SECOND CREATIVE PERIOD.

CHAPTER V.

FEATURES.

E'en now we hear with inward strife

A motion toiling in the gloom,

The Spirit of the years to come

Yearning to mix himself with life.-Tennyson.

Politics.-A colonial senate had confronted the British Parliament. Colonial militia had crossed bayonets with British regulars; and beyond the Atlantic, on the shores of an immeasurable land, three millions of Englishmen, refusing to be taxed without representation, had founded the English Republic. Across the Channel, where freedom was wholly extinct, the leading fact of the English Revolution,-the struggle between free inquiry and pure monarchy, had been repeated. A Versailles audience had greeted with thunders of applause the lines of Voltaire: 'I am the son of Brutus, and bear graven on my heart the love of liberty and the horror of kings.' News of the American revolt had fallen like a spark on the inflammatory mass; and the Bastile, grim symbol of despotism, had been razed to the ground,

By violence overthrown

Of indignation, and with shouts that drowned
The crash it made in falling.'

Feudal France became a youthful America.

Napoleon, organ

and leader of the popular movement, was the giant of the middleclass. His only nobility, he said, was the rabble. His judicial code taught the equality of man before the law. Revolutionary principles were sown broadcast. Underneath the tumult of universal war, new forces waxed silently strong. Europe rallied, it is true, and the dread apostle of Democracy was banished to the barren rock of St. Helena; but the impulses he created and strengthened lived on. A hollow and insincere tranquillity

ensued, broken first by the insurrection of the Spanish colonies in America; then by the democratic ardor which their success kindled in Spain herself, and which extended into Portugal on the one hand, into Naples on the other. Emulating the energy of her neighbors, Greece, after four centuries of servitude, asserted and won her independence. Her triumph hastened the French Revolution of 1830, which in turn quickened the republican efforts of the Swiss, roused the unhappy Poles to a vain rebellion, inflamed an anti-papal rising in Italy, and in England intensified the desire for parliamentary reform.

The need was urgent. The representative system had become corrupt. Two-thirds of the lower house were appointed by peers. Three hundred members, it was estimated, were returned by one hundred and sixty persons. Seats were openly offered for sale, and the purchasers sold their votes. Only a small minority had the privilege of franchise. In Scotland, the county of Bute had at one time but a single resident voter. At an election he took the chair, proposed and seconded his own return, and solemnly announced himself unanimously elected. The House of Commons had ceased to represent the nation. Before the end of 1816, the demand even for universal suffrage was loud. The great work of the next sixteen years was the agitation for the correction of legislative abuses. Then, amid such rejoicing as political victory has seldom awakened, the Reform Act inaugurated forever the government of the people, by the people, for the people,- one more advance against the spirit of exclusiveness, restriction, narrowness, monopoly. That the change was accomplished by the pressure of public opinion is proof decisive of the natural and healthy march of English civilization,-its elasticity and yet sobriety of spirit.

'While men pay reverence to mighty things,

They must revere thee, thou blue-cinctured isle,
... not to-day, but this long while

In the front rank of nations, mother of great kings,
Soldiers, and poets.'

Society. The cause which most disturbed or accelerated normal progress, in antiquity, was the appearance of great men; in modern times, it has been the appearance of great inventions. Printing has secured the past, and has guaranteed the future. Gunpowder and military appliances render the triumph of bar

barians impossible. In 1807 the gas-light was tried in London, and soon the cheerful blaze chased away forever the tumultuous vagabonds who were wont, in the darkness, to insult, to plunder, and to kill. In the same year, Fulton made, from New York to Albany, the first successful voyage by steam. Ten years later, steamboats were flying on the Thames. Here is Jeffrey's description of one of these smoke-puffing vessels which surprised him and his wife on Loch Lomond:

'It is a new experiment for the temptation of tourists. It circumnavigates the whole lake every day in about ten hours; and it was certainly very strange and striking to hear and see it hissing and roaring past the headlands of our little bay, foaming and spouting like an angry whale; but, on the whole, I think it rather vulgarizes the scene too much, and I am glad that it is found not to answer, and is to be dropped next year.'

Scarcely less important was the application of steam to printing. On a November morning of 1814, the following announcement appeared in a London paper:

"The reader now holds in his hands one of the many thousand impressions of the Times newspaper, which were taken last night by a mechanical apparatus. That the magnitude of the invention may be justly appreciated by its effects, we shall inform the public that after the letters are placed by the compositors, and enclosed in what is called a "form," little more remains for man to do than to attend and watch this unconscious agent in its operations. The machine is then merely supplied with paper; itself places the form, inks it, adjusts the paper to the form newly inked, stamps the sheet, and gives it forth to the hands of the attendant, at the same time withdrawing the form for a fresh coat of ink, which itself again distributes, to meet the ensuing sheet, now advancing for impression; and the whole of these complicated acts are performed with such a velocity and simultaneousness of movement, that no less than eleven hundred sheets are impressed in one hour.'

In 1802 the vain experiment was tried of fitting a little engine to a carriage on the common road. Soon after wagers were won as to the weight a horse could draw on an iron train-way. Next the two were combined-the iron rail and the steam-carriage. From 1830 the old modes of transit were changed throughout the civilized world. The New England Puritan, when told how by magic a witch rode from Salem to Boston, looked up, trembled, and wished he had the power. A few generations after, in 1837, not a witch, but the lightning, rode, not the crupper of a broom, but a permanent wire, and thought was postilioned across the air. Machinery superseded forever the spindle and the distaff of the primeval world. Once three hundred women sat a long summer's day on Boston Common, and spun with three hundred wheels, well content with their few hanks of cotton, linen thread, and woollen yarn. But the spinning-wheel sank in turn

into disuse when it was found that the power-loom could spin more in a day than these three hundred in a month. A writer in 1833 was able to say that the length of yarn spun in England in one year was sufficient to girdle the earth two hundred thousand times, and the wrought fabrics of cotton exported in one year would form a continuous sheet from the earth to the moon.

These vast improvements were effected slowly, against bitter opposition. The adventurers in lighting by gas were universally derided. It was alleged in Parliament that 'the company aimed at a monopoly, which would ultimately prove injurious to the public, and ruin that most important branch of trade, our whale fisheries.' Fulton was mocked: 'Poor fellow, what a pity he is crazy!' Against the railway it was urged that the experiment of conveying goods in this manner had failed completely; for the average rate of the best engine was not four miles per hour. When it was suggested that the speed might be increased to fifteen and even to twenty miles, the rejoinder was that 'people would as soon suffer themselves to be fired off from a rocket as trust themselves to such a machine going at such a rate.' A writer in the Quarterly Review thus summarily disposes of the question:

'As to those persons who speculate on making railways general throughout the kingdom and superseding all canals, all the wagons, mail and stage-coaches, postchaises, and, in short, every other mode of conveyance by land and by water, we deem them and their visionary schemes unworthy of notice."

Workmen, suffering from a stagnation of trade, organized conspiracies for the destruction of machinery, which had lessened the requirements of manual labor. When the Times adopted the new press, the innovation was made with the utmost caution. All being ready, the pressmen were told one night to wait for news from the Continent. At six o'clock of the next morning the proprietor appeared among them, to tell them that the Times was already printed off by steam; that if they were evilly disposed, he was prepared; but that if they were peaceable, he would continue their wages till they should obtain employment elsewhere. The operative was not incorrect in his conclusion that machinery was throwing him out of work; and doubtless the distress was temporarily severe. Men were compelled to starve or turn to new vocations. Before long, however, the depression was seen to be a real elevation. Demands were mul

tiplied. The new system, moreover, was doing the drudgery, while forms of activity were developed requiring observation and intelligence.

The advance of civilization is thus shown by the growing substitution of pacific for warlike occupations; further and in a still higher degree, by the rapid multiplication of the ties of connection between classes and nations, by the introduction of refined and intellectual tastes, by the repudiation of practices as inhuman which once were accepted as natural and right. After 1834 it was no longer permitted to behead the body of the slain criminal, to dissect it or hang it in chains. At the opening of the period men were hung for a theft of five shillings. In 1837 the death penalty was abolished for more than two-thirds of the crimes to which it had been assigned. Trial by Battle, though fallen into desuetude, was not legislatively abolished till 1817, when the right to it was openly claimed in Westminster Hall. The bench, the bar, the kingdom, were startled by the outrage. The emancipation of the slaves in all the dominions of the British crown was the result of a solemn conviction that man cannot justly be held and used as property; that he has sacred rights, the gifts of God, and inseparable from his nature, of which his bondage is an infraction. In 1834 the laborer, much as in the days of serfdom, was confined to a given area as the utmost range of his employment. In that year his sphere was extended, and the ditcher might carry his spade and pickaxe where he would. Among the glories of the present age, none is greater than the voluntary effort to relieve the suffering and raise the fallen. At the beginning of the century the number of schools, public and private, is said to have been three thousand three hundred and sixty-three. Here is a picture of one:

In a garret, up three pair of dark, broken stairs, was a common school-room, with forty children, in a compass of ten feet by nine. On a perch forming a triangle with a corner of the room, sat a cock and two hens; under a stump bed, immediately beneath, was a dog-kennel in the occupation of three black terriers, whose barking, added to the voice of the children and the cackling of the fowls, on the approach of a stranger, were almost deafening. There was only one small window, at which sat the master, abstracting three-fourths of the light it was capable of admitting.'

Of the married, one-third of the men and one-half of the women could not sign the register. In 1818 only one person in seventeen attended school. In 1833 the proportion was one in eleven.