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THE INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM
have been enlarged. The rights of conscience have been day by day more respected. Feelings of mutual respect and sympathy have been fostered among the different ranks of the nation, and among the different nations of the world; and the breasts of all thoughtful men have brimmed with gratefulness to God that He so long heard and answered their prayer - "Give peace in our time, O Lord!"
The culmination of the star of peace, under which this progress was made, marked the close of the half-century. In 1851 the monarch of Modern Babylon wrote, as did Nebuchadnezzar of old from his great city beside the Euphrates:- "Victoria the Queen, unto all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth, peace be multiplied unto you." And, at her august bidding, the nations gathered together within that wondrous Crystal Palace, which, seen across the drifting thunder-clouds and bloody horizon that have too largely blotted out the clear sky since, appears rather a Midsummer Night's Dream woven by fairies, than a temple built by hands, on which with waking eyes we gazed.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 was one of those cyclical blossomings of the mighty banyan tree of the nations which occur only at immense intervals. According to the older botanists, the aloe or agave flowers once in a hundred years. Their successors think that they made the cycle too long; for my purpose, it is too short. But take it either way, it marked one of the aloe-flowerings of the human race, and of the fruits which followed that flowering, the Industrial Museum is one.
I do not mean by this that but for the Great Exhibition we should not have had our Industrial Museum. On the other hand, it would, I believe, have been born to us at any rate, only at a later period, and as the fruit of a lesser tree. In actual fact, however, it came to us through the outburst of peaceful energy, which built and filled the Crystal Palace; and whilst we are indebted to a very few individuals for its local development, we must refer its birth, as well as that of the Crystal Palace itself, to a conviction, slowly reached and lying deep in the hearts of men, that industrial museums were a want of the age.
In truth, to recall the former comparison, as the flowering of the aloe at the close of the hundred years (if that is its cycle) implies that the ninety-nine long preceding ones have been spent in patiently amassing and elaborating materials for the crown of flowers which it wears on its hundredth birthday; so we must look upon the Crystal Palace, not as a Jonah's gourd which rose in a night and withered in
AND COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE
1851