advertisements of imaginative manufacturers. American
citizens--all but the few consummately able kings of business--allow a
free play to their imagination in advertising the products of their
skill. Canada buys a small number of our pianos; Cuba, a few; Mexico, a
few; South America, a few; and now and then one is sent to Europe, or
taken thither by a Thalberg or a Gottschalk; but an inflated currency
and a war tariff make it impossible for Americans to compete with
European makers in anything but excellence. In price, they cannot
compete. Every disinterested and competent judge with whom we have
conversed on this subject gives it as his deliberate opinion that the
best American piano is the best of all pianos, and the one longest
capable of resisting the effects of a trying climate; yet we cannot sell
them, at present, in any considerable numbers, in any market but our
own. Protectionists are requested to note this fact, which is not an
isolated fact. America possesses such an astonishing genius for
inventing and combining labor-saving machinery, that we could now supply
the world with many of its choicest products, in the teeth of native
competition, but for the tariff, the taxes, and the inflation, which
double the cost of producing. The time may come, however, when we shall
sell pianos at Paris, and watches in London, as we already do
sewing-machines everywhere.

Twenty-five thousand pianos a year, at a cost of fifteen millions of
dollars! Presented in this manner, the figures produce an effect upon
the mind, and we wonder that an imperfectly reconstructed country could
absorb in a single year, and that year an unprosperous one, so large a
number of costly musical instruments. But, upon performing a sum in long
division, we discover that these startling figures merely mean, that
every working-day in this country one hundred and twelve persons buy a
new piano. When we consider, that every hotel, steamboat, and public
school above a certain very moderate grade, must have from one to four
pianos, and that young ladies' seminaries jingle with them from basement
to garret, (one school in New York has thirty Chickerings,) and that
almost every couple that sets up housekeeping on a respectable scale
considers a piano only less indispensable than a kitchen range, we are
rather inclined to wonder at the smallness than at the largeness of the
number.

The trade in new pianos, however, is nothing to the countless
transaction