ll
the inhabitants of the earth. The assembled peoples, wrote Thackeray,
in his "May-day Ode," [Footnote: Published in the Times, April 30, 1851.
The Exhibition was opened on May I.] See the sumptuous banquet set, The
brotherhood of nations met Around the feast.

And this was the note struck in the leading article of the Times on the
opening day: "The first morning since the creation that all peoples have
assembled from all parts of the world and done a common act." It was
claimed that the Exhibition signified a new, intelligent, and moral
movement which "marks a great crisis in the history of the world," and
foreshadows universal peace.

England, said another writer, produced Bacon and Newton, the two
philosophers "who first lent direction and force to the stream of
industrial science; we have been the first also to give the widest
possible base to the watch-tower of international progress, which seeks
the formation of the physical well-being of man and the extinction of
the meaner jealousies of commerce."[Footnote: Edinburgh Review, loc.
cit.]

These quotations show that the great Exhibition was at the time
optimistically regarded, not merely as a record of material
achievements, but as a demonstration that humanity was at last well on
its way to a better and happier state, through the falling of barriers
and the resulting insight that the interests of all are closely
interlocked. A vista was suggested, at the end of which far-sighted
people might think they discerned Tennyson's "Federation of the World."

4.

Since the Exhibition, western civilisation has advanced steadily, and
in some respects more rapidly than any sober mind could have
predicted--civilisation, at least, in the conventional sense, which
has been not badly defined as "the development of material ease, of
education, of equality, and of aspirations to rise and succeed in life."
[Footnote: B. Kidd, Social Evolution, p. 368.] The most striking advance
has been in the technical conveniences of life--that is, in the
control over natural forces. It would be superfluous to enumerate
the discoveries and inventions since 1850 which have abridged space,
economised time, eased bodily suffering, and reduced in some ways
the friction of life, though they have increased it in others. This
uninterrupted series of technical inventions, proceeding concurrently
with immense enlargements of all branches of knowledge, has gradually
accustomed the least speculative