Exhibition Adbresses. 179 



with those winch were exhibited when you held your annual gather- 

 ing at the lower extremity of the city, in Castle Garden. We should 

 find a similar interest in comparing the broadcloths, the shawls, the 

 furniture, the hardware, the cutlery, the apparatus for heating and 

 ventilating dwellings, the railroad machinery, the implements and 

 tools of the arts, and even the various fruits and vegetables which 

 are so temptingly arrayed near the entrance of this building, with 

 the corresponding objects of thirty years ago. We should not so 

 much compare for the sake of ascertaining whether we had improved, 

 for that may be taken for granted, but we should be curious to dis- 

 cover how much we had improved. 



The evidences of progress, which we have been considering, lead 

 to another thought; how wonderfully is the productive power of the 

 human race promoted by the progressive advancement of the indus- 

 trial arts. In order to understand this, we have only to consider 

 how inefficient, for most useful ends, is the individual man when 

 reduced to dependence upon the unaided efforts of his own hands. 

 It is in this condition that we are to suppose the race to have been 

 originally placed. It is in this condition that we find races still'^ 

 existing, in what we are accustomed to call a state of nature. The 

 producing power of savage races, such as those which have melted 

 away before our own, but which still continue to maintain a precari- 

 ous existence upon our western plains, is hardly superior to that of 

 the brute creation. It is almost wholly expended in providuig for 

 the immediate and pressing wants of daily life, and it accunuilates 

 nothing for the future. The first step in the way of advancement 

 from this miserable condition must consist in the production of some 

 species of tools or implements, by means of which the muscular force 

 of man may be more advantageously applied. We may say perhaps 

 that even our aboriginal savages were provided with something ot 

 this kind ; for such we must regard the bows and arrows, by means 

 of wdiich they brought down their game, and the rude implements of 

 flint or bone, which served them to shape their primitive coverings 

 of skins. It needs no argument to prove that the earliest 6tej)s of 

 progress toward what we call the arts of civilization, even on the 

 part of a race in the highest degree improvable, must necfessarily be 

 exceedingly slow. Such a progress can never receive a sensible 

 acceleration until man shall have acquired some slight knowledge of 

 the hidden things of nature, and some command over the natural 

 forces. He must know something of metals ; he must know how to 



