As yet, but few modes of industry in this country have been rendered artistic; our handicraftsmen have remained pure mechanics, because wanting that knowledge which alone could convert their operation into an art; they have merely repeated, mechanically, the series of acts that others had performed before them, while such processes which had been elevated into intellectual exercises had been rendered so by mere scientific knowledge. By means of Mechanics’ Institutes and cheap literature, we had so extended the discoveries of our philosophers, that the truths of science were, in many instances, no longer confined to the laboratory, the observatory, or the library, but made to permeate the mine, the forge, the workshop, the factory, and the fields. Still, it was only science that reached our working men. Taste, as yet, was scarcely known to them. A knowledge of the laws of nature might make better and more cunning handicraftsmen, but a knowledge of the laws of pleasing could alone render their works more elegant in design; and, since every material object must necessarily partake of form and colour, it is surely as well it should be made to please as to displease the eye in these qualities. As yet we have sought to develop only the utilities of art—the beautiful, as an essential element of all manufacture, we have entirely neglected. As a stranger recently come among us, this defect appears to have forced itself deeply into the mind of Prince Albert; for, as far back as 1846, his Royal Highness urged upon a deputation that waited upon him from the Society of Arts, that the department of that Society “most likely to prove immediately beneficial to the public, was that which encouraged, most efficiently, the application of the Fine Arts to the various manufactures of the country;” and, added the Prince, after speaking of the excellence and solidity of British manufactures generally, “to wed mechanical skill with high art is a task worthy of the Society of Arts, and directly in the path of its duty.” The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry and Art of all Nations is, then, the first attempt to dignify and refine toil; and, by collecting the several products of scientific and æsthetic art from every quarter of the globe into one focus, to diffuse a high standard of excellence among our operatives, and thus to raise the artistic qualities of labour, so that men, no longer working with their fingers alone, shall find that which is now mere drudgery converted into a delight, their intellects expanded, their natures softened, and their pursuits ennobled by the process.