58 New York at the World's Columbian Exposition. 



We shall be able to point to this building in which you are assembled 

 as New York's most beautiful exhibit. I count it a pride and privilege 

 to dedicate, as I do now by the prerogative of my office, this fair structure 

 to the reception and convenience of New Yorkers visiting the fair, and to 

 the entertainment of all to whom the State may extend its hospitality. 

 The plan of this building down to the minutest detail of its lavish orna- 

 mentation is a birth of the same time, an outcome of the same spirit that 

 sent Columbus on his voyage, and enlarged no less the scope of human 

 intelligence than the boundaries of the habitable globe. It belongs to the 

 period of the new birth of learning and of art, when the torpor of centu- 

 ries was thrown off and the history of modern civilization began; In the 

 republics of Italy, whose merchants were princes, palaces, of which this is 

 the similitude, were built while Columbus was brooding over his enterprise 

 of wresting its secret from the western sea. In such abodes did men live 

 whose wealth was fed by countless rills of peaceful traffic from three con- 

 tinents, and in such were luxury and display tempered by a discriminating 

 taste in art, and by a sense of the obligations of a stirring and elevating 

 public life. Our State building stands for some of the noblest ideals that 

 commerce ever fostered or civic pride ever maintained, and it is, therefore, 

 a most fitting representation of the visible presence of New York at the 

 approaching congress of nations. 



To that gathering New York will come, bringing the best she has, 

 whether of the bounty of nature or the art of man. In the pride with 

 which the whole country may justly regard the greatest, the most compre- 

 hensive and the most impressive of all international exhibitions. New York 

 will fully participate. The lyistre which the World's Fair will shed upon 

 the city by whose energy an4 enterprise it has been promoted, New York 

 will do her utmost to enhance. There will be neither East nor West, North 

 nor South in this magnificent display of the gathered fruits of human pro- 

 gress at the close of the nineteenth century. Neither sectional nor munici- 

 pal jealousy can have a place in a celebration whose grandeur all the world 

 is helping to swell, and in which all the world will participate. A gener- 

 ous rivalry can alone have place in our people's effort to show that they 

 have not been unfaithful to the responsibilities laid upon them, and that 

 they have not been careless stewards of the heritage which, through the 

 centuries, was prepared for the great republic of the west. 



