These came forward with a promptness that at once raised the movement above the status of a project. The city with a million and a half, and the State with a million, replenished the exchequer of the association after a fashion that ensured in every quarter confidence in its success, and at the same time extinguished what little 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 obvious that the walls of but an imperceptible minority of American homes would have the patriotic faith and fervor of their occupants attested a century hence by these