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BOSTON, September 23, 1837.

DEAR SIR,

The undersigned, in behalf of the Executive Committee of the Board of Managers of the Exhibition and Fair of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, have been charged with the pleasant duty of soliciting of your Excellency, for the press, a copy of your highly appropriate and eloquent address, delivered before the Institution on the evening of the 20th instant. Believing that the publication of it will be of great public utility, and gratifying to every member of the Association, we feel the strongest assurance that you will accede to the wish of the committee.

With the highest consideration,

We are, most respectfully,

Your obedient servants,

STEPHEN FAIRBANKS,
JAMES L. HOMER,

JAMES CLARK.

To His Excellency EDWARD Everett.

BOSTON, 29th September, 1837.

GENTLEMEN,

I am duly favored with yours of the 25th, and in compliance with the request of the Executive Committee of the Managers of the Exhibition and Fair of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, I have the honor to submit to you, for publication, my address of the 20th instant. It is scarcely necessary to observe, that it is by no means to be considered as a philosophical treatise, exhausting the subject, and worthy the notice of the student, but as a series of reflections and illustrations, of a somewhat desultory character, designed for delivery before a popular audience, and hastily thrown together amidst numerous pressing avocations.

I am, gentlemen, with high respect,

Messrs. STEPHEN FAIRBANKS,

JAMES L. HOMER,

JAMES CLARK.

Your friend and servant,

EDWARD EVERETT.

ADDRESS.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,

I beg leave to congratulate you on the success of your efforts to establish the first fair of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. Under circumstances somewhat unfavorable, you have produced an exhibition which, I am persuaded, has fully answered the public expectation. More than fifteen thousand articles, in almost every department of art, have been displayed in the halls. Specimens of machinery and fabrics, reflecting great credit on their inventors, improvers, and manufacturers, many of them affording promise of the highest utility, and unitedly bearing a very satisfactory testimony to the state of the arts in this country, and particularly in this community, have been submitted to the public inspection. The exhibitors have already, in the aggregate, been rewarded with the general approbation of the crowds of our fellowcitizens, who have witnessed the display. It will be the business of your committees, after a critical examination of the articles exhibited, to award enduring testimonials of merit. But the best reward will be the consciousness of having contributed to the common stock of the public welfare, by the successful cultivation of the arts so important to the improvement of society and the happiness of life.

I feel gratified at being invited to act as the organ of your Association, in this general expression of its sentiments, on so

interesting an occasion. It would be a pleasing employment to attempt an enumeration and description of some of the most important of the articles exhibited. But it would be impossible to accomplish this object, to any valuable purpose, within reasonable limits. It would require a condensing apparatus more efficient than any which has yet been contrived, to bring even a descriptive catalogue of the articles exhibited, within the compass of a public address;—to give a full account of the most important of them, would demand no small portion of the knowledge and skill required for their fabrication. The nature of this occasion prescribes a much simpler character to the remarks I shall submit to your indulgence. It will be my sole object to establish, by a few obvious illustrations, the vast importance of the Mechanic Arts. In pursuing this end, the greatest difficulty to be overcome is, that the point to be established is too certain to be proved, and too generally admitted to need a formal assertion.

Man, as a rational being, is endowed by his Creator with two great prerogatives. One is the control over matter and inferior animals, which is physical power;-the other the control over kindred mind, which is moral power; and which, in its lower forms, is often produced by the control over matter: so that power over the material world is, practically speaking, a most important element of power in the social, intellectual, and moral world. Mind, all the time, is the great mover; but surrounded,—encased,—as it is with matter, acting by material organs, treading a material earth, incorporated and mingled up with matter, I do not know that there is any thing but pure, inward thought, which is not dependent upon it; and even the capacity of the mind for pure thought is essentially affected by the condition of the material body, and by external circumstances acting upon it.

This control of mind over matter is principally effected through the medium of the mechanic arts, taking that term in its widest acceptation. The natural faculties of the human frame, unaided by artificial means, are certainly great and wonderful; but they sink to

nothing compared with the power which accrues from the skilful use of tools, machines, engines, and other material agents. Man, with his unaided strength, can lift but one or two hundred weight, and that but for a moment; with his pulleys and windlasses, he sets an obelisk upon its base, a shaft of solid granite a hundred feet high. The dome of St. Peter's is one hundred and twenty feet in diameter; its sides are twenty-two feet in thickness, and it is suspended in the air at an elevation of three hundred and twenty feet from the ground, and it was raised by hands as feeble as these. The unaided force of the muscles of the human hand is insufficient to break a fragment of marble, of any size, in pieces; but, on a recent visit to the beautiful quarries in Sheffield, from which the columns of the Girard College at Philadelphia are taken, I saw masses of hundreds of tons, which had been cleft from the quarry by a very simple artificial process. Three miles an hour, for any considerable space of time, and with ample intervals for recreation, food, and sleep, are the extreme limit of the locomotive capacity of the strongest frame, and this confined to the land. The ARTS step in: by the application of one portion of them to the purposes of navigation, man is wafted, night and day, alike waking and sleeping, at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour, over the unfathomed ocean; and, by the combination of another portion of the arts, he flies at the rate of fifteen or twenty miles an hour, and if need be with twice that rapidity, without moving a muscle, from city to city. The capacity of imparting thought, by intelligible signs, to the minds of other men, the capacity which lies at the foundation of all our social improvements, -while unaided by art, was confined within the limits of oral communication and memory. The voice of wisdom perished, not merely with the sage by whom it was uttered, but with the very breath of air on which it was borne. ART came to the aid of the natural capacity; and, after a long series of successive improvements, passing through the stages of pictorial and symbolical representations of things, the different steps of hieroglyphical writing, (each occupying, no doubt, long periods of time for its

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