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GENERAL REPORT OF THE JUDGES OF GROUP XXVI. in harmony with the requirements of the day. Edifices are erected after the new, not the old, and the spirit of improvement, which the conventionalist and the antiquarian call the “ curse of the age,” tears down the damp old walls, and air and sunshine now pour in where disease and crime once held high festival. The cry was loud in Paris when Baron Haussmann, under Napoleon III., opened his boulevards right and left, giving breathing-space to its population of millions. And many a traveler to-day sighs in Rome over the strong-limbed Piedmontese who are laying the sewers and drains under the new regime, to drive away the very fever which might send the same traveler home shorn of his strength, a sadder and a wiser man. He sighs because the lazy, dirty, charmingly pic turesque Roman peasant is being pushed out of sight. It cannot be denied that some quaint and picturesque nooks and corners have disappeared, nor that certain historical landmarks have been obliterated; but, as a general rule, monuments of historical in terest or artistic value have been preserved and repaired, even recon structed, particularly in France and under the Empire, which restored with great minuteness of detail chateaux and churches fast crumbling away under the heavy foot of time. Even in our new country, where so much remains to be accom plished, many systematically find fault with this so-called mania for modern improvements which must grow out of the wants and require ments of modern civilization, and with us in a peculiar degree out of the rapid growth of large cities and manufacturing towns, where cause and effect follow each other with a rapidity unknown in the Old World. The architects of this country have accomplished much in this direction, and yet it is a fact hardly to be denied that the profession does not hold in this country the elevated position it has always held in Europe. Their task is, however, a peculiarly difficult one, for it is no easy matter, in a new country, to enlist the sympathies of the general public beyond the attainment of the most material results, and not until art education has become more general can we hope for that sympathy and consideration which is only born of knowledge. But already there is a promise of better things; a few technological and industrial art schools are in successful operation, and the first steps have been taken towards the art education of the masses; while in this Centennial year we have just cause to congratulate ourselves upon the establishment of art museums similar to that of the South Kensington, in London, in several of our larger cities, and we may reasonably hope that our Exhibition will stimulate and improve all