to have, and must have to give diversity to our industry, to relieve us from dependence upon other nations, to refine our taste, and to enable the ornamental and elegant appliances of our life to keep pace with our external development. Mere wealth, without the refinements of wealth--barbaric ostentation, prodigal display, extravagant self-indulgence--can only corrupt morals and degrade character. But the cultivation of the finer arts redeems society from its grossness, spreads an unconscious moderation and charm around it, softens the asperities of human intercourse, elevates our ideals, and imparts a sense of serene enjoyment to all social relations. Our common people, immeasurably superior to the common people of other nations in easy means of subsistence, in intelligence, as in the sterling virtues, are yet almost as immeasurably behind them in polished and gentle manners, and the love of music, painting, statuary, and all the more refining social pleasures. “These Exhibitions, then, which make us acquainted with the superlative arts of other nations, cannot but be highly useful to us. But they have also another use--a moral, if not a religious use, in that they teach us so powerfully the dependence of nations upon each other--their mutual relations, and the absolute necessity of each to the comfortable existence of all the rest. There is hardly an article in the Crystal Palace to which the labor of all the world has not in some sort contributed--hardly a machine which is not an embodied record of the industrial progress of the world--hardly a fabric which, analyzed, does not carry us to the ends of the earth, or which does not connect us intimately with the people of every clime--with the miners who tortured its raw material from the dark cave, or the diver who brought it from the bottom of the sea--with the solitary mariner who shielded it from the tempests--with the poor, toil-worn mechanic who gave it form or color, or with the artist who imparted to it its final finish. Thus, no man liveth to himself alone, even in his most ordinary occupations; he is part and parcel of us, as we are of him. A wonderful and touching unity pervades the relations of the race; all men are useful to all men; and we who fancy that, in some important respects, we stand on the summit level of humanity, have a deep interest in the laborers of the vales--in the celerity, the excellence and the success of what they do, and in the comfort and happiness of their general condition. As Emerson has wisely sung, in that sweet poem of his: ‘All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.’ “There is also another thought suggested by our topic which contains a world of meaning. We are apt to speak, in our discussions, of the [Illustration: CHICAGO STREET LIFE, WASHINGTON STREET AND WABASH AVENUE.]