Lippincotts Magazine, March 1876 | Page 2

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 chateau, 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 entrep?t 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 or their counselors. If it did, it was never put in practice. The difficulties to which we have before adverted stood in the way of that combination of individual effort to which the great displays of our day are mainly indebted for their success; but what the government might have accomplished toward overcoming distance and defective means of transport is evidenced by the mighty current of objects of art, luxury and curiosity which flowed toward the metropolis. Obelisks, colossal statues, and elephants and giraffes by the score are articles