OPENING ADDRESS. 43 



are proved to be false, and this exhibition conclnaively shows that 

 the arm of industry is not paralyzed or broken, and that in conse- 

 quence of the due subordination of the military to the civil power, 

 even in the midst of war, progress marks our course in all the arts 

 of peace. In this point of view the present exhibition has, indeed, 

 great significance, and we may well pause to reflect upon the 

 mighty lesson which it teaches. Great armies and fleets are deemed 

 by many the surest proofs of national strength, but in most cases 

 they will be found to be the unfailing evidence of weakness and 

 impending ruin. They tell of a people bowed to the earth by the 

 heavy weight of taxation, of manufactures suspended, of commerce 

 ruined. An exhibition like the present, on the other hand, conveys 

 the surest evidence of national prosperity and capacity to support 

 whatever military force the exigencies of the times may require. 

 They err greatly who estimate the power of nations by the number 

 of arm.ed men whom their people are compelled to support, rather 

 than by the intelligence and capacity of tlieir laboring class, for it 

 is in the workshop and fields that the true sources of power exist 

 which the battalion and the squadron merely consume. 1 say that 

 the power of a nation is in its industrial classes, and it is on this 

 account that the civil authority, in all well-regulated governments, 

 takes precedence of military rule. 



Look around this hall upon all the useful articles with which the 

 tables are covered, and tell me whether the great armies and navies 

 which carry the flag of the Republic so proudly, could be main- 

 tained for an hour in the absence of the patient industry by which 

 those articles were produced. Precisely in the same ratio in which agri- 

 culture and manufactures prosper in a country, is the capacity of 

 that country to support the burden of war. The plow must turn 

 the furrow, and the farmer must garner the rich harvest of the 

 golden grain, or the hungry soldier will faint with weakness ; the 

 noisy shuttle must traverse the loom, and the silent needle in 

 woman's hand must perform its busy work, or he will be chilled by 

 the storms and blasts of winter; the blazing forge must glow, and 

 the sonoious anvil ring to furnish him with arms to meet his 

 adversaries. This exhibition, therefore, which displays the pro- 

 gress of American industry, displays at the same time the true 

 sources from which the power of the Republic springs, and prompts 

 us by every means at our command to extend and improve them. 

 Upon the maintenance of the civil authority in its full integrity, 

 unrestricted and unimpaired, the harmonious working of the great 

 and intricate s^'stem of human industry mainly depends ; it is ^o 

 nicely adapted by the experience of years to the relative positions 



