fact at its commencement. Still less did the later exhibitions owe any
portion of their significance and interest to their connection with a
date. They afforded occasion for comparison and rivalry, but no shape
loomed up out of the past claiming to preside over the festival, to
have its toils and achievements remembered, and to be credited with a
share in the production of the harvests garnered by its successors.

In our case it is very different. Here was the birth-year of the Union
coming apace. It forced itself upon our contemplation. It appealed
not merely to the average passion of grown-up boys for hurrahs,
gun-firing, bell-ringing, and rockets sulphureous and oratorical. It
addressed us in a much more sober tone and assumed a far more
didactic aspect. Looking from its throne of clouds o'er half the (New)
World--and indeed, as we have shown, constructively over the Old as
well--it summoned us to the wholesome moral exercise of pausing a
moment in our rapid career to revert to first principles, moral,
social and political, and to explore the germs of our marvelous
material progress. Nor could we assume this office as exclusively for
our own benefit. The rest of Christendom silently assigned it to the
youngest born for the common good. Circumstances had placed in our
hands the measuring-rod of Humanity's growth, and all stood willing to
gather upon our soil for its application, so far as that could be
made by the method devised and perfected within the past quarter of
a century. It was here, a thousand leagues away from the scene of the
first enterprise of the kind, that the culminating experiment was to
be tried.

[Illustration: GIRARD AVENUE BRIDGE--ONE OF THE APPROACHES TO THE
EXHIBITION GROUNDS.]