When we recall the disposition of all
committees to select the member most fecund of words to prepare their
report, we are seized with misgivings--a feeling that becomes oppressive
as we further reflect that the local committee which deliberately
collected and sent for exhibition eighty thousand manuscripts written by
the school-children of a Western city is at large on the exposition
grounds.
The passion for independent effort characteristic of the American people
led to the supplementing of the official list by sundry volunteer
prizes. These are offered by associations, and in some cases
individuals. They are not all, like the regular awards, purely honorary.
They lean to the pecuniary form, those particularly which are offered in
different branches of agriculture. Competition among poultry-growers,
manufacturers of butter, reaping-and threshing-machines,
cotton-planters, etc. is stimulated by money-prizes reaching in all some
six or eight thousand dollars. Agricultural machinery needs the open
field for its proper testing, and cannot operate satisfactorily in
Machinery Hall. Without a sight of our harvest-fields and
threshing-floors foreigners would carry away an incomplete impression of
our industrial methods, the farm being our great factory. The oar, the
rifle and the racer are as impatient of walls as the plough and its
new-fangled allies. They demand elbow-room for the display of their
powers, and the Commission was fain to let their votaries tempt it to
pass the confines of its territory.
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