§ This is not the place to discuss the causes which have led to the present state of things. It is sufficient here to observe, that if the views of those who originally organized the British Association, had been supported both from within and from without, in the manner which so important a project in the history of science deserved, the Exhibition of 1851 would have found itself led by the science of the country, prepared by long experience on a smaller scale, yet under very various circumstances, to guide with some reasonable prospect of success that gigantic undertaking, and to elicit from it the many invaluable services it might be expected to render to civilization. Its legislative department would not have been committed to the guidance of a body of men, all of them respectable, and some, indeed, eminent in their several lines, but entirely inexperienced in the conduct and arrangement of any such undertaking—persons, all of them amiable and excellent in their private capacity, yet who have exhibited in their corporate union an entire ignorance of the great principle on which alone such expositions rest,—and who, contrary to the advice and the remonstrance of the best informed, have forbidden the most important quality by which men judge of commodities, their _Price_, from being attached to the objects on which their judgment is to be pronounced. § Long, however, before the origin of these itinerant societies, the voice of the statesmen of other countries, and the popular voice in England, had called into existence societies for the promotion of the arts connected with commerce and manufactures. In France, the “Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers” was established. In England the Society of Arts has endured above a century. Its novelty and utility caused it to flourish for a time: its seat in the metropolis of a people whose wealth and power arise entirely from the unbending energy with which they apply themselves to advance the arts and to extend commerce, added to its powers. Yet, even with these advantages, that Society has never risen to the position it deserved, and has for years been languishing in premature decay. Lately, indeed, a powerful impulse has been communicated to its proceedings, but even the presidency of the Prince-Consort has not yet raised it to its due position in the public opinion.