FAÇADE OF THE BRAZILIAN DIVISION, MAIN BUILDING.
A moderate dip into statistics can no longer be evaded. We must map out the microcosm, and allot to each sovereign power its quota of the surface. The great European states which have assumed within the century the supreme direction of human affairs are assigned a prominent central position in the Main Building. Great Britain and her Asiatic possessions occupy just eighty-three feet less than a hundred thousand; her other colonies, including Canada, 48,150; France and her colonies, 43,314; Germany, 27,975; Austria, 24,070; Russia, 11,002; Spain, 11,253; Sweden and Belgium, each 15,358; Norway, 6897; Italy, 8167; Japan, 16,566; Switzerland, 6646; China, 7504; Brazil, 6397; Egypt, 5146; Mexico, 6504; Turkey, 4805; Denmark, 1462; and Tunis, 2015. These, with minor apportionments to Venezuela, the Argentine Confederation, Chili, Peru and the Orange Free State of South Africa, cover the original area of the structure, deducting the reservation of 187,705 feet for the United States, and excluding thirty-eight thousand square feet in the annexes. France must be credited, in explanation of her comparatively limited territory under the main roof, with her external pavilions devoted to bronzes, glass, perfumery and (chief of all) to her magnificent government exhibit of technical plans, drawings and models in engineering, civil and military, and architecture. These outside contributions constitute a link between her more substantial displays and the five hundred paintings, fifty statues, etc. she places in Memorial Hall.
In Machinery and Agricultural Halls, respectively, Great Britain has 37,125 and 18,745 feet; Germany, 10,757 and 4875; France, 10,139 and 15,574; Belgium, 9375 and 1851; Canada, 4300 and 10,094; Brazil, 4000 and 4657; Sweden, 3168 and 2603; Spain, 2248 and 5005; Russia, 1500 and 6785; Chili, 480 and 2493; Norway, 360 and 1590. Austria occupies 1536 feet in Mechanical Hall; and in that of Agriculture are the following additional allotments: Netherlands, 4276; Denmark, 836; Japan, 1665; Peru, 1632; Liberia, 1536; Siam, 1220; Portugal, 1020.
DOM PEDRO, EMPEROR OF BRAZIL.
The foreign contributions in the department of machinery are, it will be seen, hardly so large as might have been anticipated. When the spacious annexes are added to the floor of the main hall, the great preponderance of home exhibitors—five to one in the latter—is shown to be still more marked. In Agricultural Hall the United States claim less than two-thirds. The unexpected interest taken in this branch by foreigners will enhance its prominence and value among the attractions of the exposition. The collection of tropical products for food and manufacturing is very complete. The development of the equatorial regions of the globe has barely commenced. Even our acquaintance with their natural resources remains but superficial. The country which takes the lead in utilizing them in its trade and manufactures will gain a great advantage over its fellows. England's commercial supremacy never rested more largely on that foundation than now. Brazil, the great power of South—as the Union is of North—America, possesses nearly half of the accessible virgin territory of the tropics. Our interest joins hers in retaining this vast endowment as far as possible for the benefit of the Western World. A perception of this fact is shown in the exceptional efforts made by Brazil to be fully represented in all departments of the exposition, and in the visit to it of her chief magistrate, as we may properly term her emperor, the only embodiment of hereditary power and the monarchical principle in a country that enjoys—and has for the half century since its erection into an independent state maintained—free institutions.
In art domestic exhibits utterly lose their preponderance. Our artists content themselves with a small fraction of the wall- and floor-space in Memorial Hall and its northern annex. In extent of both "hanging" and standing ground they but equal England and France, each occupying something over twenty thousand square feet. Italy in the æsthetic combat selects the chisel as her weapon, and takes the floor with a superb array of marble eloquence, some three hundred pieces of statuary being contributed by her sculptors. She might in addition set up a colorable claim to the works executed on her soil or under the teaching of her schools by artists of other nativities, and thus make, for example, a sweeping raid into American territory. But she generously leaves to that division the spoils swept from her coasts by the U.S. ship Franklin, together with the works bearing her imprint in other sections, satisfied with the wealth undoubtedly her own, itself but a faint adumbration of the vast hoard she retains at home. Italy does not view the occasion from a fine-art standpoint alone. Of her nine hundred and twenty-six exhibitors, only one-sixth are in this department.
JAPANESE CARPENTERS.
Nor, on the art side of our own country, must we overlook the Historical division, the perfecting of which has been a labor of love with Mr. Etting. He allots space among the old Thirteen, and reserves a place at the feast of reunion to the mother of that rebellious sisterhood.
Forty acres of "floor-space" sub Jove remained to be awarded to foreign and domestic claimants. Gardening is one of the fine arts. Certainly nothing in Memorial Hall can excel its productions in richness, variety and harmony of color and form. Flower, leaf and tree are the models of the palette and the crayon. Their marvelous improvement in variety and splendor is one of the most striking triumphs of human ingenuity. A few hundred species have been expanded into many thousand forms, each finer than the parent. It is a new flora created by civilization, undreamed of by the savage, and voluminous in proportion to the mental advancement of the races among whom it has sprung up. Progress writes its record in flowers, and scrawls the autographs of the nations all over Lansdowne hill. No need of gilded show-cases to set off the German and Germantown roses, the thirty thousand hyacinths in another compartment, or the plot of seven hundred and fifty kinds of trees and shrubs planted by a single American contributor. The Moorish Kiosque, however, comes in well. The material is genuine Morocco, the building having been brought over in pieces from the realm of the Saracens, of "gul in its bloom" and of "Larry O'Rourke"—as Rogers punned down the poem of his Irish friend.
The nations comfortably installed, we must sketch the tactical system under which they are drawn up for peaceful contest. The classification of subjects adopted by the Commission embraces seven departments. Of these, the Main Building is devoted to I. Mining and Metallurgy; II. Manufactures; III. Education and Science; Memorial Hall and its appendages, to IV. Art; Machinery Hall, to V. Machinery; Agricultural Hall, to VI. Agriculture; and Horticultural Hall and its parterres, to VII. Horticulture. These habitats have, as we have heretofore seen, proved too contracted for the august and expansive inmates assigned them. All of the latter have overflowed; mining, for instance, into the mineral annex of thirty-two thousand square feet and the great pavilion (a hundred and thirty-five feet square) of Colorado and Kansas; education into the Swedish and Pennsylvania school-houses and others already noted; manufactures into breweries, glass-houses, etc.; and so on with an infinity of irrepressible outgrowths.