RELATION TO COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE. 307 



nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth, peace be multiplied 

 unto you." And, at her august bidding, the nations gathered together 

 within that wondrous Crystal Palace, which seen across the drifting thunder 

 "clouds and bloody horizon that have too largely blotted out the clear 

 sky since, appears rather a Midsummer Night's Dream woven by fairies, 

 than a temple built by hands, on which with waking eyes we gazed. 

 The Great Exhibition of 1851 was one of those cyclical blossomings of 

 the mighty banyan tree of the nations which occur only at immense in- 

 tervals. According to the older botanists, the aloe or agave flowers but 

 once in a hundred years. Their successors think that they made the 

 cycle too long ; for my purpose it is too short : but take it either way, 

 1851 marked one of the aloe-flowerings of the human race, and of the 

 fruits which followed that flowering, the Industrial Museum is one. I 

 do not mean by this that but for the Great Exhibition we should not have 

 had industrial museums. On the other hand, it would, I believe, have 

 been born to us at any rate, only at a later period, and as the fruit of a 

 lesser tree. In actual fact, however, it came to us through the out- 

 burst of peaceful energy, which built and filled the Palace of 1851 ; and 

 whilst we are indebted to a very few individuals for its local develop- 

 ment, we must refer its birth, as well as that of the Crystal Palace 

 itself, to a conviction, slowly reached and lying deep in the hearts of 

 men, that industrial museums were a want of the age. 



In truth, to recal the former comparison, as the flowering of the 

 aloe at the close of the hundred years (if that is its cycle) implies that 

 the ninety-nine preceding ones have been spent in patiently amassing 

 and elaborating materials for the crown of flowers which it wears on its 

 hundredth birth-day ; so we must look upon the Palace of 1851, not as 

 a Jonah's gourd which rose in a night and withered in a night, but as 

 the quickly expanded flower of a trunk, strong and enduring, like that 

 of a cedar of Lebanon centuries old. The mere summoning of the 

 nations to Hyde Park in 1851 wauld have been of none effect had the. 

 summons not been met half way by a counterpart longing for such a 

 call. Natural philosophers are familiar with the phenomenon of still 

 water, more than ice-cold remaining liquid and uncongealed, till it is 

 shaken or disturbed, when it shoots in an instant into a forest of crystals. 

 The crystalline forces were all the time struggling to assert themselves, 

 and the slightest motion turned the balance in their favour. The long 

 peace had calmed the world into a similar quiescence ; but the latent 

 activities were longing for action, and the Prince Consort had scarcely 

 spoken the words of invitation, before the glass and iron crystallised 

 into a palace, and the nations, as if they had been intently waiting for 

 the call, rose like one man, and piled their works under its graceful 

 dome. 



It is in this ready acceptance of the invitation to London, and in the 

 subsequent crowdings to the exhibitions of New York, Dublin, Paris, 

 and Manchester, that I find the strongest arguments in favour of indus- 



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