Lippincotts Magazine, March 1876 | Page 2

celebrated the first centennial of the
discovery of printing or of the discovery of America by assembling the
fresh triumphs of European art, so wonderful to us in their decay, with
the still more novel productions of Portuguese India and Spanish
America. But the length of sea--voyages prosecuted in small vessels
with imperfect knowledge of winds and currents, and the difficulties of
land-transportation when roads were almost unknown, would have
restricted the display to meagre proportions, particularly had Vienna
been the site selected. Few visitors could have attended from distant
countries, and the masses of the vicinage could only have stared. The
idea, indeed, of getting up an exhibition to be chiefly supported by the
intelligent curiosity of the bulk of the people would not have been apt
to occur to any one. The political and educational condition of these
was at the end of the century much what it had been at the beginning.
Labor and the laborer had gained little.
The weapon-show, depicted in _Old Mortality_, and the market-fair, as
vivid in the _Vicar of Wakefield_, exemplify the expositions of those
days. To them were added a variety of church festivals, or "functions,"
still a great feature of the life of Catholic countries. Trade and frolic
divided these among themselves in infinite gradation of respective
share, now the ell-wand, and now the quarter-staff or the fiddler's bow,
representing the sceptre of the Lord of Misrule. "At Christe's Kirk on
the Grene that day" the Donnybrook element would appear to have
predominated. The mercantile feature was naturally preferred by gentle
Goldy, and the hapless investor in green spectacles may be counted the
first dissatisfied exhibitor on record at a modern exposition, for he
skirts the century.
Looking eastward, we find these rallies of the people, the time-honored
stalking-grounds of tale-writers and students of character generally,
swell into more imposing proportions. The sea dwindles and the land
broadens. Transportation and travel become difficult and hazardous.
Merchant and customer, running alike a labyrinthine gauntlet of taxes,
tolls and arbitrary exactions by the wolves of schloss and château,
found it safest to make fewer trips and concentrate their transactions.

The great nations, with many secondary trade-tournaments, as they may
be termed, had each a principal one. From the great fair of Leipsic, with
the intellectual but very bulky commodity of books for its specialty
to-day, we pass to the two Novgorods--one of them no more than a
tradition, having been annihilated by Peter the Great when, with the
instinct of great rulers for deep water, he located the new capital of his
vast interior empire on the only available harbor it possessed. Its
successor, known from its numerous namesakes by the designation of
"New," draws convoys of merchandise from a vast tributary belt
bounded by the Arctic and North Pacific oceans and the deserts of
Khiva. This traffic exceeds a hundred millions of dollars annually. The
medley of tongues and products due to the united contributions of
Northern Siberia, China and Turkestan is hardly to be paralleled
elsewhere on the globe. _Was_, insists the all-conquering railway as it
moves inexorably eastward, and relegates the New Novgorod, with its
modern fairs, to the stranded condition of the old one, with its
traditional expositions. As, however, the rail must have a terminus
somewhere, if only temporary, the caravans of camels, oxen, horses,
boats and sledges will converge to a movable entrepôt that will assume
more and more an inter-Asiatic instead of an inter-national character.
The furs, fossil ivory, sheepskins and brick tea brought by them after
voyages often reaching a year and eighteen months, come, strictly
enough, under the head of raw products. Still, it is the best they can
bring; which cannot be said of what Europe offers in exchange--articles
mostly of the class and quality succinctly described as "Brummagem."
It is obvious that prizes, diplomas, medals, commissioners and juries
would be thrown away here. The palace of glass and iron can only
loom in the distant future, like the cloud-castle in Cole's Voyage of Life.
It may possibly be essayed in a generation or two, when
Ekaterinenborg, built up into a great city by the copper, iron, gold, and,
above all, the lately-opened coal-mines of the Ural, shall have become
the focus of the Yenisei, Amour, Yang-tse and Indus system of
railways. But here, again, we are overstepping our century.
[Illustration: INTERIOR VIEW OF THE TRANSEPT OF CRYSTAL
PALACE.]
To us it seems odd that in the days when an autocratic decree could
summarily call up "all the world" to be taxed, and when, in prompt

obedience to it, the people of all the regions gathered to a thousand
cities, the idea of numbering and comparing, side by side, goods,
handicrafts, arts, skill, faculties and energies, as well as heads, never
occurred to rulers