ittle disposition
may have been manifested elsewhere to cavil at the choice of location.
These large subventions very properly contemplated something more than
the encouragement of a transient display, and were for the most part
devoted to the erection of structures of a permanent character, such
as the Art-Gallery or Memorial Hall and the Horticultural Building. To
endowments of this description, called forth by the occasion, we might
add the Girard Avenue Bridge, the finest in the country, erected by
the city at the cost of a million and a half, and leading direct to
the exhibition grounds. The concession of two hundred and sixty
acres of the front of Fairmount Park, with the obliteration of costly
embellishments that occupied the ground taken for the new exposition
buildings, may be viewed in the light of another contribution.

[Illustration: MAIN BUILDING.]

A treasury meant to accommodate seven millions of dollars--three
millions less than the Vienna outlay--still showed an aching void,
which was but partially satisfied by the individual subscriptions of
Philadelphians. It became necessary to sound the financial tocsin
in the ears of all the Union. Congress, States, cities, counties,
schools, churches, citizens and children were appealed to for
subscriptions. The shares were fixed at the convenient size of ten
dollars each, hardly the market-value of the stock-certificate,
"twenty-four by twenty inches on the best bank-note paper," which
became the property of each fortunate shareholder on the instant of
payment. But these seductive pictures belonged to a class of art with
which the moneyed public had become since '73 unhappily too familiar.
They had to jostle, in the gallery of the stock-market, a vast
and various collection exhaustive of the whole field of allegory,
mythological and technical, and framed in the most bewitching aureoles
of blue, red and green printer's ink. It seemed in '72 much more
probable that the Coon Swamp and Byzantium Trans-Continental Railway
would be able, the year after completion, to pay eight per cent. on
fifty thousand dollars of bonds to the mile, sold at seventy in the
hundred, than it did in '75 that ten millions of fifty-cent tickets
could be disposed of in six months at any point on the Continent. Thus
it happened that the exchange of Mr. Spinner's twenty square inches of
allegory for the three square feet of Messrs. Ferris & Darley's went
on slowly, and it became painfully ob