Il8 ENGLISH SAGA

tongues of Lancashire and Durham, and the official reports of
their behaviour as they flocked through museums and gardens
are full of unconcealed pride. Not a flower was picked, a picture
smashed. And ten years before, the Londoners who now wel-
comed them had stood silent in the streets to watch the guns
going north to Lancashire."1

To the nation that fairy palace towering over the blossom
and foliage of the park symbolised a great social reunion and
the dawning of a new era of hope, based on enterprise, freedom
of trade and cheapness of production and communication. To
innocent eyes—and there were many that saw it—it seemed a
palace of fight glittering in the summer sun with its central
crystal fountain reflecting all the jewels of the world, an Arabian
nights* creation "so graceful, so delicate, so airy that its trans-
lucent beauty remains graven on memory as something which
must defy all rivalry."2 To the simple sons of toil from the
industrial north who had saved up their pennies to make the
first and only pilgrimage of their lives to visit it, its beauty
seemed something that was scarcely of this earth. They saw it,
not like a sophisticated posterity as something comic, but as a
dream of fairyland and, in a world which contained the slums
of Irkside and Little Ireland, and in which all things are com-
parative, it is not surprising.

• ••*••• •

The Great Exhibition, born of the hopes excited by Free
Trade, was expected by its promoters to herald the dawn of
perpetual peace. It was a hope shared by every Briton. In the
past Britain had won many great prizes in war. But she had
done so because she had emerged victorious from her wars and
not because she had sought them. Her people, though redoubt-
able fighters, were deeply impregnated by a desire to live at
peace and by a belief that wars were always caused by foreigners.

This had never seemed so true as in 1851. Increasingly de-
pendent on imports, with a growing export trade, with a vast
empire (in which they had almost lost interest), and with
a glorious record of victories behind them, the islanders had
nothing to gain by war and everything to lose. All that was
now necessary was to persuade foreigners who were not in the
same state of blessedness to think likewise. The light of reason,

l£arfy Victorian England, 7, a12-23.
*Lord tedudok, Memoirs, /,