once the far eastern end of the palace
where a broad area had been allotted to the United States,--Jonathan,
as is his wont, having helped himself largely. Great was the
American's disappointment, cutting was the rebuke to his vanity; his
country made no _show_ at all. The samples of her industry were
not outwardly brilliant. Their excellence lay in their inward power,
in their wide usefulness. They were not ornaments and luxuries for the
dwellings of the few, they were inventions that diffuse comforts and
blessings among the many,--labor-saving machines and cheap newspapers.
By the thoughtful visitor the merit of these was appreciated, as it
was acknowledged in the final awards of the judges. And even in this
high department where we are so eminent, owing to distance and
misunderstandings, we were not adequately represented. But even if we
had been, the European would have said, "This has a high value and
interest; but still I find not here enough to justify the expectations
entertained by this people, and by many in Europe, of the future
greatness of the American Republic. These things, significant as they
are, are yet not an alphabet that can be so compounded as to
write the richest page of man's history. In this present display I
find not prefigured that splendid future the Americans are fond of
predicting for themselves." And the American, acknowledging the force
of the comment, would have turned away mortified, humbled. But he was
saved any such humiliation. In the midst of that area, under that
beautiful flag, day after day, week after week, month after month,
from morn till night, go when he would, he beheld there a circle ever
full, its vacancies supplied as soon as they were made, a circle
silent with admiration, hushed by emotion, gazing at a master-piece of
American art, the Greek Slave of Powers. And from that contemplation
hundreds of thousands of Europeans carried away an impression of
American capacity, a conviction that truly a great page is to be
written by the young republic in the book of history,--a sense of
American power which they could have gotten from no other source.

Our Association, gentlemen, owes its origin to the wants of industry.
The moving power which has been strongest in bringing so many of us
together to found an institution for the encouragement of art in Rhode
Island, is the desire hereby more thoroughly to inweave the
beautiful into cotton and woolen fabrics, into calicoes and d