Feudalism and slavery abolished

How much has been accomplished toward popular political institutions within the century is indicated by the fact that the French Parliament, the German Reichstag, the Austro-Hungarian Reichsrath, the Italian Parliament, and the Spanish Cortes all came into being between 1800 and 1870. These movements toward political freedom on the Continent were accompanied by a similar movement in England, which during the nineteenth century has passed from a constitutional monarchy really controlled by a landed aristocracy, and still feudal in spirit, to a democracy, still monarchical in form, still subject to the checks imposed by the aristocratic conservatism, but in spirit as essentially democraticthat is, ruled by the people—as is either France or the United States. The pocket boroughs have disappeared, the franchise has been extended, the religious disabilities have been removed. Practically all the reforms demanded by the Chartists have been secured, and the suffrage is so nearly universal that all classes have their representation directly in Parliament or indirectly through the influence of public opinion upon Parliament. A somewhat similar extension of political influence has taken place in the United States, in all sections of which the property and religious qualifications which were common at the beginning of the century have practically disappeared. In this great Anglo-Saxon movement away from class representation to popular representation, William E. Gladstone has been the most distinguished single leader. His genius was exhibited in his ability to conduct the English people from a political order based on class to a political order based on all the people, without disturbance or revolution. With these develop ments of political liberty has gone a development in industrial liberty even more striking. Without a revolution, slavery has been abolished in Great Britain and in all her colonies. At the cost of a war of gigantic proportions, slavery has been abolished in the United States. Contemporaneously with these develop ments of political and industrial liberty has gone a development of Religious liberty religious liberty. The doctrine The doctrine that the Church has authority to determine what is religious truth, and

that to contradict the Church is a crime which the State may punish, perished with the overthrow of the Inquisition in 1808 under the Napoleonic régime, and with the subsequent overthrow of the temporal power of the Pope in Italy. Writers who think it necessary to defend the traditions of the past, like Mallock or Cardinal Newman, occasionally come to an academic defense of the right of the State to punish heresy as a crime; but it may be safely assumed that the political right of every man to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, or not to worship him at all if he does not so choose, will never again be denied on any large scale or to any great extent west of the western boundary of Turkey and Russia.

Somewhat less marked in its final outcome, though not less striking in its processes, has been the development of nationalism. The unification of Germany, of

Development of nationalism

Italy, and of Austria-Hungary has been accomplished during the present century. In our own country the Civil War was fought even more to preserve the Nation from being broken up into jealous and conflicting political States than for the freedom of the slave, which incidentally resulted from the triumph of nationalism. Radically unlike in temperament and character are the three great leaders in three great contemporaneous movements toward national unity: Bismarck in Germany, Cavour in Italy, Abraham Lincoln in the United States. Grouping these events together, we may safely deduce from them, as one of the results of the century, that communities occupying contiguous territory and possessing the same racial and linguistic peculiarities belong, under the divine order, in one political organism. If the people of the Balkan States could realize this simple truth, and make common cause in a federal union against common enemies, there is little reason why they should not be independent of the nominal suzerainty of Turkey on the one hand, and the direct intervention in their affairs of Russia on the other. The changed relation of America to European Powers involved in the rapidly moving events of the past few years is too recent to be taken account of here. These events rather present a problem for the solution of the future

than indicate any accomplished solution of pre-existing problems.

of industry

SOCIOLOGY

So far as external conditions are concerned, the great social changes of this century are due to the concentration of industry in great factories, and the consequent concentration of peoConcentration ple in great cities. The development of the factory system in place of the home industries, or petty shops with one or two workmen, which preceded it, has caused the building up of an industrial hierarchy with a division of labor as minute and a concentration of authority as absolute as in any of the political or ecclesiastical hierarchies of other ages. The result of this industrial system has inevitably been the economic separation of classes, and a concentration of industrial wealth utterly unknown a century ago. While, however, the rich have grown immeasurably richer, the poor, as a rule, have grown less poor. Money wages are more than double what they were at the beginning of the century, and prices, with the exception of rent and meat, are generally lower. Furthermore, what workingmen have lost Improvement in the way of individual independence or individual influence with their employers, that came from working in small shops, has been made up by the collective independence and power that have come through the formation of unions. Moreover, the intellectual loss or division of intelligencethat is said to have come from the division of labor and the employment of a man's whole working time upon a single mechanical operation, has been in some degree offset by the shortening of the working day, and more than offset by the development of popular education through the great religious awakening of the beginning of the century, and the widening influence of the schools, the press, and the political responsibilities which came to the working classes later. The development of cities,

of workingmen

the manufacturing cities became double what it was in the rural districts, the children dying in swarms from constantly repeated epidemics, and the adults losing not only in vigor but in stamina. These evils, which came partly from long hours in close factories-even for children of five and six-and partly from overcrowding in unwholesome tenements, have been largely overcome by better sanitation and cleanlier living, so that to-day the cities are nearly as healthy as the rural districts

though many problems that have come from the crowding of the people in industrial centers are still unsolved. Apart from these outward social changes, however, and more important, has been the almost continuous growth of a sentiment of social unity, which has Liberty, fratermanifested itself so conspicnity, equality uously in the political and educational world, and is to-day beating so strongly against the development of absolutism in the world of industry. As a result of this social sentiment the century has seen the overthrow of feudal tenures in the west of Europe, the overthrow of serfdom in Russia, and the overthrow of slavery in America. There have, indeed, been several marked periods of reaction, but, taken as a whole, the nineteenth century has been almost as marked as the era of the Reformation for the broadening sense of the essential equality in political and industrial rights of all the children of men.

The

LITERATURE

The most obvious characteristics of the literature of the nineteenth century are its range of subjects and its variety of method and manner. It is at the farthest remove from the classical Revolutionary standards, traditions, and epoch forms; in its free play of individuality it has expressed that expansion of human thought which has left its fullest record in science, and that expansion of human activity which is expressed politically in democratic institutions. Science and democracy are perhaps the two words which, to the future, will embody most fully the spirit, thought, and productivity of the century; and these two fundamental movements have found varied and splendid expressions in its literature. The deep stirring of the world by the

French Revolution set in motion waves of feeling which did not subside until many years after the opening of the century, and the agitation of which is to be found in one of its most influential literary movements-that of Romanticism. The chief figure of this movement in France was Victor Hugo, its master spirit, reinforced by an informal and irregular fellowship which included George Sand, Gautier, and Béranger. In England the chief voice of this revolt was Byron, whose lyrical gift was perhaps greater than that of any English poet since the Elizabethan age, and whose work as an artist was limited only by his character and his insight. He was the leader of an insurrection, the dashing and brilliant figure on the barricade, not the organizer of a new movement; a master of melody and of descriptive verse, who has left his permanent impress on English poetry, and is best known of all modern English poets in Europe. Wordsworth, succeeding to the tradition of Thomson, Cowper, and Burns, interpreted Nature from the spiritual side with marvelous insight and noble passion of the imagination, and remains one of the greatest figures and one of the permanent forces of the century. Shelley. a far finer spirit than Byron, was penetrated and inspired by the Revolution; Coleridge, poet, thinker, and critic of the highest order though of discursive mind, has been a searching influence in theology and criticism. Keats's rich imagination and deep feeling for beauty imparted a spell to his verse which Tennyson and the later poets have not escaped.

The first slender volume which came from the hand of Tennyson alone was issued in 1832, but it was fifteen years later before his reputation had passed

The

beyond the circle of a small group Victorian of devoted friends, and had bepoetry come one of the great traditions of English literature. "In Memoriam," which appeared in 1850, at the very moment when the early scientific movement was at its most aggressive stage, and when England seemed wholly devoted to material pursuits, gave expression to that life of the spirit which has been the inspiration of English character and the source of English moral strength since the beginning of the race. His balance, sanity, deep artistic feeling, thorough technical

training, and power of divining and reflecting the thought of his time, made Tennyson the representative English poet of the latter half of the century; while the Brownings, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, Rossetti, and Swinburne express different phases of English thought or different aspects of modern passion and faith. In England the novel reached its fullest development in the hands of Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy; while criticism of life in history, biography, and essay has been enriched by the work of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold.

By inevitable reaction the romantic movement in France was followed by the realistic movement, which is generally traced to the brothers Goncourt and Realism

Flaubert, and which found its.

master spirit in Zola-a man of indomitable energy, of great talent, and of unquestioned sincerity, but lacking the power of selection, deficient in taste and in reserve; a collector and organizer of facts rather than a great artist, whose ascendency promised for a time to be permanent, but whose star is now fast sinking.

Realism, pushed to its extremes, became Naturalism, and Naturalism inevitably brought forth the decadent school, which has produced some men of notable talent, like Guy de Maupassant, but it was doomed to sterility and decay by its absorption in the secondary or morbid phases of life.

Balzac, the greatest of all the French novelists, cannot be claimed by any school. His work, in its magnitude and significance, stands by itself.

The century has seen the rise of a great national literature in Russia, which has given the world a poet of high order in Poushkin, and four novelists of genius in Dostoyevski, Gogol, Turgenieff, Northern and Tolstoi-all in profoundest Europe sympathy with their race, and interpreting its spiritual quality, its passion, its mysticism, and the pressure of absolutism on its rich impulses with marvelous power. No country has ever had in fiction more complete disclosure of what lies in its heart than Russia. Turgenieff used to say that all the later novelists were shaken out of Gogol's sleeve; it is quite certain that his little story "The Inspector" exerted a liberating influence on later Russian literature, as Turgenieff's

"Annals of a Sportsman " exerted on later Russian social order. The century has seen in northern Europe a rebirth of literature which curiously reproduces some of the characteristic qualities of the ancient eddas, sagas, and popular tales. The most picturesque of these new figures is Björn son-a typical Norwegian, who has interpreted with simplicity and sincerity some aspects of contemporary life in Norway. Ibsen is the foremost in point of contemporary interest of all the Northern writers; a dramatist of great force and of satiric spirit, who has applied to the society of his time searching and remorseless analysis, and whose underlying doctrine, if it were carried to its logical conclusion, would disintegrate society.

Germany and Southern Europe

Until 1832 Germany possessed in Goethe the foremost man of letters of the century an artist of immense fruitfulness, of extraordinary range of interests, and of a breadth of culture which is not likely to be repeated in any of his successors; with lyrical power of the highest order, wide and tolerant insight, and the breadth of view which goes to the making of a poet of the first rank; the author of the most significant poem of the century; whose defects are to be found in the vagueness of his moral insight and the consequent inability to secure the highest dramatic effectiveness by identifying the doer with the deed. Second to Goethe stands Heine, whose writings Matthew Arnold places first among the modern streams of influence in Germany. There are respectable but no great names between Heine's time and the recent movement which has brought to the front Sudermann and Hauptmann, two dramatists of deeply interesting talent who have done work notable alike for deep human feeling and for freshness of imagination. In Spain literature has revived in the field of fiction, which has been worked by a group of writers of power and freshness, foremost among them being Galdós, Valdés, and Pereda. In Belgium Maeterlinck stands out conspicuous-a mystic who uses the drama with subtle skill. but who has left in "The Treasure of the Humble" and in "Wisdom and Destiny" the deepest impress of his genius.

American literature began with the publication of Irving's "Knickerbocker's

American literature

History of New York." Before that day there were writers in America, but, with three exceptions-Franklin, Edwards, and Woolman-they cannot be ranked as masters of style. In American poetry the name of Poe stands first-an artist whose command of the lyrical note was more subtle and sure than that of any other American singer; who was not a representative poet, and whose work does not interpret the fundamental ideas of life which rise in such clearness in the work of Homer, Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Tennyson. In American prose Hawthorne holds the first place; with these two in the highest circle belongs Emerson, a poet of high rank by virtue of half a dozen poems, an interpreter of American idealism, and a “friend of the spirit" by virtue of the entire body of his work. Irving, Bryant, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Longfellow, Thoreau, Whitman, and Lanier are names which must be reckoned with in any report of American literature.

The historians of literary quality include a long and distinguished line of writers from Bancroft to Fiske. The tradition of the essay has been well sustained from the days of Emerson and Lowell to those of Mr. Woodberry. Fiction, striking its first great note in "The Scarlet Letter," produced a work full of crudeness and full also of power in Uncle Tom's Cabin," and has now become the most fruitful field for American writers. The significant fact in American literature to-day is the widening of the literary interest from the Eastern coast to include the whole country, and the expression of the life of the country in a multitude of local types at the hands of a group of story-writers. of sincerity, insight, and power.

ART

In the development of architecture during the nineteenth century, perhaps the two most noteworthy men were a Frenchman and an American, Viollet-le-Duc Architecture

and Richardson. They were adapters rather than originators. Viollet-le-Duc's own buildings have no marked reputation, but his work as a cathedral-restorer is regarded as more authoritative than that of any of his contemporaries, and his books on construction have become classics. In America, Rich