inquiring thought, of the herd who are gov- num? How comes it that this age is exerned. All our republicanism, all our theo-pressly The Age of the Show-Box; that ries of human progress, all the struggles for after innumerable centuries of probationary the independence and equality of nations humanity; after the creation and the test which for the last fifty years have en- of innumerable philosophies; after the worlivened the world, have brought us at last ship and the destruction of churches beyond to this, that between Asiatic fatalism and counting; after the trial of every possible spenineteenth century philosophy, whether as cies of government and social discipline, we professed here or in Europe, there is but have, in the almost six thousandth year of the slight difference indeed. "Believe all things world, according to Moses, lit upon the panthou art told; go whithersoever thou art acea for all our ills, fallen by gradual steps bidden; obey the behests of any who please upon the philosopher's stone, attained a perto order thee, provided their mandates are fect comprehension of the To xanov in life ingiven in the due formulas of cant, from the tellectual, aesthetical or physical, in governself-constituted chairs of 'peace, and law, ments, socialities, and domestic occupations; and order,' in the possession of the pow- perfected the crowning desideratum of scieners that be,' whether these powers should tific discovery and artistic invention, and rightly be or not," are maxims common to found it to be merely Punch and Judy, the both. A single order has gone forth from Pandean Pipes and the Big Drum-merely London; and all classes of men, in whatso- the rôle of the mountebank, of the ground ever nation they may have heard it, hasten and lofty tumbler, and of the modern Ishto give to it loyal obedience. The Lyonnese mael, who wanders from village to village manufacturer of silks, and the Lowell man- with his peep-show on his back? That one ufacturer of broadcloth; the Hindoo tailor, class of society, or one nation of men should who, in making new breeches of the Euro- reduce their extravagant ideals to this absurd pean cut, inserts the rents, and the darns, and conclusion, might produce contempt in sober the patches of the old garment, and the and unhoodwinked humanity; but it is original and music-loving hatter of New-worthy of the consideration of the wisest, York; the artisan who has droned his life away in some German garret in the discovery of perpetual motion, and the maker of universal gas in Yankee land;-all, charmed by this British order, with eyes fixed on the monster London, hurry on, with incessant wings, into his very maw. Here indeed is a problem of world-wide scope, more curious than Paine's gas or the Rochester knockings, which, above all others, needs solving: By what asphyxiating power have the pride and individual existence and popular cohesiveness of distant nations been thus deadened, and the thoughts, and hopes, and ambitions of the most thought-sident would meet, however right his intenful, hopeful, and ambitious of their several tions might be, not with the productions of peoples, been universally concentrated on the universal industry, but of the universal "British public opinion," and a Cockney scorn of the nation. Men would say, We park on the mud-banks of the Anglo-Saxon have other things to mind than a rareeAcheron? How comes this universal power show; Constitutionalists would hint thereto be centred in the head of a German ad- after that the Chief Magistrate of the Reventurer, not remarkable for any great ex- public should be qualified for the White ploit, for genius, or other attributes fixing the House by indoctrination in the practices of admiration of men; not even remarkable Barnum; manufacturers would say, If you for the faculty of charlatanism, by which want to buy, buy-but we are not to break crowds of wondering humanity have been up our machinery and our trade orders to brought together, the possession of which gratify your capricious vanity with a show; has immortalized a Cagliostro and a Bar-and democrats would very justly respond, when it affects all nations and men alike, when it supremely influences, not only volatile Celts, but phlegmatic Dutch and AngloSaxons, and even the schooled and independent Republicans of the United States. We venture to say that if a President, uncalled on by the people, and without legal authority, should issue a patent or other order to hold, in some central spot of this continent, an universal exhibition of all the productions of its several States, the several States would rebel against such presumption; the people would declaim against any attempt so centralizing; and the unlucky Pre 1851 "The World's Fair." | British trade, have yielded to it a willing obe- design. The commercial, manufactural, and What have we to do with this State or that? We mind our own affairs, let the rest do the same. But here an order has been issued by a foreign prince, and merely a prince by courtesy, to centralize the whole world upon London, and Presidents and people give to that foreign order implicit obedience. Hith-mittees, and ships of war, to carry out the erto, indeed, we all knew that" sets" of pretentious "respectability," and "circles" of questionable republicanism, had a languishing and silent existence in our chief cities, whose members still paid to England the same reverence as the ante-revolutionary Tories were boastful of giving to her; who still looked to her, and not to America, as their "Anglo-Saxon mother," as the land overflowing with the milk of fashion and the honey of etiquette, as the land whose social order and habits of domineering insolence on the one hand, and abject servility on the other, were alone worthy of admiration-as the land of liveried flunkeys and heraldic panels, of court dresses and bow-scraping legitimacy, as the fountain head of fashionable novels, and the Elysium wherein are riches without labor, rank without requisite virtues, working men without wealth, and lower classes without independence; but their discreet silence and paucity of numbers insured them unnoticed safety in contempt. "English literature," cheap republications of romantic novels, whose heroes and heroines are proud young scions of noble houses, or faithful and obedient servants of the same; the systematic indoctrination of a pretended and false philosophy whose head is London, god Commerce, and religion Free Trade; these and other Anglican influences have brought us to that pass, that now "in the second half of the nineteenth century; and in the first year of the same," an attempt is made to drag the American artisan across the Atlantic, that he may publicly receive proper lessons in his handicraft, whatever it may be, from the "genius of England," and learn a just respect for thrones and kingly toggery, and for the gew-gaw splendor and the peacock attributes filched by aristocrats from the labor and life of an unfortunate and ignorant people; and it has been perfectly successful. Throughout the American Press not a single voice has been raised against it. "Democrats," forgetful of their former Republican professions, and devoted only to the triumph of their principles of "Free Trade," or the Millennium is to come right off" the Anglo-Saxon family are to be reunited "war is to end, the English and the Austrians are to become very good boys for evermorethe progress of humanity is to be largely advanced-the whole world is to be changed henceforth; nay, the laws of the Eternal God, history, nature, fact, are to be utterly annihilated henceforth; and "friendly competition," and civilization, and the mission of the new Saviour are now to go-ahead and no mistake. And all this is to be done, this very year, by a raree show in Hyde Park, Surely supreme London, under the direction of Punch, Prince of Saxe Coburg-Gotha, and his American horn-blower. cant, flunkeyism, the vilest charlatanism, and the most unfathomable nonsense, never before enjoyed such a world-wide triumph! The Emperor Napoleon was once inHe issued next mornformed that the people of his capital were preparing to revolt. ing orders for the instant gilding of the dome of the Invalides. The eyes of the entire population of Paris were immediately The splendid coup d'œil directed from him, upward, to a ball of wood and stone. of the building, after the magnificent design of the Emperor should be completed, be came the one theme of conversation in all circles, from the palace to the café. For days and weeks, interested passengers on foot and in carriages, and curious and admiring persons, from house-top and windows, kept gazing aloft at the colossal object so soon to be decorated with the tinsel of empire, viewing it from this point and that, and discussing the relative impressions it would produce on the eye in such and such a light, always ending with the exclamation, How worthy such a truly French idea is of the conqueror of Jena and the hero of Austerlitz! By-and-by, when the excitement had subsided, and the dome was not gilded, the émeute and the conspirators had been forgotten. "The volatile French !"-"Poor senseless Celts caught by the idea of a gilded show!""Can any stronger proof be required that they are utterly incapable of self-government ?" "Did we not always say that they were deficient in the peculiar attributes of the Anglo-Saxon, in 'solidity of character,' instrenuous purpose,' in 'indefatigable order,'-qualities peculiarly belonging to the Anglo-Saxon family, and which render its members, whether in America or Europe, alone capable of self-government?" Such are the eminently satisfactory conclusions deduced by members of the "Anglo-Saxon family" from this and similar incidents in the history of the French nation. So unselfish and magnanimous a theory, redounding, as it does, to the glorification of the typical man, we will not dare to deny. Science, reason, philosophy, fact, conservatism; the "interests of society," of peace, law and order; the supremacy of cant; the continuance of all scoundrelism, necessitate its truth. Let it, therefore, in due reverence to these august powers, be acknowledged by us, An Humble Reviewer. Possibly, however, we may be enabled to find similar gilded stratagems, for the taking of other than the French people by the nose, almost as singularly applied, though not, we hope, to turn out as remarkably successful. But two years back, the attention of the thoughtful of the world was everywhere directed to the nations struggling for democratic freedom in Europe. The principles involved in these combats, the effects to be evolved from them, were the sole subjects of men's thoughts. First, there was seen raising its head, under the bonnet of a Cardinal and the tiara of a Pope, the same republi canism which, from '89 to 1815, had shaken or overthrown the thrones of Europe in succession; which had wrested the land of Rienzi from the Austrians, and that of Sobieski from the Russ; which had overwhelmed England with unsaleable goods and an illimitable debt; which had annihilated the aristocracy of Prussia, and left in ashes the capital of the Tzar. Next, the same republicanism was seen flinging off the authority of the Cardinal and the mask of the Popedom, and concentrating the energies of all Italy in one struggle for unity and life; hurling out of France another monarchy, and subjugating its mushroom appendages without the aid of the guillotine; raising barricades in Berlin, Vienna, Turin, Messina, and contemplating them in Warsaw and Dublin, in London and St. Petersburg. And again was seen the organized forces of this monarch and that, marching in junction against the liberties of insurgent peoples in detail, sacking Rome, conquering the Viennese, rending asunder the heartstrings of Hungary, placing Buda-Pesth under martial law, and restoring once more, by sheer brute force, the rule, over all Europe, of monarchs lawfully expelled by the nations subjected to them. During two years and more, this drama was enacted before the eyes of a wondering world. Every incident was made the subject of universal discussion, every principle therein involved, of universal thought. A defeat of republicanism in Italy was not of importance to the Calabrian, the Roman, the Lombard, or the Piedmontese alone. The German, the Swiss, the Parisian, the Viennese, the Hungarian, the Berliner, even the Londoner, recognized in every reverse of an individual nation, a common defeat to each of themselves and to the great principle for which they all alike were warring. Nay, the reverses of Hungarians, Italians, Germans, Irishmen, the British people, the people of Schleswig-Holstein, became not only a matter of intense interest to the people of Europe, but the news by every steamboat roused the diversified, but thoroughly Republican people of this continent to the madness of despair, or the enthusiasm of joy. As Republican after Republican reached these shores an exile, he was astonished to find in the oldest Republic of the modern world an enthusiasm, a genial love, a bursting welcome, and a boundless hospi tality, for him and his cause, more sincere books, editing the most seditious newspaand self-sacrificing than he left behind in pers, forming clubs, concocting schemes, the younger and yet more stolid Republics of and even going to gaol, like that atrocious Europe. In fact and truth, monarchies and editor of Le Peuple, or into exile, like the their interests; the political child's-play of anarchic villains transported to Algeria, aristocratic statesmen; and the peculiar push- simply for the purpose of rousing the peopin as to their interests of kings, by which, ple of all Europe to establish the rights of for ages, they have contrived to keep their mere useable humanity against the privipeoples engaged, and even hound one people leges and sacred powers of capital, what on face to face against another, as fighting might not in a short time eventuate, even to fanciers do their dogs, had utterly lapsed England, where the artisan is nothing, and from the minds of all men; and in the the man who works him everything-even universal desire to see all peoples matched to London, where the spoils gathered togeagainst all monarchs, it was to be feared, ther from the tired right arms of the workers, that monarchs, in their imbecility and utter everywhere, lie largely concentrated, like cornothingness, should be altogether forgotten. rupted vitality in a world's wen, and whence Besides, such a state of affairs, such a contest are issued loans to all the poor monarchs in for mere right against palpable wrong, for difficult circumstances, that they may renew popular liberty against individual usurpation, the almost broken bonds of their insurgent and the wars, and the democratic alliances, "subjects?" In short, if men were to go on, and the democratic sympathies it called day after day, debating right and wrong, forth, inducing men even to die for their own on both sides of the Atlantic, raising insuror a brother land, to spend their last coin in rections and horrid wars for their liberty sustaining a glorious rebellion, or overthrow- and their property, (God bless the mark!) ing an accursed throne, to abandon families, what in the end was to become of the and labor, and all their hopes of profitable em- monarchies, and other idle classes, of Engployment under the ancient régime-such an land and Germany? If men were to continue anarchic mania was shockingly opposed to merely men, and not produce-growing and the interest of commerce, to the advancement cloth-consuming machines, what, in the of "civilization," to the propagation of "free- name of common sense and the cash-book, trade" principles, and to the interests of was to be made out of them? Nothingthe moneyed and manufacturing plutocracy. absolutely nothing. Trade was at a standWhen Germans were cogitating how to still-Commerce lay upon his oars-cloth take Cologne, or Munich,-how to avenge did not go-knives and forks were almost Blum, or give but one other holy sword to valueless, and rude swords and scythe-blades Kossuth; how was it to be expected that of the highest worth-monarchy trembled they could be strenuously thinking, as from head to foot-stocks became affected they should be, about buying English cloth with the dance of St. Vitus, or stood at with "fancy articles?" When Italians in zero cataleptic-railroad kings lost their one quarter, Hungarians in another, and prestige in a debtors' prison-rents would Poles in a third, were seeking, night, noon, not come-brokers migrated—and the whole and morning, some means of dragging still world seemed going mad. lower in the dust the empire of Austria, Such was the frightful picture which loomed how was it to be expected that they could in the year '49-'50 on the anxious soul of compete with the Americans in the London a newspaper writer thereto unknown to market in corn and food, distil wines for the fame, the son of an editor of a third rate Englishman, or buy his cutlery and his iron- humanitarian and general civilizing paper work? Nay, was it not to be feared, that these in London, hight the "Athenæum." To continental democrats would prove utterly this individual came the idea of concentratunproductive to the perfidious island, which ing the mind of insurgent Europe, from had so often cajoled them, for months on "Liberty" and "Republicanism" and fanmonths, to deliver them, in the end, naked-tasies equally absurd, not on a gilded dome handed, to the vengeance of its monarchical in Paris, (émeutes being frequent there of and congenial allies? When Frenchmen, late on such occasions,) but on a Crystal with their "peculiarly excitable character" Palace of the "cheapest English glass," to and "volatile temperament," were writing be built in an intramural part of London for the staring admiration of universal human- | And here begins the most ridiculous part of ity. This person had not one cent in "coin the affair. This charter, given under the of the realm," but much stray coppers of "Royal sign manual" of the Queen, stated shallow philosophy, and an illimitable stock that "in consideration of the sum of twenty of profound impudence. A communication thousand pounds in the hands" of the parwas readily established between him and ties to whom it was granted, it was granted. the Prince Albert, the German husband of Now, we shall not say this was what is the Queen of England. To the latter gen- vulgarly called a lie, because it bears the tleman the voluble discoverer of the scheme signature of a woman, (our gallantry being made known its astounding importance in even in this instance superior to any little European politics, showed him how each knowledge of the sex we may have acquired ;) ruler, so called, of Europe would direct the but the fact is simply this, there was not attention of his people there-how especially in the hands of the parties obtaining the it would interest and surprise the Germans, charter, either in those of the Prince Albert, and utterly entrance the volatile French- or his man of all work, or their abettors, twenhow, by an imposing display of Kidder- ty thousand pence for any such purpose. The minster carpets and household troops, of charter was therefore granted in considerSheffield cutlery and dragoon sabres, of ation of a falsehood, very much of course to Manchester cloth and Highland light infan- the honor of England. But the avidity of try, of model tubal bridges and heavy can- the discoverer and the anxiety of the Prince non, the mistaken and fanatical foreigners, were not to be balked by obstacles so trifling. who had lately indulged in the wildest hatred The matter was to be pushed through; of England, and the most unreasonable con- the" charter was granted"; the officious tempt for her proficiency in the arts and "commissioners of woods and forests," in sciences, would be taught an exemplary les- urgent haste, meted off Hyde Park; on son. The son of the "Athenæum" deeply the imaginary idea of twenty thousand interested the Prince farther, by discoursing pounds, brokers and bill discounters adto him on peace principles, on humanitarian vanced ready money, at usurious interest; and progress-of-his-species theories, and by masons, carpenters, glaziers, laborers assemdisplaying to him how, though the proposed bled, architects laid off, London presses laid scheme was merely one to glorify Eng-on, and now the "Crystal Palace," wherein land and (as he thought) sell British manu- is to be concentrated the bright ideas of ninefactures, yet it would bear the appearance teenth-century humanity, has reached the of England sacrificing herself at the altar of universal benevolence, and propelling, even at a loss to herself, the interests of Peace, Trade, and Industry of all Nations. The Prince immediately jumped at the idea of becoming patron of the gorgeous scheme the Big Show entranced him, with its accompanying ideas, of moral effect, Crystal Palace, staring Germans, enthusiastic French, *Our "true and particular account" of this obfuscated Americans, growling police, mar-small but singular conspiracy is entirely drawn shalled troops, political importance and truly doubts which may arise in the mind of the profrom English authorities. To do away with any religious consequences-all perfectly en- Anglican reader, as well as a little further to tranced him. His literary instructor was develop the immense resources in stupidity, humequally pleased at the idea of becoming mem- bug, and untruth, brought to bear on the "Crystal ber of committee. Next came Her Gracious Palace," we shall here in a note endeavor to condense the matter of several articles on the subject, Majesty the Queen, and she, pleased beyond published in the Mechanics' Magazine, (London, measure, either "by the advice of her min- Fleet street,) in the volume from January to June, isters" or without it, gave to her husband 1850, being and his abettors, including the discovering son of the Editor as fac-totum, a Charter empowering them to hold this great Peep Show, to be called the "World's Fair, and xhibition of the Industry of all Nations." roof, although to this hour the parties interested have not been able to collect the stipulated twenty thousand pounds. But what matters it-are not there the taxes, and the obedient English people, and subservient ministers, and the Prince's name—and what more need be ?* A FULL, TRUE, AND PARTICULAR ACCOUNT OF THE BACK-STAIRS HISTORY OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.— Queen of England, dedicated to publishing her will The Royal Gazette (or private newspaper of the and the descriptions of thieves,) dated 4th January, 1850, contains her "commission" authorizing the |