OPENING ADDRESS 



AT THE TWENTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL FAIR OF THE AMERICAN INSTI- 

 TUTE, SEPTEMBER 24, 1856. 



By the Hon. Henry Meigs, Recording Secretary. » 



Ladies and Gentlemen. — The managers request me to salute 

 you on the opening of the twenty-eighth Annual Fair of the 

 American Institute, in this splendid Crystal Palace. It is my 

 highest pleasure to obey their request in opening to America, old 

 and young, the abundant new demonstrations of their noble 

 progress in these, the God-bidden works of their hands.. 



You see that there can be few folded jar-niente arms in our 

 republic. The do-nothings are almost as scarce as the mammoths. 

 We are all, from the first planting of our feet on this great con- 

 tinent, carrying out, with unexampled energy, every work which 

 ean make it the greatest wonder of the world. The old world 

 looks to this new one as a new star of the first magnitude now. 

 Truly, we do talk magniloquently of ourselves. Tne rest of 

 maiftind will soon doit for us, when our flying cars and steamers 

 shall have bound our four thousand-mile-wide republic together. 

 .Nor is this a phantom of the present, but a solemn verity, looked 

 at from the first days of oui- ancestry at Plymouth rock and the 

 land of Pocahontas. 



The wisest and best men have never ceased to proclaim the 

 mission of our race to be — all Jlmerica, — the Bible, — the books, 

 industry of all, — a continent entirely cleared of barbarism in 

 manners as well as sterility of soil, — ^all over "dotted with school 

 houses and churches," like stars in the heavens, as our orator, 

 A. H. H. Stuart, once said here. Look at our poet, Earlow, 

 (whose epic, "The Columbiad," is not read as much as it should 



