These things, significant as they
are, are yet not an alphabet that can be so compounded as to
write the richest page of man's history. In this present display I
find not prefigured that splendid future the Americans are fond of
predicting for themselves." And the American, acknowledging the force
of the comment, would have turned away mortified, humbled. But he was
saved any such humiliation. In the midst of that area, under that
beautiful flag, day after day, week after week, month after month,
from morn till night, go when he would, he beheld there a circle ever
full, its vacancies supplied as soon as they were made, a circle
silent with admiration, hushed by emotion, gazing at a master-piece of
American art, the Greek Slave of Powers. And from that contemplation
hundreds of thousands of Europeans carried away an impression of
American capacity, a conviction that truly a great page is to be
written by the young republic in the book of history,--a sense of
American power which they could have gotten from no other source.
Our Association, gentlemen, owes its origin to the wants of industry.
The moving power which has been strongest in bringing so many of us
together to found an institution for the encouragement of art in Rhode
Island, is the desire hereby more thoroughly to inweave the
beautiful into cotton and woolen fabrics, into calicoes and delaines;
to melt the beautiful into iron and brass, and copper, as well as into
silver and gold; so that our manufacturers and artisans may hold their
own against the competition of England and France and Germany, whereof
in the two latter countries especially, schools of design have long
existed, and high artists find their account in furnishing the
beautiful to manufacturers.
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