LITMIR.BIZ

      Social and political questions like this point to a vast field of inquiry. For its proper cultivation the exposition provides data additional to those heretofore available. They should be used as far as possible upon the spot. At least, they can be examined, collated and prepared for full employment. To this end, meetings and discussions held by men qualified by intellect and study to deal with them are the obvious resort. There is room among the two hundred judges for some such men, but the juries are little more numerous than is required for the examination of and report on objects. For more abstract inquiries they will need recruits. These should be supplied by the leading philosophical associations of this country and Europe. The governments have all an interest in enlisting their aid, and the Centennial Commission has done what in it lay to promote their action. Ethnic characteristics, history, literature, education, crime, statistics as a science, hygiene and medicine generally are among the broad themes which are not apt to be adequately treated by the average committee of inspection. So with the whole range of the natural sciences. Dissertations based on the jury reports will doubtless be abundant after a while, but those reports themselves, being limited in scope, will not be as satisfactory material as that which philosophic specialists would themselves extract from direct observation and debate upon the ground.

      For the study of the commanding subject of education the provision made at the present exhibition is exceptionally great. In bulk, and probably in completeness, it is immeasurably beyond the display made on any preceding occasion. The building erected by the single State of Pennsylvania for her educational department covers ten or eleven thousand square feet, and other States of the Union make corresponding efforts to show well in the same line. The European nations all manifest a new interest in this branch, and give it a much more prominent place in their exhibit than ever before. The school-systems of most of them are of very recent birth, and do not date back so far as 1851. The kingdom of Italy did not exist at that time or for many years after, yet we now see it pressing for a foremost place in the race of popular education, and multiplying its public schools in the face of all the troubles attendant upon the erection and organization of a new state.

      The historian will find aliment less abundant. A century or two of Caucasian life in America is but a thing of yesterday to him, and, though far from uninstructive, is but an offshoot from modern European annals. For all that, he finds himself on our soil in presence of an antiquity which remains to be explored, and which clamors to be rescued from the domain of the pre-historic. It has no literary records beyond the scant remains of Mexico. It writes itself, nevertheless, strongly and deeply on the face of the land—in mounds, fortifications and tombs as distinct, if not so elaborate, as those of Etruria and Cyprus. These remains show the hand of several successive races. Who they were, what their traits, whence they came, what their relations with the now civilized Chinese and Japanese—whom, physically, their descendants so nearly resemble—are legitimate queries for the historian. Geologically, America is older than Europe, and was fitted for the home of the red man before the latter ceased to be the home of the whale. The investigation of its past, if impossible to be conducted in the light of its own records or even traditions, is capable of aiding in the verification of conclusions drawn from those of the Old World. If History, however, contemptuously relegates the Moundbuilders to the mattock of the antiquarian, she is still "Philosophy teaching by example." As thus allied with Philosophy, she finds something to look into at the Centennial, even though she look obliquely, after the fashion of the observant Hollanders, who have stuck the reflecting glasses of the Dutch street-windows into the sides of their compartment in the Main Building, and squint, without a change of position, upon the United States, Spain, South America, Egypt, Great Britain and several other countries.

      Religion and philanthropy find the field inviting, and their representatives, individual and associated, are busy in preparing to till it. The enthusiasm of the leading religious societies took the concrete shape of statuary. Hence the Catholic Fountain, heretofore noticed; the Hebrew statue to Religious Liberty, as established in a land that never had a Ghetto or a Judenstrasse; the Presbyterian figure of Witherspoon; an Episcopalian of Bishop White; and others under way or proposed. The temperance movement, too, embodies itself in a fountain that runs ice-water instead of claret. The less tangible but perhaps more fruitful form of reunions and discussions must in a greater or less degree enhance the power for good of these organizations. They are led by men of mind and energy, seldom averse to enlightenment, and all professing to seek nothing else. When men of these qualities, aiming at the same or a like object, meet to compare their respective admeasurements of its parallax made from as many different points, they cannot fail to approach accuracy. Faith is a first element in all great undertakings. It removes mountains at Mont Cenis, as it walked the waves with Columbus. In our century even faith is progressive, and does not shrink from elbowing its way through what Bunyan would have styled Vanity Fair.

      Modestly in the rear of the moral reformers, yet not wholly and uniformly unaggressive, nor guiltless altogether of isms and schisms, step forward the literary men. As a rule, they do not affect expositions, or exhibitions of any kind. But one general meeting, with some minor and informal ones, is on the programme for them. This is well. The world and the fullness thereof belongs to them, and they may care to come forward to scan this schedule of their inheritance. We do not hear of their having combined to put up a pavilion of their own, like the dairymen and the brewers, "to show the different processes of manufacture." The pen will be at work here, nevertheless, and has been from the beginning, before the foundations of the Corliss engine were laid or the granite of Memorial Hall left the quarry. Without this first of implements none of the other machinery would ever have moved. The pen is mightier than the piston. It is the invisible steam that impels all.

      FRENCH RESTAURANT LA FAYETTE.

      In a visible form also it is here. The publishers of the London Punch have selected as the most comprehensive motto for the case in which they exhibit copies of their various publications a sentence from Shakspeare: "Come and take choice of all my library, and so beguile thy sorrow." We do not know that to dull his sorrows is all that can be done for man. Literature assumes to do more than make him forget. The lotos-eater is not its one hero. School-books, piled aloft "in numbers without number numberless," may to the man be suggestive of hours without thought and void of grief, but they certainly are not to the boy. Blue books, ground out in a thousand bureaus, and contributed in like profusion, may be pronounced a weariness to the adult flesh, however sweet their ultimate uses. Unhappy those who wade through them for increasing the happiness of others! These humble but portly representatives of political literature are the log-books of the ship of state. They chart and chronicle the currents and winds along its course, so that from the mass of chaff a grain of guidance may be painfully winnowed out for the benefit of its next voyage, or for the voyages of other craft floundering on the same perilous and baffling sea. Everything comes pat to a log-book. As endless is the medley of memoranda in blue-books. They deal, like government itself, with everything. They take up the citizen on his entry into the cradle, and do not quite drop him at the grave. How to educate, clothe, feed and doctor him; how to keep him out of jail, and how, once there, to get him out again with the least possible moral detriment; how to adjust as lightly as possible to his shoulders the burden of taxation; how to economize him as food for powder; and how to free him from the miasm of crowded cities,—are but a small part of their contents. And the index is growing, if possible, larger, as the apparatus of government becomes more and more intricate. With such contributions and credentials do the rulers of the nations enroll themselves in the guild of authorship. They are proud of them, and exhibit them in profusion, in whole libraries, rich with gold and the primary colors.

      THE MAMMOTH RODMAN GUN.

      Expositions, as we have before remarked, come into the same worshipful guild by right of a special literature they have brought into being. They come, moreover, into the blue-book range

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