THE CRYSTAL PALACE AND ITS LESSONS.

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BY HORACE GREELEY.

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Each age, each race, inscribes itself, with more or less distinctness, on History’s dial. Nineveh, almost faded from our traditions of the world’s infancy, revisits us in her freshly exhumed sculptures and in the vivid narrations of Layard. The Egypt of Sesostris and the Pharaohs survives no less in her pyramids and obelisks than in the ever-enduring records of Moses and Manetho. Jerusalem, in her lonely humiliation, best typifies the Hebrew state and race. Ancient Rome lives for us in the Capitol and the Coliseum, as does her mediæval and sacerdotal offspring and namesake in St. Peter’s and the Vatican. Royal and feudal France, the France of Richelieu and Louis le Grand, still lingers in the boundless magnificence and prodigality, the showy sieges and battle-pieces of Versailles. The England of the last three centuries confronts us in the Bank—not a very stately nor graceful edifice, it must be allowed; but very substantial and well furnished—the fit heart’s core of a trading, money-getting people. So we Americans of the Nineteenth Century will be found in due time to have inscribed ourselves most legibly, though all unconsciously, on the earth’s unfading records—how, or in what, time alone can tell. Perhaps a railroad over the Rocky Mountains, a telegraph across the Atlantic, a towering observatory wherein all the storms and calms at any moment prevailing within the earth’s atmosphere shall be portrayed on a common dial-plate, and the storms which shall take place at any point during the next day or week, with their several directions and intensities—perhaps something very different from any of these. Essential History still insists on writing itself, and will not be controlled nor anticipated.

—The Crystal Palace, with its contents and purposes, was the clearest expression yet given to the spirit and aspirations of our time—aspirations not wholly utterable nor even comprehensible as yet, but sufficiently so to demand and reward our deepest attention. That Palace was the first edifice ever built for and consecrated to the uses of Universal Industry. It was the first structure ever devoted to the advancement and diffusion of the Useful Arts throughout the world—the first in which, to the greatest extent consistent with individual selfishness, the arcana of skill and production were thrown open to all mankind, with an express invitation, “Come hither, and see how the most successful workers accomplish their ends, and learn to rival or excel them if you can.” Herein was assembled the first general convention or council of Captains of Industry—the first practical Peace Congress ever held. Magnificent in conception and most triumphant in execution, this grand and fruitful enterprise deserves something more than the journalist’s fleeting paragraph. We cannot waste the time that we devote to its contemplation, even though I should succeed no farther than in drawing your attention to the subject, leaving it to be pondered unaided, unembarrassed, by my crude and hasty suggestions.