Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876. Various
from Captain Jack's lava-bed reservation and jars of semi-putrescent treaty-beef. He will alight, next door to the penniless immigrant, the red man and the omnibus-horse, on Class 348, religious organizations and systems, embracing everything that grows out of man's sense of responsibility to his Maker. It will perhaps occur to the observer that, though the juxtaposition is well enough, religion ought to have come in a little before. His surprise at the power of condensation shown in compressing eternity into a single class will not be lessened when he passes on to Class 632, sheep; 634, swine; and 636, dogs and cats!
A glance over the classification-list assists us in recognizing the advantages of the system of awards framed by the Commission and adopted after patient study and discussion. It discards the plan—if plan it could be called—of scattering diplomas and medals of gold, silver and bronze right and left, after the fashion of largesse at a mediæval coronation, heretofore followed at international expositions. These prizes were decided on and assigned by juries whose impartiality—by reason of the imperfect representation upon them of the nations which exhibited little in mass or little in certain classes, and also of their failure to make written reports and thus secure their responsibility—could not be assured, and whose action, therefore, was defective in real weight and value. The juries were badly constituted: they had too much to do of an illusory and useless description, and they had too little to do that was solid and instructive. Special mentions, diplomas, half a dozen grades of medals and other honors, formed a programme too large and complicated to be discriminatingly carried out. So it happened that to exhibit and to get a distinction of some kind came, at Vienna, to be almost convertible expressions; and who excelled in the competition in any of the classes, or who had contributed anything substantial to the stock of human knowledge or well-being, remained quite undetermined. What instruction the display could impart was confined to spectators who studied its specialties for themselves and used their deductions for their individual advantage, and to those who read the sufficiently general and cursory reports made to their several governments by the national commissions. The official awards and reports of the exposition authorities amounted to little or nothing.
THE CORLISS ENGINE, FURNISHING MOTIVE-POWER FOR MACHINERY HALL.
A sharp departure from this practice was decided on at the Centennial. Two hundred judges, of undoubted character and intelligence and entire familiarity with the departments assigned to them, were chosen—half by the foreign bureaus and half by the U.S. Commission. These were made officers of the exposition itself, and thus separated from external influences. They were given a reasonable and fixed compensation of one thousand dollars each for their time and personal expenses. An equal division of the number of judges between the domestic and foreign sides gives the latter an excess, measured by the comparative extent of the display from the two sources. But this is favorable to us, as we shall be the better for an outside judgment on the merits of both our own and foreign exhibits. Were it otherwise, the excess of private observers from this country would counterbalance our deficit in judges. The foreign jurors have to see for the millions they represent. Our own will have vast numbers of their constituents on the ground.
Written reports are drawn up by these selected examiners and signed by the authors. The reports must be "based upon inherent and comparative merit. The elements of merit shall be held to include considerations relating to originality, invention, discovery, utility, quality, skill, workmanship, fitness for the purpose intended, adaptation to public wants, economy and cost." Each report, upon its completion, is delivered to the Centennial Commission for award and publication. The award comes in the shape of a diploma with a bronze medal and a special report of the judges upon its subject. This report may be published by the exhibitor if he choose. It will also be used by the Commission in such manner as may best promote the objects of the exposition. These documents, well edited and put in popular form, will constitute the most valuable publication that has been produced by any international exhibition. To this we may add the special reports to be made by the State and foreign commissions. These ought, with the light gained by time, to be at least not inferior to the similar papers scattered through the bulky records of previous exhibitions. Let us hope that brevity will rule in the style of all the reports, regular and irregular. There is a core to every subject, every group of subjects and every group of groups, however numerous and complex: let all the scribes labor to find it for us. When we recall the disposition of all committees to select the member most fecund of words to prepare their report, we are seized with misgivings—a feeling that becomes oppressive as we further reflect that the local committee which deliberately collected and sent for exhibition eighty thousand manuscripts written by the school-children of a Western city is at large on the exposition grounds.
The passion for independent effort characteristic of the American people led to the supplementing of the official list by sundry volunteer prizes. These are offered by associations, and in some cases individuals. They are not all, like the regular awards, purely honorary. They lean to the pecuniary form, those particularly which are offered in different branches of agriculture. Competition among poultry-growers, manufacturers of butter, reaping-and threshing-machines, cotton-planters, etc. is stimulated by money-prizes reaching in all some six or eight thousand dollars. Agricultural machinery needs the open field for its proper testing, and cannot operate satisfactorily in Machinery Hall. Without a sight of our harvest-fields and threshing-floors foreigners would carry away an incomplete impression of our industrial methods, the farm being our great factory. The oar, the rifle and the racer are as impatient of walls as the plough and its new-fangled allies. They demand elbow-room for the display of their powers, and the Commission was fain to let their votaries tempt it to pass the confines of its territory. The lusty undergraduates of both sides of Anglo-Saxondom escort it unresistingly down from its airy halls to the blue bosom of the Schuylkill, while "teams" picked from eighty English-speaking millions beckon it across the Jerseys to Creedmoor. And the horse—is he to call in vain? Is a strait-laced negative from the Commission to echo back his neigh? Is the blood of Eclipse and Godolphin to stagnate under a ticket in "Class 630, horses, asses and mules"? Why, the very ponies in front of Memorial Hall pull with extra vim against their virago jockeys and flap their little brass wings in indignation at the thought. The thoroughbred will be heard from, and the judges that sit on him will be "experts in their department."
Another specimen of the desert-born, the Western Indian, forms an exhibit as little suited as the improved Arab horse to discussion and award at a session fraught with that "calm contemplation and poetic ease" which ought to mark the deliberations of the judges. How are the representatives of fifty-three tribes to be put through their paces? These poor fragments of the ancient population of the Union have, if we exclude the Cherokees and Choctaws and two or three of the Gila tribes, literally nothing to show. The latter can present us with a faint trace of the long-faded civilization of their Aztec kindred, while the former have only borrowed a few of the rudest arts of the white, and are protected from extinction merely by the barrier of a frontier more and more violently assailed each year by the speculator and the settler, and already passed by the railway. If we cannot exactly say that the Indian, alone of all the throng at the exhibition, goes home uninformed and unenlightened, what ideas may reach his mind will be soon smothered out by the conditions which surround him on the Plains. It is singular that a population of three or four hundred thousand, far from contemptible in intellectual power, and belonging to a race which has shown itself capable of a degree of civilization many of the tribes of the Eastern continents have never approached, should be so absolutely an industrial cipher. The African even exports mats, palm-oil and peanuts, but the Indian exports nothing and produces nothing. He lacks the sense of property, and has no object of acquisition but scalps. Can the assembled ingenuity of the nineteenth century, in presence of this mass of waste human material, devise no means of utilizing it? There stands its Frankenstein, ready made, perfect in thews and sinews, perfect also in many of its nobler parts. It is not a creation that is demanded—simply a remodeling or expansion. For success in this achievement the United States can afford to offer a pecuniary prize that will throw into the shade all the other prizes put together. The cost of the Indian bureau for 1875-76 reached eight millions of dollars. The commission appointed to treat for the purchase of the Black Hills reports that the feeding and clothing of the Sioux cost the government thirteen millions during the past seven years; and that without the