Kepoet of Board of General Managers. 11 



course of financial experience overtrading and overconfidence, with prob- 

 ably different relations another year between the farm and the markets of 

 the world, would be followed by a corresponding collapse. But this great 

 industrial exhibition at Chicago will take up the frayed threads of oppor- 

 tunity too lavishly employed and weave them into new cables to draw the 

 car of American progress. The vast movement of peoples over railways, 

 the stimulus given to business at cities and railway centers, the hundreds 

 of millions of dollars brought into active use which would otherwise be 

 unemployed will save us as a nation from the dangers which threaten and 

 crystallize into permanency thousands of enterprises which otherwise 

 would fail from lack of confidence or capital. 



The citizens of Chicago are to be complimented and congratulated 

 upon the courage and forethought which have characterized their local 

 preparations for this grand event. They have already expended $ 1 0,000,000 

 of their own money, and their patriotism and resources are not yet 

 exhausted. 



But the expense of this national enterprise should not he wholly borne 

 by the locality where Congress has placed it. The nation should do its 

 part to second the efforts of the citizens of Chicago to make this World's 

 Fair surpass in every respect any ever yet held in any country. The 

 grounds devoted to the fair are more than three times greater in area 

 than the acres which the exhibition had at Paris in 1889. The buildings 

 are more numerous and much larger than the ones which astonished the 

 visitors at the French capital. The floor space in these magnificent struc- 

 tures will be five times greater than at the Centennial exhibit at Phila- 

 delphia and double that of the French exhibition at Paris. 



The cost of the preparations for the Centennial was about $5,000,000, 

 and of the French exhibit about $10,000,000. But for the exposition at 

 Chicago it will be $17,000,000. The buildings themselves will be an 

 industrial exhibition of the highest character. They were designed by 

 the most distinguished of American architects. In proportion and 

 grandeur they excel the famed structures of other lands. By modern 

 invention and the plastic art the architect is enabled to impress upon the 

 eye all the effects produced by the genius of Phidias and Praxiteles. 



Our exposition will be unique and distinct from its predecessors at 

 London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, in its superb recognition of woman and 

 her work. A structure equal in size and appointments to any except the 

 Machinery Hall at Paris, and designed by an American girl, will demon- 

 strate by its architectural beauty the advance of women in this field, and 

 the departments housed in this superb structure, where woman's work will 

 be displayed, will fitly show what the United States has done to dignify 



