear off their national asperities, and teach them to respect each other's rights. War after this will be more than ever fratricidal. Great Britain and America, who have met eaah other in days gone by on so many well-contested, but bloody fields, have now been communing together many months in sweetest concord, and in the animated interchange of the courtesies and of refined life, they will most assuredly be more than ever unwilling to draw the sword against each other. And, as to the Continent, though the day dawning is exceedingly dark, still we will hope for the best. It

was a custom among the Romans to split in two, and divide between themselves and foreign visiters who shared their hospitality, a small token called the tessera hospitalis, which was preserved from generation to generation in the two families who formed the friendly alliance. It became an heir-loom to remote descendants. So in the great gathering of the nations in the Industrial Mansion, the tessera hospitalis has been divide, and borne off to the East and to the West and to the North and to the South, over mountains and continents and oceans throughout the old and the new world, to be cherished through long years to come. Every article of art and of commerce bought or exchanged, and carried away from the Great Exhibition by the people of one nation from the stalls of another, connected as it is, and ever will be, with the associations of that Exhibition, becomes a Rahab scarf in the hands of the Knights of Jericho to prevent the destructions of war. The Exposition has made it apparent to all, that the different forms of industry mutually support each other; and, therefore, in a commercial, social, and political aspect, its influence will produce wide-spread and longenduring benefits.

It is a monument of the peacefulness of the age. It proclaims the supremacy of law, the exhaltation of that invisible and hallowed guardian of civil rights which sits upon the throne of the public mind. It indicates the improved condition. of the people in education, intelligence, and taste, which is the result of agencies that have been doing their silent work through hundreds of past years, the chief of which is the Gospel of Christ. "These are the true victories, which cause no tears to flow," said his late Majesty, the King of the French, as he gazed on the trophies of French ingenuity and skill in the magnificent Palace de la Concorde, in 1839. And Napoleon said of a similar exposition in Paris, even while flushed with his early victories "Our manufactures are the arsenals which will supply us with the weapons most fatal to the British power."

Finally. Let us briefly consider a few of the lessons taught by the World's Pair. And

First, The unspeakable advantages of international and domestic peace. Without the protection of law and the security of property and life, and the pursuits of agriculture, mechanics and commerce guaranteed by Treaties of Peace, no such exhibtions could ever have taken place, nor could its costly and pre. cious furniture have ever been made. While, therefore, the results of the exhibition must tend to the civilization of the human race, it is at the same time a most impressive lesson on the importance of cultivating the arts of peace, and the reciprocities of national brotherhood.

A second and higher lesson is, The existence and beneficence of an Ineffable Creator, the Father of mankind, whom all should

adore and obey. We have seen that human art is but an imitation of the Creator's works. He reads to us from the flower, the cloud, the mountain, the skies and the ocean, lessons of the greatest importance. The universe is the handiwork of an Allwise and supremely benevolent God. The grand transparent Hall of Industry was not the result of a poet's dream, although Chuacer's poetic soul had "a dream which was not all a dream," of an island whose walls and gate were all of glass. It is, indeed, true, that every beautiful work of art was once a sort of dream-that is, it floated in the imagination before it was fixed and made visible by the hand. This picture or that splendid painting is Correggio or Ruben's dream transferred to canvas. The Apollo Belvidere-what is it but the sculptor's evening vision, carved in marble? Milton's "Paradise Lost" is a poet's high communings with the Invisible committed to paper. Glorious Karnak is an architect's thought some 3000 years ago, built up in stone and lotus-crowned colonnades. The Palace of glass is the thinking of an architect, consolidated most wonderfully into wood, iron and glass-rapid in its construction as the growth of the Victoria Regia-yet pervaded by unity of design and well compacted together. The parts were all prepared before they were brought together, like Solomon's Temple-great and complicated and varied machinery was employed-thousands of men were engaged in its erection, and the structure served as a scaffold for itself. And within its long aisles and galleries we have seen exhibited the productions of every art of every clime-works of strength and skill for necessity and convenience for comfort and luxury-for ornament and displaythings carved and moulded and woven-vast and minute, bold and elegant, simple and elaborate, running through all the conceivable departments and grades of inventive industry. Groups, heaps, masses and all manner of cunning work, covering nine miles of table room, yet classified and arranged according to the taste of the respective nations, from America to the distant "Ind." But this Repository of the peaceful spoils of all the earth is no fancy sketch-no mere poet's vision-no caprice of chance. It is the production of the human mind, whose constructive skill is singularly exhibited in the edifice itself—a cleareyed intelligence that could survey, consider, contrive, adapt and fashion, and out of sand and ore and wood cause to rise up such a vast and magnificent pile--and then fill it with an almost infinite and diversified number of objects of art. If such a collection of earth's choice things could not be brought together without contrivance, much less could this universe of suns and stars and systems create and arrange itself in such wondrous harmony. If this incarnation of order and method prove the existence of human thought; much more does human thought and the world, and all that is in it, prove the being, power, wis