]30 TliANSACTIOXS OF THE A.VERICAX INSTITUTE. 



cesses and significant tropliies of our country's industrial art aiui 

 proficienc}'. We trust in good time — I wish I could saj in a short 

 time — to welcome you in an edifice of our own [cheers], an edifice, 

 not so large as this but at least better adapted to our purposes. And 

 in that edifice we hope to celebrate the 100th anniversary of 

 American independence [cheers] by an exhibition of American art 

 and American skill at which no American need blush, and upon 

 which all Europe might well congratulate us. [Loud cheers.] 

 Understand, friends, that our managers, and they are not a few, have 

 been faithfully at work for a whole week producing what you see 

 around you. We have not been able to bring the exhibition to the 

 gtate in which we hoped to present it on this opening day ; all we 

 can say is that the best has been done, and that a few days more will 

 make it such an exhibition of American art and industry as no 

 American ever yet saw, [Cheers.] 



The first exhibition of the American Institute that I attended was 

 held thirty-seven years ago in the Masonic Hall in Broadway, near 

 Duane street. A room, perhaps fifty feet by 100, contained it all; 

 now twenty such rooms would be utterly insufficient. We were 

 compelled to accept a room most remote from, and inconvenient to, 

 the mass of our population, since it was better to call you miles to 

 see something than furlongs to see nothing. Forty years is not a 

 long period, but it is longer than most of you who hear me have 

 lived. As my recollection fully grasps this period of the lifetime of 

 the Institute, let me endeavor briefly to set before you some of the 

 changes which it — the period, not the Institute — has wrought in the 

 condition of the civilized world. Though its wars and battles have 

 been less numerous, less important, and less destructive than those 

 of the preceding forty, and though no great changes in the bounda- 

 ries of States have been carved out in this period by the conqueror's 

 aword, yet no other lifetime since the Christian era — unless it be 

 that of one who as a boy heard of the invention of printing, and in 

 the ripe fullness of liis days read of the memorable discovery of a 

 new world by Columbus— has been so full of events worthy to be 

 held in remembrance and fraught with blessings to the entire human 

 family. When this Institute was founded, forty years ago, the civil- 

 ized world slumbered uneasily in the arms of what called itself legiti- 

 macy and divine right. Napoleon had ended his warlike career 

 fifteen years before, and had died upon his rocky prison seven or 

 eight years before ; while Alexander of Russia, his mightiest antago- 



