Report of Board of General Managers. 135 



Tou have taught us that art is more God-like than science, for while 

 science discovers, art creates. If an emperor could stoop to piok up the 

 brush dropped by a Titian, if Meissonier could kiss the slipper once worn 

 by a Michael Angelo, all men may bow to art. The art works upon which 

 wo gaze today speak a universal language and impart a lasting pleasure 

 to all. They appeal to our highest senses and awake our noblest emotions. 

 They are an eternal benediction. They induce the power of reflection 

 and inspire us with the majesty of the creative faculty. They cause us 

 to realize more fully than ever before Lytton's definition of art: "The 

 effort of man to express the ideas suggested to him by nature of a 

 power above nature, whether that power lie within the recesses of his 

 own being in that gfeat first power of which nature, like himself, is but 

 an effect." 



A visit to the fair is the equivalent to a trip around the entire circuit 

 of the world. Here we meet the peoples of the nations ; we hear their 

 language and their music ; we see their faces and familiarize our- 

 selves with their manners and customs. Here we are carried back 400 

 years in history. We see upon land the reproduced monastery of La Rabida, 

 upon the water the historic caravels, those brave little craft, frail in 

 structure and diminutive in size, yet which rode the waves long enough 

 to penetrate the mystery of the seas, to reconstruct the map of the world 

 and shed upon the gloom of the dark ages the light of a modern civiliza- 

 tion ; those vessels which brought to our shores the illustrious navigator 

 who broke the shackles of superstition, calmed the fears of timid men and 

 gave a new world to commerce, to science and to civilization. From the 

 progress made in the past who can tell how far the giawt republic will 

 400 years hence dominate the policy of the world ? This nation was 

 not born among the fabled tales and mysteries of barbaric ages, but 

 planted, fully equipped, upon this virgin continent. It has been woven 

 of the stoutest fibres of other lands and nurtured by a commingling of the 

 best blood of other nations. America has now thrown off the swaddling 

 clothes of infancy and stands clothed in the robes of majesty and power 

 in which the God who made her intends that she shall henceforth tread 

 the earth. To day she may be seen moving at the head of the procession 

 of the world's events, leading the van of civilized and Christianized 

 liberty, her manifest and avowed destiny to light the path of liberty 

 throughout the world till human freedom and human rights become the 

 common heritage of mankind. In the working out of this destiny we feel 

 assured of the events of this memorial day that Chicago and New York 

 will always be found laboring in common for the nation's common good, 

 and in all things pertaining to our national prosperity, moving forward 



