The getting up of a World's Fair was an afterthought; the original design having been simply an illustration of British industrial advancement, in friendly rivalry with that which was becoming, across the Channel, too brilliant to be ignored. The government's contribution, in the first instance, was meagre enough—merely the use of a site. Rough discipline in youth is England's system with all her bantlings. She is but a frosty parent if at bottom kindly, and, when she has a shadow of justification, proud. In the present instance she stands excused by the sore shock caused her conservatism by the conceit of a building of glass and iron four times as long as St. Paul's, high enough to accommodate comfortably one of her ancestral elms, and capacious enough to sustain a general invitation to all mankind to exhibit and admire.
Novelty and innovation attended the first step of the great movement. The design of the structure made architects rub their eyes, and yet its origin was humble and practical enough. The Adam of crystal palaces, like him of Eden, was a gardener. When Joseph Paxton raised the palm-house at Chatsworth he little suspected that he was building for the world—that, to borrow a simile from his own vocation, he was setting a bulb which would expand into a shape of as wide note as the domes of Florence and St. Sophia. And the cost of his new production was so absurdly low—eighty thousand pounds by the contract. The cheapness of his plan was its great merit in the eyes of the committee, and that which chiefly determined its selection over two hundred and forty-four competitors. This new cathedral for the apotheosis of industry resembled those of the old worship in the attributes of nave, aisles and transepts; and these features have been, by reason in great degree of the requirements of construction, continued in its successors. Galleries were added to the original design to secure space additional to what was naturally deemed at first an ample allowance for all comers. Before ground had been well broken the demands of British exhibitors alone ran up to four hundred and seventeen thousand superficial feet instead of the two hundred and ten thousand—half the whole area—allotted them. The United States were offered forty thousand feet; France, fifty thousand, afterward increased to sixty-five; the Zollverein, thirty thousand, and India the same. A comparison of the whole number of exhibitors, as distributed between Great Britain and other countries, indicates that the equal division of the superficial space was a tolerably accurate guess. They numbered 7381 from the mother-country and her colonies, and 6556 from the rest of the world. Certainly, a change this from the first French exhibition, held in the dark days of the Directory, when the list reached but 110 names. We shall dismiss the statistics of this exhibition with the remark that it has precedence of its fellows in financial success as well as in time, having cleared a hundred and seventy-odd thousand pounds, and left the Kensington Museum as a memorial of that creditable feat, besides sending its cast-off but still serviceable induviæ to Sydenham, where it enshrines another museum, chiefly of architectural reproductions in plaster, in a sempiternal coruscation of fountains, fireworks and fiddle-bows. The palace of industry has become the palace of the industrial—abundantly useful still if it lure him from the palace of gin. The chrism of Thackeray's inaugural ode will not have been dishonored.
The first of the great fairs, in so many respects a model to all that came after, was beset at the outset by the same difficulty in arrangement encountered by them. How to reconcile the two headings of subjects and nations, groups of objects and groups of exhibitors, the endowments and progress of different races and the advance of mankind generally in the various fields of effort, was, and is, a problem only approximately to be solved. It was yet more complicated in 1851 from the compression of the entire display into one building of simple and symmetrical form, instead of dispersing certain classes of objects, bulky and requiring special appliances for their proper display, into subsidiary structures—the plan so effectively employed in Fairmount Park. A sort of compromise was arrived at which rendered possible the mapping of both countries and subjects, especially in the reports, and to some extent in the exhibition itself, without making the spectacle one of confusion. The visitor was enabled to accomplish his double voyage through the depths of the sea of glass without a great deal of backing and filling, and to find his log, after it was over, reasonably coherent.
The articles displayed were ranged under thirty heads. The preponderance of matter of fact was shown in the concession of four of these to raw material, nineteen to manufactures, and one to the fine arts. Twenty-nine atoms of earth to one of heaven! Of course the one-thirtieth whereinto the multiform and elastic shape of genius was invited, like the afreet into his chest, to condense itself, had to be subdivided—an intaglio and a temple, a scarabæus and a French battle-picture, being very different things. This was accomplished, and the Muses made as comfortable as could be expected. They soon asserted the pre-eminence theirs by right divine, and came to be the leading attraction of the affair, next to the Koh-i-noor. On this barbaric contribution of the gorgeous East the French observers, a little jealous perhaps, were severe. One of them says: "They rely on the sun to make it sparkle," and, when the fog is too thick, on gas. The curiosity about it, in the eyes of this incisive Gaul, was "not the divinity, but the worshipers." All day long a crowd filed solemnly by it under the supervision of a detachment of police, each pilgrim bestowing upon the fetish, "an egg-shaped lump of glass," half a second's adoration, and then moving reluctantly on. Thousands of far more beautiful things were around it, but none embodying in so small a space so many dollars and cents, and none therefore so brilliant in the light of the nineteenth century. As this light, nevertheless, is that in which we live, move and have our being, we must accept it, and turn to substantials, wrought and unwrought.
On our way to this feast of solids we must step for a moment into St. Paul's and listen to the great commemorative concert of sixty-five hundred voices that swept all cavilers, foreign and domestic, off their feet, brought tears to the most sternly critical eye, and caused the composer, Cramer, to exclaim, as he looked up into the great dome, filled with the volume of harmony, "Cosa stupenda! stupenda! La gloria d'Inghilterra!"
A transition, indeed, from this to coal and iron—from a concord of sweet sounds to the rumble into hold, car and cart of thirty-five millions of tons of coal and two and a half millions of iron, the yearly product at that time of England! She has since doubled that of iron, and nearly trebled her extract of coal, whatever her progress in the harvest of good music and good pictures. Forced by economical necessity and assisted by chemistry, she makes her fuel, too, go a great deal farther than it did in 1851, when the estimate was that eighty-one per cent. of that consumed in iron-smelting was lost, and when the "duty" of a bushel of coal burnt in a steam-engine was less than half what it now is. The United States have the benefit of these improvements, at the same time that their yield of coal has swelled from four millions of tons at that time to more than fifty now, and of iron in a large though not equal ratio. The Lake Superior region, which rested its claims on a sample of its then annual product of one hundred tons of copper, now exports seven hundred thousand tons of iron ore.
Steel, now replacing iron in some of its heaviest uses, appeared as almost an article of luxury in the shape of knives, scissors and the like. The success of the Hindus in its production was quite envied and admired, though they had probably advanced little since Porus deemed thirty pounds a present fit for Alexander; their rude appliances beating Sheffield an hour and a half in the four hours demanded by the most adroit forgers of the city of whittles for its elimination from the warm bath of iron and carbon. Bessemer, with his steel-mines, as his furnaces at the ore-bank may be termed, was then in the future. The steel rails over which we now do most of our traveling were undreamed of. Bar iron did duty on all the eighty-eight hundred miles of American and sixty-five hundred of British railway; not many, if at all, more than are now laid, in this country at least, with steel. This poetic and historic metal has become as truly a raw product as potatoes. The poets will have to drop it. The glory of Toledo—of her swords bent double in the scabbard, of her rapiers that bore into one's interior only the titillating sensation of a spoonful of vanilla ice, and of her decapitating sabres that left the culprit whole so long as he forbore to sneeze—is trodden under foot of men.
In crude materials the Union is at home. It was so in 1851, and is still; but then it was not so much at home in anything else as now. We have advanced in that field too, since we sent no silver, and from Colorado no gold, no canned fruits, meats or fish, and no wine but some Cincinnati Catawba, thin and acid, according to the verdict of the imbibing jury. We adventured timidly into manufacturing competition with the McCormick reaper, which all Europe proceeded straightway to pirate; ten or twelve samples of cotton and three of woolen goods; Ericsson's caloric-engine; a hydrostatic pump; some nautical instruments; Cornelius's chandeliers for burning lard oil—now the light of other days, thanks to our new riches in kerosene; buggies of a tenuity so marvelous in Old-World eyes that their half-inch tires were likened to the miller of Ferrette's legs, so thin that Talleyrand pronounced his standing an act of the most desperate bravery; soap enough to answer Coleridge's cry for a detergent for the lower Rhine; and one bridge model, forerunner of the superb iron erections that have since leaped over rivers and ravines in hundreds.