INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS DURING THE YEAR 1876. cci 



the value would be $10,000,000,000. The canals of the country 

 transported not less than 10,000,000 tons, worth $500,000,000. The 

 tonnage of vessels employed in the domestic trade of the United 

 States is 4,000,000 ; which, estimating four voyages per year and 

 light freights, may be placed at 15,000,000 tons per annum, having 

 a minimum value of $750,000,000. From the above there results the 

 grand total of $11,250,000,000 per annum as the volume of the in- 

 ternal commerce of the United States an amount nearly ten times 

 as great as the value of our exports and imports combined. 



INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF 1876. 



The Centennial Exhibition has passed into history, and although 

 in a work of this nature it is obviously no part of our task to at- 

 tempt the depiction of the magnificence and profusion of the works 

 of human genius and ingenuity there displayed, and which have 

 doubtless delighted the eyes and amazed and bewildered the under- 

 standing of most of our readers, we may properly devote a little 

 space to a few comments upon its industrial results, relegating to 

 our miscellaneous columns such descrij^tive items of the multitude 

 of exhibits as appear to be worthy of special attention by reason of 

 pre-eminent merit or novelty. 



The most permanently valuable lesson of the Exhibition has doubt- 

 less been the ocular demonstration which it has afforded to multi- 

 tudes of our own people of the prodigious strides made by the 

 United States in every description of industrial enterprise, the di- 

 rect and useful result of which will manifestly be the wide dissemi- 

 nation of the conviction, which there is every reason to hope may 

 become the national belief, that in every branch of manufacturing- 

 industry that has reference to the general wants of the country the 

 productions of the United States are fully equal and in many in- 

 stances superior, by reason of better adaptation to domestic de- 

 mands, than similar productions of foreign countries ; and the 

 American manufacturer will doubtless in the future be spared the 

 humiliation of seeing the products of his mills and workshops sold 

 as of French, English, or German make, to gratify the prejudice, now 

 happily tolerably well dissipated, of that large body of our people 

 in whose vocabulary the designation foreign was at once the syno- 

 nym for and the assurance of excellence. Besides this quiet but 

 complete revolution of opinion at home respecting the excellence 

 of home productions, it was reserved for the Exhibition, by the in- 

 stitution of a direct comparison between the qualities of American 

 and foreign wares beneath the eyes of consumers, to open new mar- 

 kets for them, to the permanent benefit of home manufactures. The 

 far-reaching influence of this great educator of our people has been 

 well expressed in the following terms by one of the leading daily 

 journals: "Related to these varied ramifications of influence, the 



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