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intellectual activity of a People. A community which witnesses from year
to year the processes of Agricultural labor only, lacks a stimulus to
mental cultivation of inestimable value. If Europe were to say to
America, "Sit still, and we will send you from year to year all the
Wares and Fabrics you need for nothing, on the simple condition that you
will not attempt to produce any yourselves," it would be most unwise and
suicidal to accept the offer. For we need not more the Wares and Fabrics
than the skill which fashions and the taste which beautifies them. We
need that multiform capacity and facility of hand and brain which only
experience in the Arts can bestow and diffuse. The National Industry is
the People's University; to confine it to a few and those the ruder
branches is to stunt and stagnate the popular mind--is to arrest the
march of improvement in Agriculture itself. Hence, nearly or quite all
the modern improvements in Cultivation have been made in immediate
proximity to a dense Manufacturing population; hence Belgium is now a
garden, while Ireland (except the manufacturing North) is to a great
extent stagnant and decaying. Other causes doubtless conspire, as in
England contrasted with Italy and Spain, to produce these results, but
they do not unsettle the general truth that Industry advances through a
symmetric and many-sided development or does not advance at all.

We have yet much to learn in the Arts, but the first lesson of all is a
well-founded confidence in our own artisans, our own capacities, with a
patriotic resolution to encourage the former and develop the latter. And
this confidence is abundantly justified even by what is exhibited here.
While our show of products is much less than it might and less even than
it should have been, those who have really studied it draw thence hope
and courage. No other nation exhibits within a similar compass so great
a diversity of excellence--no other exhibits so large a proportion of
inventions and valuable improvements. Even in the vast apartment devoted
to British Machinery, the number and importance of the American
inventions exhibited (some of them adapted to new uses or improved upon
in this country; others merely incorporated with British improvements),
is very striking. I doubt whether England during the last half century
has borrowed so many inventions from all the world beside--I am sure she
has not from all except France--as she has from the United S