Prussian cannon were not yet covered up. Nor had Nature yet "healed and reconciled to herself by the sweet oblivion of flowers" the battlefields of 1870. In 1900, even though the whole British nation seemed to have boycotted the Exposition, I, with thousands of fellow-Americans, rejoiced in her honors paid to Paris of being still the unchallenged center of taste and art, and again the hostess, for the third time, of the nations. Whatever defects, faults, of vulnerability to criticism, there may be in the Exposition, here is the highwater mark of civilization. Glad to see again the sign of the ship afloat, I greeted. in it the symbol of humanity, of the world's history.

Right in the heart of the great city and on both sides of the Seine rose the splendid edifices which were themselves the indexes of varied civilization. In the air, on the water, and under the earth were shown the varied deposit of man's thought and the results of his toil during the long life of the race on earth. The raw materials, gathered together and effectively arranged in appropriate storehouses, revealed the riches of the earth and its treasures. These show the world as man Art, architecture, literature, inventions and appliances, show the world as man has made it. The various gatherings held in the Palais des Congrès made grand interpretations of the material realities. Archæology showed us the discarded tools and inventions, the first rude attempt at man's mastery of nature, and the methods by which victory was won and results achieved. In the ruins restored for us in "staff," in the far-off temples brought under our eyes in models, we looked on the shells of the old and dead civilizations. There was really nothing new under the sun, even of sunny France, but rather in every case the clearer apprehension, the fuller expression, of the old ideas. The new fulfilled the old. I confess that the very ancient, the prehistoric triumphs of mind over matter, seem to me just as wonderful in their way as the last new product of Westinghouse, Edison, Tesla, or Marconi. The French genius never shows itself in more charming expression than when it demonstrates clearly the evolution of man's thought and labor in the triumphs of to-day, and the reduction of what were once, in the twilight of

knowledge, called sorcery or miracles, to realities.

The gem of the Exposition was the bridge of Alexander III., which has no peer in all the world for beauty and glory. As one stood on it midway over the Seine one could see how the French genius flowers in art. Here are people that love beauty both for its own sake and delight also in the application of it to the common things of life. On this bridge, also, one ceases to wonder why the Pope of Rome, once sovereign ruler of the world (as known to Europeans), took or inherited (by appropriation) as his highest title Pontifex Maximus-the greatest of bridge builders. Entranced, we gazed on the glory of arch and column, of orb and pinion, of bold and splendid figures of man, bird, and beast, winged, helmed, or in the apparent glory of overflowing life. The perfection of the art almost made one forget that here were stone and steel and gold, rather than living eagle or man, a reality resting on piers and not a dream floating in air, a bow of masonry and not of prismatics.

Yet even here I could not forget the first twisters of strands for the suspension bridge, the primitive makers of arch or cantilever. In this first triumph of the art of the pontifex, one can look through a long perspective of the work of the men who made highways over gorge and river. Yet he may not forget their dangers, their toils, and their triumphs even while he reads the story of their mastery of material, for in a bridge one perceives the index of national taste and the record of character. Who can look at the bridges across the Thames and the Seine, and not discern in them sure proofs of the varying character of Briton and Gaul? In the one is a solidity as of Assyria, Egypt, or Rome, while yet lacking highest beauty. The eye of the builder was for a permanence as of æons. In the other, refined taste and a delight in harmony with appropriate surroundings are preeminently manifest. "For glory and for beauty,' even if for a season," seems to have been the craving of those who spanned the Seine.

In the vastness of its details the Exhibition was confusing. In the clearness and strength of its total effect it was one of the best of teachers. It was eloquent

in lessons which need to be learned, yes, and often impressed, and which some of us are glad in fresh forms to receive. Knowledge of history, which is the best preparation for enjoyment either of Europe or its chief cities, is in itself also a fountain of youth. It makes a young man old without feebleness. To go even a little further than the gilding, the paint, and the staff of the great show was to pluck some of the best fruits which this tree, whose root is that of all science, bears on its branches. It was as exhilarating, almost, as if one were in a Western prairie town, where things are in a perpetual boom, to hear the young men of the twentieth century sound the praises of the last new invention or appliance which they "represented." Each brand-new device bore its stamp of "patent," or "patent applied for," as if Father Time lived mostly in Washington and was to be pulled by the foremost hair of his forelock and made to talk like a drummer. I could of course easily believe that this or that last new bolt, hinge, plunger, drill, or lathe eclipsed everything else that went before it; for did not Mr. Glib Tongue say so? But, all the time, I could see only the dwarf on the giant's shoulders.

If such a collection of mind-shadows, or of materialized human thought, suggests anything, it is to illuminate the past. It tells of the labors of those who have rested, but whose works follow. Names will perish but results endure. Multitudes of minor changes and improvements are made by unknown men, and wait to be fused into unity by some "genius." Those who had visions and spoke or wrote, or who reduced their thoughts to metal or wood, left an inheritance to be gathered up by some one who should receive the glory and the reward. Often it is as when Professor Morse, who did nothing whatever electrical, gathers on his bosom the stars and medals from many sovereigns and stands forever associated with a story as long and glorious as that from amber to Marconi, from electron to wireless telegraphy. Whether it were a Westinghouse air-brake, or a new generator of electric power, or the model of a steamship, as of the Deutschland, that was to be the arrow shot by steam across the ocean, I could not but see behind the present phenomenon a host of toilers

working in concert, of men through all the ages in the world's broad harvest-field "binding in unconscious brotherhood the self-same sheaf."

The twentieth-century man has his forward foot on a new and greater era than the world has ever seen. With torch in hand, he is eager to plant it far afront, to kindle beacons on the headlands of the once unknown. Yet he is tempted to forget the past, and doubtless he often does, though the discoverers of the first order and the real inventors are perhaps far less likely to do this than the commercial gentleman who is eager to sell. Exhibitors are very apt to think and behave very much like children born into the world to-day, who imagine that electric push-buttons, and telephones, and Empire State expresses were always here. Yet, philosophically speaking, the inventor of the wheel and the plow was as great in originality as he who gave us the telephone or the electric light.

In fact, it is impossible for an inventor to live or to die unto himself alone. In mythology and romance this may happen, but not in true history. The Exposition's wonders in war and peace, in propulsion and transportation, illustrated the old story again that no one man either invents or creates. He happily catches gleams and sees visions of what already exists. He adds another link to the chain, looks over the shoulders of the players and lights upon possibilities of improvement which he may make actualities. Though every man who has lived before him may be Greek or barbarian, yet in reality the last comer is debtor to all these. "Our civilization is largely the product of the forgotten." One of the first things which the obtainer of a patent, or the maker of money from a machine which he imagines he has invented, ought to do is to build the tombs of the forgotten. prophets. He should erect a great monument in honor of the men, known and unknown, who have helped him to win. He has been made able to see because thousands of dead men have reared out of their brains a Darien peak for him to stand on, as he discovers some new ocean to which, perhaps, he would fain give his own name.

I was delighted to find in the American section of the Palais de l'Electricité a few

manuscripts and prints which hinted at the work of Moses Farmer, who, away back in the forties, did by electric power and his own devices blow up a submarine mine, light a house, run a passenger-car many miles, and, as his own shop and home-made models at Greenacre, Maine, still show, anticipated many things since made commonplace. Yet where is the cyclopædia or reference-book that even mentions his name? What American book tells, or boy knows, of him?

The Paris Exposition is eloquent of humanity's shining host-of those who gave something to the world. I enjoyed greeting these even more than the exhibitors who had an eye to glory and dollars.

It is said that the difference between a gentleman and a trader—and the saying is true whether we mean parsons, lawyers, and doctors, or green-grocers and shoemakers-is that while the lat ter has something to sell, the former has something to give. The world's gentlemen have enriched humanity by their gifts. This truth on a larger scale is also seen in that nations, too, bestow as well as trade. I, for one, was delighted with the United States building, its idea and atmosphere. I am glad I found nothing to sell there, that everything was inviting and comfortable, open to everybody alike, with polite attendants ready to give help, comfort, and information, while seats and rooms were abundant to yield welcome, coolness, and comfort. It was every American's club-house, rich with a home feeling. There was none of the shop air or talk, or clinking of money in the drawer. Thus the world saw that the "free heart's hope and home," called by ignorant foreigners "The Land of the Almighty Dollar," had in Paris a home for its people, and put its shops elsewhere..

The United States at the Paris Exposition appeared as the gentleman among nations. Here was an index of a true evolution, of a State founded by men, and by women too, who could leave even dear old England and the comforts of Leyden in order to give and not sell something to the world and for all time.

The American house was not the only one which showed that more than one people had come to full consciousness of themselves in the family of the nations.

The various national buildings expressed their history in a nutshell. "There are living and there are dying nations." There are those, also, that have a name and a reality which are quite different from each other. To discern and recognize in the various edifices not only varying traits and history, but expressions of the feeling and temper of them in this decade, was a fascinating study. One who knew Spain or Russia, Japan or China, for example, in the other world's expositionsthe whole story of which, since the first in the London Crystal Palace, is not yet fifty years old-could easily do this. Turning from the United States edifice most naturally to that of Spain, its near neighbor on the Street of All Nations, fronting the Quai d'Orsay overlooking the Seine, we see a pavilion in the Renaissance style. It shows at once the pride and poverty of the quondam ruler of America and the Indies. Within, grand and gloomy, are empty rooms. The walls are lined with the tapestry, faded but inimitable, of the sixteenth century, with a few trophies of old armor and weapons, but in the main telling of glories gone, suggesting what is preterit rather than what is of promise. Near by it rises the pavilion of Peru, which in size and general impression outshines, we might say outglares, the Spanish edifice. On the other hand, Great Britain is represented by the most solid of all the foreign buildings, an exact reproduction of an old English manor-house of Jacobean time and style-one of the stately homes of mighty England. Built on a framework of steel and covered with cement, it suggests all that is fine, rich, and massive in the old, while yet furnished and fitted throughout with all the modern comforts and appli

ances.

In no other of the world's expositions that I can remember have the edifices been so characteristic of the people who erected them. For the most part, the shops and trading-places, which show the commercial phases of life, are placed else where. where. The United States and Spain are not alone in their strong peculiarities. Japan, too, has resolved to put her marketplace on one site and what she stands for -as leader of the art, the taste, the progress of Asia-elsewhere. China lets the Frenchmen direct her exhibit at Paris,

and make of her temples and palaces trading-places for tea and crockery. Spite of its hoary antiquity, China has not thus far come to national consciousness. The race has not yet reached the evolutionary stage of a nation. Japan, which thrills with newness of life, seeing herself anew in the mirror of her own history, has done more wisely. In 1876, at Philadelphia, the Dai Nippon, with a national unity then only eight years old, was known as a shop, a pleasure garden. In 1900 Japan asks, as asked her own poets a thousand years ago, for the world's admiration of her art, which is her soul. She wisely erects in Paris her model, not indeed of a Kioto temple, for Japan's genius does not lie in religion, but of a Kioto pavilion that was once gorgeous in gilt and decoration, even as its lines are now charming to the eye that has looked lovingly on its pagodas and the work of its native craftsmen at home. Nothing of the shop is here, but one sees her superb paintings of natural scenery, her marvelous inlaid armor, her severe and chastened taste in decoration-as well as the hideous and the monstrous which lurk in her traditions. Japan has her Caliban and oni, as well as her Kobo and her "angels "-unwinged ladies in stead of the plumed females of our de based and unbiblical notions.

Wisely, too, have the northern nations, those that yet live close to the forest, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia, erected their pavilions and edifices in wood, while those of the south, where the sunshine is perennial, have used stucco and staff abundantly, with open and airy verandas and porticoes. Our many-windowed northern houses seem traps to catch sunbeams, and our "livingrooms" crave more light. In the south lands, comfort means seclusion from the sun. Whether it be Hungary and Germany, whence feudalism seems loth to retire, with their lofty towers and turrets, Austria and Roumania with their edifices set lower, the Ottoman, Servian, and Roumanian pavilions with their domes, the open edifices of the African Dahomey and the Ivory Coast, which seem built merely to corral a little of all outdoors, the exquisite and richly decorated civic hall of Belgium, a model of that at Oudenarde, or the Tyrolean House, each tells

its story of climate, physical environment, tradition, taste, and history.

In a survey politically, there was everything to cheer. One needed no actual or metaphorical glance from the top of an Eiffel tower to learn how the world has moved since the first universal exhibition was held in London in 1851. Then the Turk dominated southwestern Europe, and millions of Christians lay groaning under his heel. Then Russia was in the chains of diplomacy. Even France had joined hands with the Turk and "perfidious Albion" to keep her bound. China was unknown as a participator in anything social that might interest Occidentals. With millions of banners, she had no national flag. The pitiful apology for a government would not recognize any subject that once left the borders of the Middle Kingdom. China cared nothing for her own people abroad. Her interest in Western nations was a minus quantity. Japan was still a hermit, excluding the alien and so including her own people that they could escape abroad only in secret and on pain of death, while all her forts were ordered to fire on the American rescue ships returning ocean waifs to their inhospitable home. Other peoples, now free nations, lived in lands that were then mere geographical expressions, and were unrepresented. But now, behold a more social world. Relaxed is the grasp of the dying Turk, of the Spaniard, and of the mighty ecclesiastic once claiming temporal power, while even a Chinese Emperor has awakened to duty and reform.

It is positively exhilarating to the lover of human progress to find here the nations of the Balkan peninsula present in the rapture of freedom and the thrill of joyous achievement. How happy seem the Bulgarians and Roumanians, Bosnians and Herzegovinans, to show themselves and their products in the family of nations! Was it all imagination, born of "the wisdom that comes after the event," that discerned in the faces of both men and women a contagion that keeps even the Armenian hoping for like blessings? The Turk as yet will not have Armenia to be even as much as a term in geography, but to her sons the ancient name is not impersonal. personal. It stands for a vitalizing entity. It may be that her turn will come. Even Greece seems to be recovering from that