1890s

“ Another American economist, Wells, said about 1890, “When the historian of the future writes the history of the nineteenth century he will doubtless assign to the period embraced by the life of the generation terminating in 1885 a place of importance, considered in its relations to the interests of humanity, second to but very few, and perhaps to none, of the many similar epochs in time in any of the centuries that have preceded it.” Is the generation terminated in 1915 willing to admit that it takes a less important place in history than its predecessor? ”

“ At Washington, one saw other swarms as grave gatherings of Dames or Daughters, taking themselves seriously, or brides fluttering fresh pinions; but all these shifting visions, unknown before 1840, touched the true problem slightly and superficially. Behind them, in every city, town, and farmhouse, were myriads of new types--or type-writers--telephone and telegraph-girls, shop-clerks, factory-hands, running into millions of millions, and, as classes, unknown to themselves as to historians. ”

“ The movement of political affairs has kept pace with the discoveries of science, and their fruitful application to the industrial and useful arts and the convenience and refinement of social life. Great wars and consequent revolutions have occurred, involving national changes of peculiar moment. The civil war of our own country, which was at its height when the last volume of the old work appeared, has happily been ended, and a new course of commercial and industrial activity has been commenced. ”

“ It is also the century of national systems of popular education, and at the same time of nation-great armies; the century that has done more than any other to scatter men over the face of the earth, and to concentrate them in cities; the century of a universal suffrage that is based upon a belief in the inherent value of the individual; and the century of the corporation and the labor union, which in the domain of capital and of labor threaten to obliterate the individual. ”

“ The nineteenth century has been called the age of hope; and perhaps only a superstitious belief in the automatic progress of humanity could have carried our fathers and grandfathers through the tremendous difficulties which the rush through the rapids imposed upon them.
Let us spend five minutes in picturing to ourselves the English nation in a condition of stable equilibrium, as it was in the eighteenth century. Before the Industrial Revolution, the country was on the whole prosperous and contented. The masses had no voice in the government, but most of them had a stake in the country. ”

“ I had read a deal about the time following upon the 'Black Century,' and of the marvels wrought by the new source of power, and I had seen that the introduction of abundant heat, light and power had so stimulated industry and production that life had become easy and the means of sustaining it had become abundant, with the result that the population doubled in a little more than a century. ”

“ Enclosures.—The century and a half which extends from the middle years of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth was, as has been shown, a period remarkable for the extent and variety of its changes in almost every aspect of society. In the political, intellectual, and religious world the sixteenth century seemed far removed from the fifteenth. It is not therefore a matter of surprise that economic changes were numerous and fundamental, and that social organization in town and country alike was completely transformed. ”

“ The year of 1890 is going to be more favorable to you than for the last ten years. I think in some way you are to meet with more reciprocity of soul. As the divining rod points to the stream of water in the earth, so I find my intuitive eye takes cognizance of your interior life. ”

“ Whatever the division in men's minds as to the relation between the close of the century and a race's history, and the precise moment at which the old century ends and the new begins, one thing in 1800 was radiantly clear to all men—the glory and the wonder, the endless peace and felicity not less endless, which the opening century and the new age dimly portended or securely promised to humanity. ”

“ Occupying the centre, as it were, of all these events, we are too near them at present to appraise either their magnitude or importance at their legitimate value. Not the man at the base of a lofty tower, but he who stands at some distance from it can take its proportions aright, and we may depend upon it that the reader of the history of our period a hundred years hence will turn to the page that records the events of 1870 as at once the most interesting and important in the annals of many centuries. ”

“ Fields died and the Charles Street door was finally closed, at the beginning of 1915, the world had entered upon its first entire year of a new era. It is an era as sharply separated from that of her intimate contemporaries, the American Victorians, as any new from any old order. The figures of every old order take their places by degrees as “museum pieces,” objects of curious and sometimes condescending study. But let us not be too sure that in parting with the past we have let it keep only that which can best be spared. We would not wish them back, those Victorians of ours. ”

“ It may be that the industrial revolution which began in the reign of George the Third has produced most of its fruits, and has had its day. We may have to look forward to such a change as is imagined by Anatole France at the end of his Isle of the Penguins, when, after an orgy of revolution and destruction, we shall slide back into the quiet rural life of the early modern period. ”

“ The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations. ”

“ With the peace of 1815, however, the era of industrial development commences, and this has been treated with great—though it is believed not too great—fullness of detail; for, beyond all question, the event of the world's history during the nineteenth century is the growth of the United States. ”

“ Could there have been anything more Utopian in 1860 than a picture of what to-day we take as a matter of course, the seven million children emerging every morning washed and brushed from five or six million homes in every part of the kingdom, traversing street and road and lonely woodland, going o'er moor and fell, to present themselves at a given hour at their 30,000 schools, where each of the seven million finds his or her own individual place, with books and blackboard and teacher provided? ”

“ The traces of the Revolution remain in a hundred scars and bruises and mutilations, but the visible marks of the war of 1870 have passed away. The country is so rich, so living, that she has been able to dress her wounds, to hold up her head, to smile again ”

“ Either the rapid growth of cities, the stir and excitement of trade, the strife for fortune and fame, the magical charm of Western life, or something else peculiar to the climate, the country or the people, all of these distinct and opposing types of social life, began soon to lose their “type force” and blend into a conglomerate social mass, with fewer Northern, Eastern and Southern peculiarities than Western—a rather unique social formation, which the modern sociologists have not yet classified. ”

“ In some cases, as in France, the change in institutions was immediate and sweeping; in others, as in Germany and Italy, the transformation was more gradual; but in all, the old state of things was doomed.
The thirty years or so just preceding the Revolution are those that most concern us in this study, though we shall often have occasion to look back to the early eighteenth century — and sometimes to the seventeenth.
To realize the conditions under which men lived in the eighteenth century is not easy. ”

“ The literature of a higher kind was [Pg 42] chiefly limited to New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. From materials so poor no precision of result could be expected. A few customs, more or less local; a few prejudices, more or less popular; a few traits of thought, suggesting habits of mind,—must form the entire material for a study more important than that of politics or economics.
The standard of comfort had much to do with the standard of character; and in the United States, except among the slaves, the laboring class enjoyed an ample supply of the necessaries of life. ”

“ In the centuries between the Great Plague and the Reformation, just as in the nineteenth century, the real significance of our history lies in the advent of a new class to wealth and power, as the result of a great industrial revolution. ”

“ For hackneyed as the period of the Wars of the Roses may seem to the superficial reader, no student has yet adequately studied the secret of the age in which the great revolutions of the next century were being prepared—the age which made possible for England the revival of letters and the reformation, which founded her commercial greatness, which revolutionized her industrial system, which cast away the last bonds of feudalism and laid the foundations of the modern State. ”

“ Side by side with the wave of political revolution, strongest for France and America, came the industrial revolution; and the opening of the nineteenth century brought with it the myriad changes we are now to face. ”

“ By the time this week's issue of the Weekly Leader appears the year 1895 will have passed away and 1896 will have been ushered in. It will do us no harm, especially the rural workers, to look at the condition of labour and ascertain, if possible, its true condition. ”

“ The Most Critical Period in the History of Our Country Perhaps few will believe what is unquestionably the fact, that the most critical period in the history of our country was not in the Revolution, nor yet in the civil war, but in the autumn of 1876, or more properly, the opening weeks of 1877. ”

“ The nineteenth century—in the life of the wage-earning multitudes—was a century of disturbance. The twentieth promises to be a century of consolidation. What completed product will emerge from its city aggregation, the children of the crowd? ”

“ The European reaction after 1848, and the success of an unprincipled usurper in December, 1851, put an end, as it seemed, to all present hope of freedom or social improvement in France and the Continent. In England, I had seen and continued to see many of the opinions of my youth obtain general recognition, and many of the reforms in institutions, for which I had through life contended, either effected or in course of being so. ”

“ We must have courage to understand that we are entering into a new world and banish the selfish chill we may feel upon the threshold of the unknown. Europe of 1920, whether we will it or not, will not be at all like that of 1910. ”

“ Upon the map of our young fancy the great mills were sketched in lightly; we looked up from the restaurant ice-cream to see the hands pour out for dinner, a dark and restless, but a patient, throng, used in those days, to standing eleven hours and quarter—women and girls—at their looms, six days of the week, and making no audible complaints; for socialism had not reached Lawrence, and anarchy was content to bray in distant parts of the geography at which the factory people had not arrived when they left school.... ”

“ In truth, our people needed rest: we were in the first stages of an industrial revolution: our cotton and woollen industries were passing from the cottage to the factory; and a large part of our folk were beginning to cluster in grimy, ill-organized townships. ”

“ England devoted thirty years of arduous labor to clearing away only a part of the débris. A young American in 1863 could see little or nothing of the future. He might dream, but he could not foretell, the suddenness with which the old Europe, with England in its wake, was to vanish in 1870. ”

“ In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the old roads ran about in every direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side-paths that led nowhere, and sequences that could not be proved. ”

“ One does not require to be very old to remember the great social transition that took place between, say, 1887 and 1902, when the first-fruits of the Education Act of 1870, together with the results of Colonial enterprise had combined to create a new class of social climber, which altogether upset previously existing conditions and, indeed, finally ended by flooding them out. ”

“ The poor financial administration of the government seemed deranging everything; and again a social movement was instituted in New England to promote "Oeconomy and Household Industries." "The Rich and Great strive by example to convince the Populace of their error by Growing their own Flax and Wool, having some one in the Family to dress it, and all the Females spin, several weave and bleach the linen." The old spinning-matches were revived. ”

“ Yet that decade was the cradle of a new epoch, in which inventions first came into view, or were brought to practical completion, which have had a deeper and more permanent influence than any political event could have upon the shaping of human society. ”

“ Now, Sir, a transition from darkness to light has taken place - and it ought to be hailed, notwithstanding all the inconveniences which accompany such transactions - and it is rather a serious question for us to consider whether the English nation and Government from 1860 to 1880, or whether the influences which acted during the years 1883-4 and 1885, and which are to some extent acting now, lead us in the right or wrong direction. ”