same error, or the other side of the question.

There has lately been an exhibition of articles of French manufacture,
at Paris; one of, I believe, the triennial collections of this
character, that have been established here. The court of the Louvre was
filled with temporary booths for the occasion, and vast ranges of the
unfinished apartments in that magnificent palace have been thrown open
for the same purpose. The court of the Louvre, of itself, is an area
rather more than four hundred feet square, and I should think fully a
quarter of a mile of rooms in the building itself are to be added to the
space occupied for this purpose.

The first idea, with which I was impressed, on walking through the
booths and galleries, on this occasion, was the great disproportion
between the objects purely of taste and luxury, and the objects of use.
The former abounded, were very generally elegant and well-imagined,
while the latter betrayed the condition of a nation whose civilization
has commenced with the summit, instead of the base of society.

In France, nearly every improvement in machinery is the result of
scientific research; is unobjectionable in principles, profound in the
adaptation of its parts to the end, and commonly beautiful in form. But
it ends here, rarely penetrating the mass, and producing positive
results. The Conservatoire des Arts, for instance, is full of beautiful
and ingenious ploughs; while France is tilled with heavy, costly, and
cumbrous implements of this nature. One sees light mould turning up,
here, under a sort of agricultural _diligences_, drawn by four, and even
six heavy horses, which in America would be done quite as well, and much
sooner, by two. You know I am farmer enough to understand what I say, on
a point like this. In France, the cutlery, ironware, glass,
door-fastenings, hinges, locks, fire-irons, axes, hatchets, carpenter's
tools, and, in short, almost everything that is connected with homely
industry and homely comfort, is inferior to the same thing in America.
It is true, many of our articles are imported, but this produces no
change in the habits of the respective people; our manufactories are
merely in Birmingham, instead of being in Philadelphia.

I have now been long enough in France to understand that seeing an
article in an exhibition like the one I am describing, is no proof that
it enters at all into the comforts and civilization of the nation,
although it may be an object as