receptacle.  Close at hand stand the antipodes in the pavilion of Chili, that opens its graceful portal to bales sprinkled mayhap with the ashes of Aconcagua.  There “crashes a sturdy box of stout John Bull;” and Russia, Tunis and Canada roll into close neighborhood with him and each other.  A queer and not, let us hope, altogether transitory show of international comity is this.  Many a high-sounding, much-heralded and more-debating Peace Congress has been held with less effect than that conducted by these humble porters, carpenters and decorators.  This one has solidity.  Its elements are palpable.  The peoples not only bring their choicest possessions, but they also set up around them their local habitations.  It is a cosmopolitan town that has sprung into being beneath the great roof and glitters in the rays of our republican sun.  In its rectangularly-planned streets, alleys and plazas every style of architecture is represented—­domestic, state and ecclesiastical, ancient, mediaeval and modern.  The spirit and taste of most of the races and climes find expression, giving thus the Sydenham and the Hyde Park palaces in one.  The reproductions at the former place were the work of English hands:  those before us are executed, for the most part, by workmen to whom the originals are native and familiar.  In this feature of the interior of the Main Building we are amply compensated for the breaking up of the coup d’oeil by a multiplicity of discordant forms.  The space is still so vast as to maintain the effect of unity; and this notwithstanding the considerable height of some of the national stalls, that of Spain, for example, sending aloft its trophy of Moorish shields and its effigy of the world-seeking Genoese to an elevation of forty-six feet.  The Moorish colonnade of the Brazilian pavilion lifts its head in graceful rivalry of the lofty front reared by the other branch of the Iberian race.  In so vast an expanse this friendly competition of Spaniards and Portuguese becomes, to the eye, a union of their pretensions; and a single family of thirty-three millions in Europe and America combines to present us with two of the handsomest structures in the hall.

[Illustration:  Facade of the Brazilian division, main building.]

A moderate dip into statistics can no longer be evaded.  We must map out the microcosm, and allot to each sovereign power its quota of the surface.  The great European states which have assumed within the century the supreme direction of human affairs are assigned a prominent central position in the Main Building.  Great Britain and her Asiatic possessions occupy just eighty-three feet less than a hundred thousand; her other colonies, including Canada, 48,150; France and her colonies, 43,314; Germany, 27,975; Austria, 24,070; Russia, 11,002; Spain, 11,253; Sweden and Belgium, each 15,358; Norway, 6897; Italy, 8167; Japan, 16,566; Switzerland,