The Crystal Palace of 1853 will have another and profounder character. It is an attempt to consecrate these fruits of the world’s strivings to the education and elevation of the great masses, whom commerce has too long used up, and then flung aside to perish. It is a deliberate effort to gather all the ripest fruit of the world’s most earnest strivings, most glorious victories, and present them, in order to minister to the development of the men, women, and children of the present generation. It is no mere exhibition, except in the sense in which the whole world is an exhibition. It is the grandest conception of a hitherto mechanical and money-loving generation, and has its root far deeper than in a desire for 5 per cent. returns. It grows up through the force of a conviction, which is now wrought into the mind of the community, that the intellect and wealth which commerce has developed, owe a ministry to the people of the land; and that while the merchant princes can pillage the Continent, Egypt, Palestine, India, and China, of their treasures, to minister to their own vanity, amusement, or instruction, the united strength of the intellect and wealth of the country should build a Palace, far transcending all private palaces, for the great people whose industry has made our England the queen of the kingdoms of the earth. It is emphatically a People’s Palace, and the organization of it on this gigantic scale, by men of shrewd understanding, is certainly a sign that the tide of public feeling has turned towards higher, more intellectual, more elevating pursuits and recreations, than it affected some fifteen years ago. The fact that the keenest speculators are now ransacking our world for the treasures of art, science, and the early history of our race, wherewith to adorn this Palace, is a proof that the very class which has been most prone to renounce all the higher attributes of humanity, and to make its life like that of the brutes that perish, is beginning to resume the exercise of those higher attributes, and to waken to a sense of what a man’s life includes. It is possible that many may regard this view of the New Exhibition as overstrained. Many expect that people will go to the Crystal Palace to see the sight, and, when they have seen it, will go to the public-houses and finish there. Such a view is both shallow and faithless. No doubt, those who like to think so will find plenty which will appear to sustain their views. “The people” is a vague term. It needs patient and intelligent observation, not on the outskirts, but in the centre of a great popular movement, to discern its character. The experience of the last few years does not confirm such anticipations. The working classes, who visit the Museum in Great Russell Street, the Zoological Gardens on Monday, Hampton Court, and Kew, add nothing to the disorder and drunkenness of the metropolis. It is wonderfully rare, even in the more distant exhibitions and places of