OPENING ADDRESS, 



AT THE TWENTY-NINTH ANNUAL FAIR OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE, 

 SEPTEMBER 15tH, 1857. 



By the Hon. Henry Meigs, Recording Secretary. 



Ladies and Gentlemen. — Welcome to this Crystal Palace now 

 opened to the genius of America, whose millions of strong arms 

 carry into the fullest perfection the designs and inventions of the 

 freest people on earth, original, self-dependent, looking with 

 eagle eye onward and upward. Behold the realities all around 

 you — nearly every one of them made for useful purposes, the 

 smaller number for ornament, and do not forget while you look, 

 that all is the work of Americans, and chiefly of the one year 

 past. Those are samples of American work in the factory and 

 field; and their total value to our country, counting all crops 

 and all works, about five thousand millions of dollars in one 

 year; a sum which would pay that great pyramid of debt of 

 Great Britain, whose base is all the people and on whose apex 

 sits credit, the emperor of commerce. 



And this almost fabulous sum of money, before which Califor- 

 nia and Australia hide their penny play, is due to modern science 

 in agriculture, and especially to the mechanic arts, those steel- 

 bound giants who do more travelling for us in a year than all the 

 horses, mules, and camels of the world could do; aye, with all 

 the men to help them. England said thirty days ago, that she 

 is now fighting China and India, which constitute half the people 

 of the whole globe, and that she would whip them too 1 That 

 her science and machinery constituted a power more than equal 

 to the task; for by mathematical calculation, she now has work- 

 ing powers equal to those of four hundred millions of able- 



