Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876

I.—GENERAL PROGRESS

This of ours is a conceited century. In intense self-consciousness it exceeds any of its late predecessors. Its activity in externally directed thought is accompanied by an almost corresponding use of introverted reflection. Its inheritance, and the additions it has made, can make or will make thereto, supply an ever-present theme. It delights to stand back from its work, like the painter from his easel, to scan the effect of each new touch—to note what has been done and to measure what remains. It is a great living and breathing entity, informed with the concrete life of three generations of mankind the most alert and the most restless of all that have existed. This sensation of exceptional endowments is self-nourishing and ever-growing; and our little nook of time is coming to view all the paths of the past, broad or narrow, direct or interlacing, straight or obscure, as so many roads laid out and graded for the one purpose of leading straight to its gate. It sounds its own praises and celebrates itself at all opportunities. But with all this there is a wholesome recognition of responsibility. Nobility obliges, it is prompt to confess, and to act accordingly. It sees flaws in its regal diamonds, spots that still sully on its ermine; and is not slow to address itself to the duty of their removal.

If the century understands itself, it may be said likewise to understand the others better than they did themselves. It collects their respective autobiographies and their mutual criticisms. The real truths, half truths and delusions each has added to the accumulating common stock it sifts and weighs, mercilessly piling a dustheap beyond Mr. Boffin's wildest dreams, and rescuing, on the other hand, from the old wastebasket many discarded scraps of real but till now unacknowledged value. Busy in gathering stores of its own, it is able to find time for digesting those bequeathed to it, and for executing both tasks with a good deal of care. It brings skepticism to its aid in both, and subjects new and old conclusions to almost equally close analysis. Each new pebble it picks up upon the shore of the Newtonian ocean it holds up square and askew to the light, and cross-examines color, texture and form. Now and then, being but mortal after all, it chuckles too hastily over a brilliant find, but the blunder is not apt to wait long for correction. Just now it appears to be overhauling its accounts in the item of science, taking stock of its discoveries in that field, balancing bad against good, and determining profit and loss. Some once-promising entries have to undergo a black mark, while a few claims that were despaired of come to the fore. This proceeding is only preparatory, however, to a new departure on a bolder scale. Scientific progress knows only partial checks. Its movement is that of a force en échelon: one line may get into trouble and recoil, while the others and the general front continue to advance. Theory does not profess to be certainty. It is only tentative, and subject necessarily to frequent errors, for the elimination of which the severely skeptical spirit of the laws to which it is now held furnishes the best appliance. Modern science possesses an internal vis medicatrix which prevents its suffering seriously from excesses or irregularities. When it ventures to touch the shield of the Unknowable, it is only with the butt of its lance, and the inevitable overthrow is accepted with the least modicum of humiliation.

In that science which assumes to marshal all the others, philosophic and judicial history, ours ought to be the foremost age, if only because it has the aid of all the others. It does more, however, than they can be said to have contemplated. It widens the scope of history, and more precisely formalizes its functions. It makes of the old chroniclers so many moral statisticians, fully utilizing at the same time their services as collectors of material facts. The deductions thus arrived at it aims to test by the methods of the exact sciences. It invites, in a certain degree, moral philosophy to don the trammels of mathematics and decorate its shadowy shoulders with the substantial yoke of the calculus. Such is the programme of a school too young as yet to have matured its shape, but full of vigor and confidence, and a very promising outgrowth from the elder and more stately academy of abstract historical inquiry and generalization. The latter has redeveloped and freshened up for us the pictures of the ancient story-tellers, and has furthermore had them, so to speak, engraved and scattered among the people, until we have come to live in the midst of their times and enjoy an intimate knowledge of the actual condition of human polity and intelligence at any given period. Through the long gallery or the thick portfolio thus presented to our eye we may trace the common thread of motive under the varying conditions of time and circumstance. This thread able hands are aiding us to discover.

To what segment of time shall we assign the name of Nineteenth Century? In A.D. 1800 there was dispute as to which was properly its first year, the question being settled in favor of 1801. Having thus struck out the first of the eighteen hundreds, we may take the liberty of similarly ostracizing the last twenty-four or twenty-five, which are yet to come, and start the nineteenth century as far back in the eighteenth. If we look farther behind us, the centuries will be found often to overlap in this way. Coming events cast their shadows before, and the morning twilight of the new age is refracted deeply into the sky of the old one. Of no case can this be more truly said than of that in point. Not only America, but Christendom, may safely date the century's commencement about 1775 or 1776. The narrowest isthmus between the mains of past and present will cover those years.

England and France were then both at the outset of a new political era, sharply divided from that preceding. The amiable and decorous Louis XVI., with his lovely consort, had just ousted from Versailles the Du Barrys and the Maupeons. George III., a sovereign similar in youth and respectability of character, had a few years before in like manner improved the tone of the English court, and, after the first flush of welcome from his subjects, surprised and delighted to have an Englishman and a gentleman once more upon the throne, was getting over his early lessons in adversity from the birch of Wilkes and Junius, and entering upon a second series from that of Washington, all preparatory to the longest and most brilliant reign in British annals. Frederick II. was an old man, occupied with assuring to the power he had created the position it now holds as the first in Europe. Clive, in the House of Lords, was nursing a still younger bantling, now an empire twice as populous as Europe was at that period. Under the equally rugged hand of the young princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, Russia was having her Mongolian epidermis indued with the varnish Napoleon so signally failed to scrape off, and was for the first time taking a place among the great powers of the West. The curtain, in short, was in the act of rising on the Europe of to-day. Anson had lately brought the Pacific to light, and Cook was completing his work. The crust of Spanish monopoly in the trade of four-fifths of the North and South American coasts had been broken, and England was preparing to replace it, at some points, by her own. This was, of itself, a New World, geographical and commercial.

Under Linnæus and Buffon, another world, wider still, was unfolding its wonders and subjecting them to a classification which has since been but little changed, vast as have been the subsequent accessions of knowledge and attainments in methods of interpretation. Before them, the study of the organic creation can scarcely be said to have existed. The inorganic was as little reduced to system, and in its broadest aspect was not even looked at. Buffon's acute but for the most part empiric speculations on the structure of the globe were a step in advance; but the science of geology he did not recognize, and left to be shaped a very little later by Hutton. Priestley, Cavendish and Lavoisier were dissecting the impalpable air and making the gaseous form of substances as familiar and manageable as the solid. Hence true analytic chemistry. Astronomy, an older science, had derived new precision from the first observed transit of Venus, imperfect as were the data obtained and the calculations made.

Contemporaneous with this sudden apparition of new fields of scientific discovery and enlargement of the old was an intellectual movement of a more general character than that necessarily involved in the progress of natural philosophy. The French Encyclopædists took hold of social, moral and juridical questions with an unsparing vigor that could not be gainsaid. The art of criticism was simultaneously introduced, perfected and applied. Many of the wrongs and follies that paralyzed thought and industry were dragged to light. Hoary absurdities that smothered law and gospel under the foul mass of privilege and superstition, and made them a curse instead of a blessing, shrank before the storm of ridicule and denunciation. Those which did not at once succumb were placed in a position of publicity and exposure in which they could not long survive. The great upheaval of which the French Revolution was a part was thus originated.

Sounder political ideas were brought within reach of the masses, till then not recipient, it may almost be said, of any political ideas at all. Statesmen and governments were similarly enlightened, Adam Smith's declaration of commercial antedated by two years Mr. Jefferson's of political independence. The atrocities of the English criminal code, approaching those of Draco, were put in process of correction, though, as usual in British reforms, it took half a century to effect their complete removal; a woman having been, if we recollect rightly, hanged for a trifling theft in the last years of George IV. This same slowness of that conservative but persevering people is calculated to blind us to the operation among them of deep-seated and active influences. Hardly till 1815 can we discover in England any fervor, much less efficiency, in the demand for an extension of popular rights and relaxation of the grasp of privilege. Irish manufactures continued to be distinctly and rigidly repelled from competition with English by formal statute; Jewish and Catholic disqualification was maintained; the game-laws and the rotten-borough system, which conferred on the nobility and gentry arbitrary power over the purse and person of the commonalty, were determinedly upheld; counsel was only nominally allowed to the defendant in criminal cases; chancery withheld or plundered without resistance or appeal; and there can be no doubt that life and property were better protected by law in France at the fall of the First Napoleon than in Great Britain. Nevertheless, the movement had begun in the latter country forty years before. A generation had passed since the battle of Culloden, and the island was at length indissolubly and efficiently one. It shared fully in the intellectual impulse of the day. Victorious in all its latest struggles and freed from all sources of internal danger, it might naturally have been expected to enter at once on a career of improvement more marked than in the case of its neighbors. It is not easy to assign reasons for failure in this respect, unless we seek them in disgust at the subsequent dismemberment and disturbance of the empire by the fruits of popular agitations in America, Ireland and France. The reaction due to such causes was probably sufficient to defeat all liberal efforts. The leading English writers of the Revolutionary period were strong Tories. Such were Johnson, the Lake poets after their brief swing to the opposite extreme, and Scott. All these except the first belong as well to the time of successful reform, and Johnson may be claimed by the eighteenth century; which serves to illustrate the blight cast upon British literature by the prolonged resistance of British statesmen to the prevailing current—a resistance which took its keynote from the dying recantation and protest of the Whig Chatham.

The opening of the epoch, then, was as marked in Great Britain as elsewhere. Only in special fields she afterward fell behind, and lost something like half the century. In others she kept abreast, or even in advance.

Criticism was not content to exercise its new powers and apply its newly-framed laws exclusively in the investigation of any branch of philosophy. It brought them to bear upon the arts. The discovery of the buried cities of Campania aided in attracting renewed attention to the art-stores of Italy, ancient and modern. The principles of taste and beauty which they illustrated were searchingly analyzed and carefully explained. Painting and sculpture began slowly to emit their rays through the eclipse of more than a century. The allied art shared in this second and secondary renaissance. Haydn was in full fruit, Mozart ripening, and Music watched, in the cradle of Beethoven, her budding Shakespeare. A fourth Teuton was studying the symphonies of the spheres; and within the first five years of the century, while the "crowning mercy" of Yorktown was maturing, a planet that had never before dawned on the eye of man took its place with the ancient six, and "swam into the ken" of Herschel.

We have said enough to vindicate our assumed chronology and justify our readjustment of the calendar. Europe may well be invited to celebrate her own political, social and material centennial in 1876, as truly as that of America. Her intellectual revival indisputably contributed, through Franklin, Laurens, the Lees and others who were immediately within its influence, to bring on the American movement; and her thought, in turn, has since that juncture as certainly gravitated, in many of its chief manifestations, toward that of the New World. Hers is the jubilee not less than ours. The humblest cot on her broad bosom is the brighter for '76. By no means the least fortunate of the beneficiaries is Great Britain herself. Contrast her present position as a government and a society with what it was when Liberty Bell announced the dismemberment of her empire. Her rank among the nations has notably improved. The population of England, Scotland and Wales was then estimated below eight and a half millions—a numerical approximation, by the way, to the three millions of the colonies not sufficiently considered when we measure the stoutness of her struggle against them with France and Holland combined. Of the continental powers, the French numbered perhaps twenty-two millions, Spain twelve, the Low Countries six, Germany thirty, Prussia seven, and so on. From the ratio of one to nearly three, as compared with France, she has, if we include pacified and assimilated Ireland—an element now of strength instead of weakness—advanced to an equality. She has equally gained on the others, except Prussia, with its aggregation of new provinces. She may, furthermore, in the event of an internecine conflict with a combination, count upon the unwillingness of America to see her annihilated; not the least just of Tallyrand's observations expressing his conviction that, though the two great Anglo-Saxon powers might quarrel with each other, they would not push such a dispute for the benefit of a third party. But, dismissing the question of mere brute strength, Britain's sentiment of pride is conciliated by the spectacle of an advance in the numbers speaking her tongue from eleven or twelve to eighty millions within the century, and that in considerable part at the expense of other languages; millions of foreign immigrants, parents or children, having abandoned their vernacular in favor of hers.

Let us now essay a light sketch of the stream at whose source we have glanced. Light and superficial it must be, for to attempt more were to confront the vast and many-sided theme of modern civilization. The nineteenth century, the child of history, has the stature of its progenitor. It would fill more libraries. Conditions, forces, results,—all have been multiplied. But a few centuries ago the world, as known and studied, was a corner of the Levant, with its slender and simple apparatus of life, social, political and industrial. Later, its boundaries were extended over the remaining shores of the same landlocked sea. Again a step, but not an expansion, and it looked helplessly west upon the Atlantic: its ancient domain of the East almost forgotten. Then that long gaze was gratified, and Cathay was seen. With that came actual expansion, which continued in both directions of the globe's circuit until now. At length the world of thought, of inquiry and of common interest is becoming coincident with the sphere.

In the direction of international politics progress during the century has not kept pace with the advance in other walks. We are accustomed to speak of Europe as forming a republic of nations, but that cannot be said with much more truth than it could have been in the middle of the sixteenth century. A sense of the value to the peace of the continent of a balance of power was then recognized; and the object was attained in some measure as soon as the career of Charles V., which had inculcated the lesson, admitted at his abdication of an application of it. Treaties were then framed, as they have been constantly since, for this purpose, and the observation of them was perhaps as faithful. The passions of nations, like those of men, furnish reason with its slowest and latest conquests. The great wars of the French Revolution, and the short and sharp ones which have, after an indispensable breathing-spell, recently followed it, were as causeless and as defiant of the compacts designed to prevent them as those of the Reformation period or of the Thirty Years. They were so many confessions that an efficient international code is one of the inventions for which we must look to the future. It is something, meanwhile, that, with the extinction of feudalism and the concretion of the detached provinces with which it had macadamized Christendom, the ceaseless fusillade of little wars, which played like a lambent flame of mephitic gas over the surface of each country, has come to an end. The petty sovereignties which made up Germany, France and Italy have been within a few generations absorbed into three masses—so many police districts which have proved tolerably effective in keeping the peace within the large territories they cover. The nations, thus massing themselves for exterior defence, and maintaining a healthy system of graduated and distributed powers, original or conferred, for the support of domestic order and activity, have cultivated successfully the field of home politics.

In that the change for the better is certainly vast. It is difficult for Americans, whose acquaintance with European history is usually derived from compends, to realize what an incubus of complicated and conflicting privileges, restrictions and forms has, within the century, been lifted from the energies of the Old World. The sweeping reforms in French law are but a small part of what has been done. All the neighbors of France, from Derry to the Dardanelles, have shared in the blessing. We may be assisted to an idea of it by turning to the experience of our own country, whose condition in this regard was so exceptionally good at the beginning of the period in point. The constitutions of our States have been repeatedly altered, and they are now very different in their details from the old colonial charters, liberal and elastic as these for the most part were. Yet American innovations are but child's play to those of Europe, which has not reached the position we held at the beginning, and has a great deal still to do. In France the people are not trained to local self-government, but they have an excellent police, and the rights of person and property are well protected. In Italy, which has only within a few years ceased to be a mere geographical expression, municipal rights and the independence of the commune are on a stronger basis, but the police is bad, though far better than when the Peninsula was divided among half a dozen powers. Both have but commenced arming themselves with the chief safeguard of Germany, popular education. The great fact with them all is, that, despite the drawbacks of external pressure and large standing armies, they are at liberty to pursue the path of domestic reform as far as they have light enough to perceive it or purpose enough to require it.

All this is an immense gain. It reflects itself in the improved social condition of the people—a result, of course, not wholly due to it. Crime, though the newspapers make us familiar with more of it than formerly, has notably diminished. The savage classes of the great capitals, populous as some of the old kingdoms, are controlled like a menagerie by its keepers. A residuum of the untamable will always exist, inaccessible to education or "moral suasion," and amenable only to force. This force seems sufficiently supplied by the baton of the constable, and we may hope that even in volcanic Paris an eruption of barricades will henceforth cease, unless simply as a somewhat flamboyant expression of political sentiment, the gamin throwing up paving-stones and omnibuses as the independent British voter throws up his hat at the hustings. But it will not do to expect too much from any ameliorating cause or chain of causes. Race-characteristics cannot be annihilated. Man is an animal, and the Parisian turbulent. The Commune has done its worst probably, and the Internationale, which threatened at one time to loom up as a modern Vehmgericht, has subsided. Whatever may hereafter come of such slumbering perils, the beneficent forces which so largely repress and reduce them are none the less real.

The marked advance of the masses in physical well-being is a great—some would say the greatest—item in social profit and loss. Food is everywhere better in quality and more regular in supply. The English record of the corn-market for six centuries shows a remarkable alteration in favor of steadiness in price. The uncertainties of the seasons are discounted or neutralized by the average struck by increased variety of products and multiplied sources of supply. Famines become infrequent. That of 1847 in Ireland, bad as it was, would have been worse a hundred years earlier. A given population is more regularly and better fed than one-fifth of its number would at that time have been. A city of four millions would then have been an impossibility. Dress and lodging are better, and relatively cheaper. Hygiene is more understood, imperfect as is its application. Some diseases due to its disregard have disappeared or been localized. As a result, men have gained in weight and size and in length of life.

In the character of their recreations—a thing largely governed by national idiosyncrasy—the masses have advanced. And this we may say without losing sight of the devastations of intemperance since the distillation of grain was introduced, about a century and a half ago. With an enhanced demand upon man's faculties civilization brings an increased use of stimulants. There are many of these unknown to former generations. In noting those which attack the health by storm we are apt to overlook others which proceed more stealthily by sap. Of these are coffee, tea, chocolate, the rich spices and more substantial accessions to the modern table, all stimulating and inviting to excess, but all, as truly, nutritious and apt to take the place of other aliment, thus adapting the measure of their use, as a rule, to the demands of the system. The consumption of opium, the one dissipation of the Chinese till now unadded to the three or four of the Caucasian, is said to be extending. If so, a Counter-blast to it from king or commonwealth will be as ineffectual as against its allied narcotic. Prohibitory laws will be even more unavailing than in the case of ardent spirits. It will run its course—a short one, we trust—and be followed or joined by new drugs contributed by conscienceless trade.

Intemperance—we use the word in its special but most common signification—is debasing. Compensation, so far as it goes, is found in the abandonment by those communities among whom it is most rife of certain gross amusements, such as cock-fighting and the prize-ring. Bull-and bear-baiting, too, so prominent among the deliciæ of England's maiden queen, have died out. Isolated Spain, fenced off by the Pyrenees from the breeze of benevolence wafted from the virtuous and bibulous North, still utilizes the Manchegan or Estremaduran bull as a means of conferring "happy despatch" on her superannuated horses and absorbing the surplus belligerence of her "roughs." She seems, however, disposed to tire of this feast of equine and taurine blood, and the last relic of the arena will before many years follow its cognate brutalities. For obvious reasons, bull-fighting can be the sport, habitually, of but an infinitesimal fraction of the people. They share with the other races of the Continent the simple pleasures of dance and song. These enjoyments, as we go north and are driven within doors from the pure and temperate air by a more unfriendly climate, form an increasingly intimate alliance with strong drink, until in the so-called gardens of Germany Calliope and Gambrinus are inseparable friends. Farther still toward the Pole the voice of the Muse gradually dies away upon the sodden atmosphere; and she, having outlasted her successive Southern associates, wine and beer, in turn gives place to brandy pure and simple—a beverage itself frost-proof and only suited to frost-proof men.