THE GREAT EXHIBITION OF 1862.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume I, Issue 26, 26 December 1861, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE GREAT EXHIBITION OF 1862.

(Erom the Times, September 2) It has been said that international industrial exhibitions have a natural tendency to develope and enlarge themselves with each succeeding display. The truth of this remark is being strikingly exemplified by the widespread preparations now xnakin all departments of science, arts, and manufactures for the great event of next year; and it is still more forcibly shown in the elforts of the colonies to be properly represented in the forthcoming display. The weak point of the Exhibition of 1851 was the colonial department. As a whole the colonies were almost unrepresented. The notice giving was too short ; the object'of the undertaking was new, and not well understood, and few of the colonies were in a position to go to much expense for contributions. Thus it was that out of the 23,500 feet of horizontal space allotted to the British Colonies in 1851 ouly 6,180 feet were thinly occupied. The Indian Court, it is true, made a grand display of rich and guady wares, but the products and manufactures—the material wealth, in short, of our gigantic colonial possessions, were either inadequately represented or not represented at all. Kow, all this will be changed next year. 'The truth of the theory of the natural development of these Exhibitions showed itself in the l J aris Exhibition of 1853. Then our colonies not only appreciated the objects of the Exhibition, but, what was more important, understood what they had lost by being so imperfectly represented in 1851. The result was that at Paris in 1853, there was a finer colonial display than in London in 1851, and in the Exhibition of next year there will be such a show of colonial products and manufactures as has never yet been gathered under one roof before. All, even to our most distant dependencies, are making such efforts to be well rpresented next year as almost apparently to surpass the interest taken in the scheme at home. The Canadian Government has voted £B,OOO towards the expenses of properly representing that grand colony ; Cape Colony will give £5,00(1; British Columbia, £2,000; Queensland, £2,000; Tasmania, £2,000; New South Wales, £3,000, and £5.U00 for an exhibition of gold ; Victoria gives £IO,OOO ; New Brunswick, £1,600 ; British Guiana £I,OOO, and proportionate sums will be voted by nearly all the oilier colonial legislatures throughout the world. The idea of the gold exhibition of the Australian Colonies is an admirable one. For the first time the English public will see a properly arranged and classified exhibition of the various deposits of the precious metal, the discovery of which lias in ten short years raised Australia from the position of an outlying colony and convict depot to a series of powerful and wealthy States. It is not to be a mere display of nuggets : on the contrary, tlie nuggets that are to be sent as specimens are to be limited in weight to 6 ounces. It is to be a display not only of the various forms in which the rich auriferous yicla is found, bnt also of all the machines and implements by which it is worked at the diggings. Thus there will be gold eart h and gold sand, with the methods of washing it, gold quartz of every grade of richness from 3 oz. to the ton, till the lumps of metal at last emerge in an eruption of pure nuggets upon the surface of the earth. Towards (his display New South Wales gives £5,000, and the settlement of Victoria £5,000 with £5,000 more for the general purposes of exhibitors. Let those who affect to complain that ten years is 100 short a space of time to intervene betv.t-ou these exhibitions, think of the munificent grant of the Victorian Legislature, and of the progress made by that colony during the last decade. In 1851, Victoria was just starting into existence us a dis! hu-t colony. Its population was then short of Su.uOO : it had barely 60,600 acres of land under cultivation ; its annual imports barely a million, and its exports short of 1,100,000. Now its population is nearly 700,000, its exports exceed in value £15.000,000 annually, and its imports are as large, while more than 400,000 acres of land are under cultivation. The colonists own upwards of 7,000,000 head of cattle, and have sent gold to the mother country to the value of £110,000,000 sterling. Nor is it only in Victoria that we see this astounding progress in the ten years that has intervened. Port Philip, which in 1851 had only just been erected into a separate colony, is now the great settlement of the group. Moreton Bay has wit hin the last two years become a great, prosperous, and independent colony, tinder the name of Queensland; Van Diemen’s Land longer exists, but in its stead is the wealthy and thriving settlement of Tasmania, and even the beautiful Norfolk Islands are no more the most dreaded of all penal settlements, but have been colonized by the Pitcairn Islanders, to whom a romantic interests still attaches as the descendants of the mutineers of the Bounty, who kept up the primitive simplicity and isolation til) they outgrew the limits of their first island homo. We live fast nowadays, and ten years is a huge epoch in the rapid history of colonial enterprise and progress. There are now railways and telegraphs to towns in Australia which ten years back were only stations with sheep tracks through the bush, Steamers are plying on the Murray and the Darling, and Queensland, British Columbia, and Vancouver’s island have since ihu last Exhibition been admitted info that great family of communities which constitute the gigmtic empire of the British colonies. If there are any among the members of this system of dependencies which show less zeal in the Exhibition than the rest they are to be found among the West Indian colonies Sugar now and cotton for the future seem not unnaturally to occupy all their thoughts at present, and more interest is evinced among the people of the Sandwich Islands, at Hayti, in -Jspan, the South Sea

Isles, the Fejees, in Liberia, and along the settlements of the West Coast of Africa, than among the inhabitants of the greatest of the Antilles. Mr. Rutherford Alcock is sending home a superb collection of objects from Japan, principally of China lacquer ware, and textile fabrics, with scientific and agricultural implements, raw products, Ac. To this display. Her Majesty will contribute from the Windsor armoury the magnificent weapons and armour which were lately sent to her as a present from the Tycoon. Our Indian empire was last time represented by the display put forth by the Company. This time Dr. Forbes Watson is intrusted with gathering together a grand collection of the staples of that great empire, and it is said that the collection will be one of the most valuable and most varied that has ever been bi-ought together. The Indian empire does not come within the space assigned for the colonial display, but will, as in 1851, have a separate court to itself. In all, 12,000 feet of horizontal space has been given up to the colonies proper. Judging from present applications, at least twice that amount is demanded and expected, and the Commissioners apparently will have to enlarge the area at first decided on. On all sides arises the clamour for more room, and yet more. The theory of development on which the Commissioners have depended lias been rather more than realized, yet, as their belief in the theory has not taken the practical form of erecting a building large enough to meet what they rightly said would be the increased demand, it necessarily follows that a numerous minority of the late applicants will be disappointed altogether. Ihere is not one-fourth more space for exhibitors than in 1851, yet about ten times the amount is wanted. England alone has sent in demands which amount to twice the contents of the whole structure, and France complains that she has about a tenth of the space required for what she must exhibit.

Of all our large cities, Dublin seems the most apathetic on the subject, as compared with its size and importance ; but few applications have vet ccme in, and uone whatever will be entertained after the SUth of this month. The 12th of February next has been fixed on as the date when exhibitors may begin to send in their objects, and Commissioners will receive them from that time till the end of March. After March nothing whatever will be admitted either from home or abroad, no matter from what cause the delay may have arisen. There will thus bo one clear month during which those in charge of the building can proceed uninterruptedly in the proper arrangement and display of all the works of arts and manufactures, if this rule is strictly adhered to there is no fear of a repetition of the burr}', confusion and half finished state in the midst of which the Exhibition of 1851 was opened.