Acts permitting the Centennial medals to be struck at the mint, and admitting free of duty articles designed for exhibition, were passed in June, 1874.  The Secretary of the Treasury gave effect to the latter by a clear and satisfactory schedule of regulations.  Under its operation foreign exhibitors have all their troubles at home; their goods, once on board ship, reaching the interior of the building with more facility and less of red tape than they generally meet with in attaining the point of embarkation.

The answers of the nations were all that could be desired, and largely beyond any anticipation.  Their government appropriations will exceed an aggregate of two millions in our currency.  Great Britain, with Australia and Canada, gives for the expenses of her share of the display $250,000 in gold; France, $120,000; Germany, _$171,000_; Austria, $75,000; Italy, $38,000 from the government direct, and the same sum from the Chamber of Commerce, which is better, as indicating enlightenment and energy among her business-men; Spain, amid all her distractions, $150,000; Japan, an unknown quantity in the calculations of 1851, no less than $600,000; Sweden, $125,000; Norway, $44,000; Ecuador, $10,000; the Argentine Confederation, $60,000; and many others make ample provision not yet brought to figures, among them Egypt, China, Brazil, Chili, Venezuela, and that strange political cousin of ours at the antipodes, begotten and sturdily nurtured by the Knickerbockers, the Orange Free State.  In all, we may reckon at forty the governments which have made the affair a matter of public concern, and have ranked with the ordinary and regular cares of administration the interest of their people in being adequately represented at Philadelphia.  Many other states will be represented by considerable displays sent at private expense.  It results that we shall have twenty-one acres under roof of the best products of the outer world—­more than the entire area of the London exposition of 1851.  A Muscovite journal, the Golos, expresses a wide popular sentiment in declaring that our exposition “will have immense political importance in the way of international relations.”  The people suspect they have found what they have long needed—­a great commercial, industrial and political ’change to aid in regulating and equalizing the market of ideas and making a common fund of that article of trade, circulating freely and interchangeable everywhere at sight.  Practically, the territory of the United States is an island like Great Britain.  Everything that comes to Philadelphia, save a little from Canada, will traverse the sea.  We are assuming the metropolitan character, whereto isolation is a step.  All the imperial centres, old and new, have been seated on islands or promontories.  Look at England, Holland, Venice, Carthage, Syracuse, Tyre, Rome and Athens.  Shall we add New York and San Francisco—­little wards as they are of a continental metropolis?