SUMMER MEETING. 79 



The Exposition. 



The grandest show the earth ever saw is at last blest with tine 

 weather, increasing crowds and the prospect of a happy issue out of 

 its troubles. All that now remains to be done is for the managers to 

 get down to somewhere within 45° of the people, adapt themselves to 

 their conditions and circumstances, assign the big-head, as the bank 

 managers do, to others ; only do it before the crash comes, that failure 

 and bankruptcy may be averted. It is quite true that everything in 

 this country partakes of the largeness of its area and the freedom of 

 its atmosphere, but this only makes asinine bossism on the part of 

 those who are for the moment clothed with temporary largeness and 

 brief authority all the more odious. 



Forty years of experiment have taught those addicted to shows of 

 this sort many things unthought of and unknown when the first of its 

 kind was conceived by royalty and brought forth in Hyde Park, Lou- 

 don, where the entire space covered was less than 20 acres, and all the 

 world flocked to it. Here we have hundreds of acres, and the entire 

 Exposition partaking of the same magnitude except the great crowds 

 from all over the earth in attendance, and yet the experience of those 

 years and the various similar exhibits which have been held on the 

 continent of Europe, of Australasia and America have not been with- 

 out their effect on the minds of the people of the world. Though they 

 have not brought universal peace, international brotherhood and the 

 millennium, they have brought the world, in a measure, in contact, have 

 distributed sentiments of human equality and equal rights, measured 

 the quality of governments and determined their stability by their 

 goodness, and shown that worth was not measured by rank or name or 

 historic pedigree. 



But it is in the greatness of the innumerable branches of human 

 industry that one naturally expects the great Exposition to excel all 

 its predecessors, and the visitor will in nowise be disappointed as 

 as he passes over the grounds and through the departmental and other 

 buildings, for it meets him at every turn and at nearly every step. 

 Here the people of every state, and measurably so of every country, 

 have gathered their best, and exhibit it in quantity as well as in quality 

 to tell the story better than in language or pictures, in poetry or prose, 

 and in such fashion that he who runs may read, be his mother tongue 

 what it may or his nativity what it will. 



