44: TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



and necessities of all classes of society, that any sudden change or 

 any interference of the military power, however slight it may 

 apparently be, disturbs and deranges to a greater or less extent the 

 entire system. The soldier's arm receives its strength from the 

 civil authority, of which it is the servant; it should never attempt 

 to control that which creates and sustains it. On this account it 

 is that the plumed hat is doffed, and the point of the sabre lowered 

 in the presence of the civil magistracy as the representative of 

 that power by which armies and navies are maintained, and on this 

 account the exhibition before us, with its varied treasures of me- 

 chanical art, is a higher and more convincing proof of the power 

 of the Republic than its armies girt with bristling steel from the 

 Potomac to the Mississippi, and all its iron clad navies which ride 

 the waves. It is the great object of this Institute to encourage 

 American industry, and in this point of view its work is truly 

 national, and its benefits in times past have been generally and 

 widely disseminated ; it is in every sense the friend of the laboring 

 man, whether that labor is exerted in the scholar's study, in the 

 noisy workshop, among the furrow^s of the teeming meadow, or in 

 the mines down in the depths of the earth. The Institute has 

 encouraged rising merit ; it has brought into notice many useful 

 inventions, and tended in no small degree to elevate the character 

 and increase the knowledge of the American mechanic. It lacks 

 but one thing, in my judgment, to complete and render most effi- 

 cient its arrangements for practical usefulness, namely, a perma- 

 nent location where an extensive library and a mechanical museum 

 may be at all times maintained. It seems somewhat strange, in- 

 deed, that in a city so noted for magnificence and costliness of its 

 public institutions, the claims of the Institute for a permanent 

 foundation should not have commended themselves to the liberality 

 of private individuals if not to that of the corporate authority; 

 but with the return of peace and union re-established, the Ameri- 

 can Institute will enter upon a career of prosperity which will 

 cause it to be remembered in future years as one of the most im- 

 portant and useful societies of the age. It has encouraged the 

 arts of peace and developed the resources of war, and now, like all 

 our other great interests, both public and private, it needs but the 

 influence of a vigorous prosecution of the war, followed by an honora- 

 ble and magnanimous settlement of our pending difiSculties, to estab- 

 lish ii in a position of wide-spread usefulness. In the name of the 

 President, the Board of Managers and the officers of the Institute, 

 I welcome this refined and intelligent audience to these halls lately 

 sacred to song, but now for a brief period devoted to the interests 

 of American industry. 



