But if these arts are sufficient to excite our wonder, especially when made to contribute to the happiness of the most destitute of our race, and to confer on our paupers comforts and luxuries, formerly unknown to our princes, surely the art of working in metal—the manufacture of the buttons on the workhouse coat, the making of the nails on the bottom of the workhouse floor, is a thousand times more wonderful. Who can look at the commonest pocket-knife or padlock, and not feel an intense reverence for the art and artists that could fashion those most useful instruments out of a lump of stone? To become conscious of the skill displayed in the various processes, we should have a knowledge of the difficulties to be overcome; and nothing will give us so profound a sense of these as to endeavour to make one or other similar instruments for ourselves. Or if we wish to have a just appreciation of the intellect required for the discovery and perfection of the metallurgic arts, let us imagine ourselves placed on an uninhabited island—another Juan Fernandez—and then fancy how we, even though we have lived among the very arts all our days, should set to work. Let us think whether we could make a pin or a needle out of a piece of rock to save our lives. Is there any more skill to put words together than to manufacture a razor out of a lump of iron-stone? _We_ know which seems to us by far the easier occupation of the two. Nevertheless, without any wish to indulge in that mock humility which seeks to disparage our own productions, when, if there be an innate propensity, it is to value our own work immeasurably beyond its true worth, we must confess that the one craft appears no more worthy of respect than the other; so, we say again, the Great Exhibition, where all these matters are forced upon the mind, rightly considered, is a huge academy for teaching men the true dignity of even what are thought the inferior grades of labour.