knowledge to improve the quality, and lessen
the cost of production. Labour was more
efficiently organised. Improved engines raised
coal more economically from the pits; and,
sixteen years ago, came the great invention
of the hot-blast. The expensive process of
converting coal into coke was at once
saved. The furnace was supplied with raw
coal; and a stream of hot air, equal to the
temperature necessary for melting lead, being
constantly poured in, the whole process of
smelting became one of comparative ease and
certainty. The iron bridge of Coalbrookdale
was a wonder of the world in 1779. The
wonder of 1851 is the iron and glass structure
of Hyde Park, with its three thousand
three hundred columns, its two thousand
two hundred and twenty-four girders, its
eleven hundred and twenty-eight intermediate
bearers, and its thirty-four miles of guttering tube,
all of iron. To have produced this structure at all,
by any amount of expenditure, would have been
an impossibility a century ago. It is a triumph of
energy and skill to have produced what all agree
to call a palace, at a less cost per cubic foot than
that of a barn.

Glass, iron, and wood, are the only materials
employed in the construction of this building—
"dry material, ready at once for the introduction of
articles for the Exhibition." Science has not,
ostensibly, done so much for timber, as for glass
and iron; but the influence of knowledge upon
production is to be traced here, as in everything
which largely administers to the conveniences of
life. Knowledge has been at work in two ways in
diminishing the cost of timber; it has lessened
the expense of freight and carriage; it
has got rid of enormous protective duties.
Canada and Norway have been rendered
somewhat more equal in the commercial race.
We buy our timber cheaper by one-half; we
reckon our consumption of timber by an increase of
five hundred per cent, in fifty years.

This, then, is a brief view of the influence
of a Lamp, more durable in its effects than
that of Aladdin, upon the materials of our
May Palace. Let us say a few words upon
the labour employed in its constraction.

The principle of the whole building—that
of a succession of similar parts upon a uniform
plan—allowed the very utmost amount of
union of forces. Every piece of iron, or wood,
or glass, that went to form a whole, was one
of many pieces of similar dimensions. There
was no measuring or cutting. Machinery
was employed in the preparation of sash-bars
and gutters, in mortising, and in rough
painting; but in all these operations there
were no varying applications of ingenuity—
scarcely any manipulation. All the elements
of cheap production were thus called into
action.* But the amount of manual labour, in the
actual putting together these materials,
was enormous, to have accomplished such a
result in six months. Herodotus tells us, that
the great Pyramid of Egypt employed a hundred
thousand men, for twenty years, in its
erection. The Palace of Industry will, most
probably, be swept away in a generation or
two, whilst another thousand years will leave
the great Pyramid unscathed. But the
influence of one building and of the other
is not to be measured by their comparative duration.
The monument of despotism
remains, barren as the sands upon which it is
reared. We know nothing certain of its
construction, beyond the fact recorded by
Herodotus, that the food of the labourers
cost sixteen hundred talents of silver. The
labour employed upon our Palace of Industry,
as compared with the labour which raised
the Pyramid, is as one to two thousand. Yet,
which labour will work the greatest amount
of good to the human race? History has
nothing to tell of the uses of the Pyramid.
When history shall record that a Temple of
Peace was erected in London, in 1851, to
which all the nations brought the trophies of
their arts, it will forget that there were
amongst us prophets of evil, who would desire
to keep the great family of mankind in jealous
isolation; and will remember only the grandeur of
the spectacle, when every clime,
without distinction of government or religion,
sent its ambassadors of industry to the capital
of the world, to teach and to learn, to give and
to receive.
* For an extended description of the construction of the
Palace of Glass, the reader may be referred to page 385 of
our second volume.

It was a remarkable sight on the morning
of the second of April, the last day for the reception
of heavy articles for exhibition, to look upon the
long line of waggons, slowly moving
westward from Hyde Park Corner, to deposit
their loads before nightfall. It was more
wonderful to behold the varied industry
within the building. It is no exaggeration
to say that there were thousands intensely
occupied, each with his own work of unloading
or unpacking. The great struggle was in the
centre of the western aisle, where the heavy
British articles of models, or machinery, were
deposited. In the Foreign department, the
allotted spaces were filled with chests, bearing
inscriptions in English, French, German, and
Italian. Fragments of sculpture, heads and
feet of colossal statues, were spread in wild
confusion on the central floor. In the furrows
of the glass roof were troops of workmen, repairing
the defects of the glazing. Painters
hung upon fragile scaffolds, giving their last
tints to the massive girders. Bazaars were
springing up in the enclosed divisions; and
cases were being constructed in the galleries,
brilliant with plate-glass, tasteful and substantial.
Here and there, ponderous organs
began to grow into shape, and the heroes and
saints of painted glass to receive due form
and proportion. The department of machinery
appeared a chaos of unshapeable matter, the
disjointed skeletons of mighty powers. The