The Sun.
London, England, 1851-08-20 00:00:00

evtilintt Int

LONDON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 1851.

CLOSE OF THE EXHIBITION.

The close of the world's file of Industry is fixed
for the 11th of October. Ou that day the Crystal
Palace will shut its doors, and the Exhibition of the
Industry of all Nations, after a career of success as
unprecedented as the Exhibition itself, and as the
palace in which it was contained, will cease ;
the World's Fair will be over. The consequences,
however, of this magnificent and glorious work will
last, and produce a beneficial and humanizing effect
for ages to come on the various nations who
have taken part in this great congress of
the world's best men. Friendships have been
formed among men of different climes, pro-
fessing different religions an living under
different Governments, which cannot be broken. No
longer will the calumnies with "iiio-A every free
nation (and more particularly our own) have
been of late years assailed by those who hate industry
because it leads to self-reliance and self-government,
obtain credence. No! will be the reply of our visitors,
we have seen the land, we have conversed with its
people, and we know, therefore, that you say the
thing which is not.

War is a gam. which, were their subjects wise,
litogs would not play at;'
and this peaceful assemblage of the industrious and
talented of all nations is, of all things, calcu-
lated to bestow upon men that wisdom
which is so much lauded by the poet.
Prince ALBERT is the real Apostle of Peace, and the
Great Exhibttion the only real and genuine Peace
Congress. The success of this great work has been
so complete that none have ventured to deny
it; but certain grumblers have contended

that the trade of the metropolis has
suffered in consequence. On this point we join issue
with the grumblers. That the exaggerated, not to say
impossible, expectations of certain very sanguine and
very greedy persons have not been realised, we readily
admit; but we contend that more, much
more money has been spent in London than during
any former season since 1814, and, what is better
still, the expenditure, instead of being concentrated
in the hands of a few wealthy aristocrats of the shop-
ocracy, bas been expended among a large number
of small traders, and has thus afforded a greater sti-
mulus to general industry and diffused a larger
amount of comfort among a greater number of reci-
pients. Taken as a whole the Exhibition is unparalleled
in the history of human industry ! The idea of
establishing such an Exhibition was as original as it
was gr-at, the magLitudt., and beauty of the Exhibi-
tion-building was as unprecedented as the idea of the
Exhibition, and the Exhibition itself surpassed in
beauty the most exaggerated expectations, whilst
its success outran the fondest hopes of the most san-
guine of its projectors. Prince ALBERT has acquired
for himself an immortality which the proudest
monarchs and the most successful conquerors might
envy. He is the first Prince who has ever linked
his name indissolubly with the progress of industry
all over the world—the only progress that can secure
to the nations " Peace on earth and good-vi ill to-
wards men."

" What are you doing, JoaN ?" said a master to
his s.rvant. " Nothing, Sir." '' And you, THOMAS ?"
" Htlping JoaN, Sir" For the last two years the
Board of Health and the Board of Sewers have been
the JOHN and the THOMAS of the British public. Tne
excellent members of these Boards have talked
more diffusely than did, according to MUSTAPHA RUB•
A•DUB KEELI KHAN, even the Congress of the United
States of America ; th-y have reported upon all ima-
ginable subjects, recommended the adoption of all
sorts of plans, possible and impossible, di-courssd as
learnedly on stinks as though they bad studied the
euhject practically in the city of Cologne, where, ac-
cording to SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, seventy-
six distinct and separate stinks may be discovered b)
even an uneducated nose, in the course of
a walk of half a mile ; they have told us we were poi-
soned by the foulness of our drains, poisoned by the
. foulness of the water supplied to us by the water com-
panies, stifled in consequence of the ill-ventilated
state of our habitations ; they have reported all this
and much more, and then re-reported and then re-
published the re-report in another form, but they
have absolutely done nothing. Those filthy cesspools
and choked drains, which twe years since we were
told had, if not produced, at least aggravated, the
cholera, which was at that time raging to a fearful
extent, still continue as filthy and as choked
as though no Board of Health had ever de-
nounced them. The Theme+, which ought
to be a source of health to the inhabitants
living on its banks, by supplying them with an in-
exhaustible supply of pure water and of pure air, is
a filthy polluted stream of stinking sewage, generat-
ing malaria through its whole course, and propagat-
ing pestilence as it goes along. The water supplied
by the water companies, which two years since was
declared by the Board of Health to be unfit for use,
and in many cases absolutely poisonous, is still sup-
plied in quantities as scanty, and of quality as dole
terious ; and bete we have the cholera again making its
appearance, and finding us quite as unprepared to resist
its attacks as we were two years since, notwithstanding
the Bard of Health, which declared at the time that
cholera was a disease the approach of which might,
by the proper adoption of sanitary measures, be abso.
lutely prevented, has been sitting ever since, and has
had nothing to do but to devise measures for such
prevention. We have said the cholera is approach-
ing, and we found our statement upon the weekly re-
turn
of the Regi-trar-General just published. The
deaths in London have risen from 873 in the third
week in July to 1,061 last week. In the correspond-
ing week of 1849, when the cholera was at its height,
the deaths were 2,230, but the deaths during the last
week are more numerous than during any corres-
ponding week of the last ten years, with
the exception of the years 1847 and 1849. Of
these deaths 156 were from diarrheas, which
has been progressively increasing for the last six
weeks, and 28 from cholera, which has also been
progressively increasing, from 9 six weeks since, up
to 28 last week. There is, perhaps, no occasion for
immediate alarm ; and if the Board of Health did its
duty, and exercised the power which it possesses, of
insiqing on the pri per drainage of houses and on the
immediate cl..sing of all the metropolitan grave) ards,
the probability is that we should have no very serious in- 1
creme of the Peetillauct i but whilst the Board of Health 1