Editeur : Doubleday page & Company
Année de sortie : 1904
Langue : Anglais
Introduction :
This number of The World's Work is made to serve the purpose of a guide; philosopher, and friend for wee that go to see the World's Fair at St. Louis, and a faithful report of it for those who is not go. The articles and illustrations that follow were written and taken by the members of the magazine's staff, after a month's study. The Fair is more variously instructive than any of its predecessors, and it will richly repay intelligent study. It gives a worthy representation of the condition of the arts and industries of the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, on a scale of unprecedented magnitude. It presents, also, a great variety of splendid spectacles, as well as of subjects of instructive study; and every alert and ambitious person who can go to see it ought to spend a week
there—a fortnight if possible.
The bigness of the Fair is the first fact that strikes the visitor, and it is the fact that will remain longest in his memory. Immense distances, buildings so large that you have to make a new standard of measurement, and an endless variety of things to see — these at first produce an impression of bewilderment. You may have read the statistics of all recent great fairs, which show how much more extensive and costly this is than any of its predecessors was; but you do not comprehend the bigness of it till you come into it. The truth is, it is larger than man's stature— so much larger than the buildings and the fairs and the machines and the displays of things to which we are accustomed, that the first experience of the visitor is likely to be unsatisfactory. Consider, for instance, the building given to Agriculture. You may walk nine miles in it without retracing your steps. Now the first effect of this hugeness is to disturb our usual standards of measurement. But presently the magnitude of the subjects dawns upon you—the subjects treated at the Fair; for the Fair is a colossal work of art, a method of expressing the large facts of industrial activity. Regarded in this way, you may study (again to use the Palace of Agriculture as an example) the large facts of our food-production on a scale of exhibition never before made possible. Everybody knows that corn is our most valuable crop. The statistics of it are as dull as any other table of figures. But the display of Corn in acres of artistic designs, in colossal domes and pillars and portieres, and in great piles of ears, and of all the products of corn (for there are perhaps a hundred such products)—acres of impressive designs and arrangements—all this does bring to any man who has the least imagination the feeling of inexhaustible plenty, of the measureless richness of our continent. What has been done for Corn has been done for Transportation also; for Electricity; for the Philippine peoples and their industries— for many other things. The bigness of the Fair, therefore, has a meaning, a use, and a justification. Great spaces are necessary to show great products and important processes. So large are we grown, and so various are the modern industries of the world, that a new scale of measurement is necessary. It is the first time that the products and industries of our country have been exhibited on a sufficiently large scale to give a correct idea of them.
