The Nineteenth Century

“ 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 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. ”

“ Every century has had its epoch-making characters,—men and women who dominated and directed the thoughts, purposes, activities, and achievements of their times. The nineteenth century is distinguished above all others by the number and quality of those who came to stand for the inception, advance, and culmination of the world’s great movements and who highly exemplified in their careers the enterprise and genius of their day. ”

“ If the nineteenth century is other and better than the eighteenth, it is, in great measure, to him and to such men as he, that we owe the change. If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley’s footsteps. ”

“ It is one thing to declare that the Nineteenth has been the greatest and most glorious of the centuries; it is another and more arduous task to trace the development of this greatness and the culmination of this career of glory. This it is that we shall endeavor to do in the pages of this work. All of us have lived in the century here described, many of us through a great part of it, some of us, possibly, through the whole of it. It is in the fullest sense our own century, one of which we have a just right to feel proud, and in whose career all of us must take a deep and vital interest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And then those years have comprised the best part of the nineteenth century—a century during which change has been more rapidly at work among all the surroundings of Englishmen than probably during any other century of which social history has to tell. ”

“ We have hitherto dealt solely with the progress of the nineteenth century. Now, standing like Bellamy at the dawn of the twentieth, it may be well to take a long look ahead, and strive to trace some stages of the probable progress of the coming time, looking forward from this summit of the ages and stating what this outlook into the dim and distant future brings to our eyes. ”

“ And from our observations we predict that the Nineteenth Century will close with a halo of journalistic sunshine about his head, and the Twentieth Century open with succeeding new events indicative of his triumphant success. ”

“ Indeed, without permitting existing and pardonable pride to endanger rigid truth, it may be said that along many of the lines of invention and progress which have most intimately affected the life and civilization of the world, the nineteenth century has achieved triumphs and accomplished wonders equal, if not superior, to all other centuries combined. ”

“ Measuring epochs, or eras, by spaces of a hundred years each, that which embraces the nineteenth century stands out in sublime and encouraging contrast with any that has preceded it. As the legatee of all prior centuries, it has enlarged and ennobled its bequest to an extent unparalleled in history; while it has at the same time, through a genius and energy peculiar to itself, created an original endowment for its own enjoyment and for the future richer by far than any heretofore recorded. ”

“ The sixteenth reminds us of audacious youth, still clinging to parental authority; the nineteenth reminds us of cynical and irreverent old age, believing in nothing but the triumphs of science and art, and shaking off the doctrines of the ages as exploded superstitions.
The sixteenth century was marked not only by intensely earnest religious inquiries, but by great civil and social disorders,--showing a transition period of society from the slaveries and discomforts of the feudal ages to the liberty and comforts of highly civilized life. ”

“ For students at every extreme of thought have equally recognized the force of organization, the constancy of race, the permanent varieties existing in the human family, the steady ruling of the laws of descent. If there is any one part of the science of anthropology in which the nineteenth century has reversed the judgment of the eighteenth,—and that equally among men of science, poets, materialists, idealists, anatomists, philologists,—it is just here. To find so intelligent a man reproducing the last century in the midst of the present is a little extraordinary. ”

“ Certainly we are now being forced back to a new consideration of this periodical beat, in history at least, for now that our own era, which came in by the power of the Renaissance and the Reformation and received its final energizing force through the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth, is so manifestly coming to its end, we look backward for precedents for this unexpected debacle and lo, they appear every five hundred years back as far as history records. ”

“ Alfred Russell Wallace, in a recent work, argues that the nineteenth century is altogether unique in that it inaugurated a new era. To grasp its marvelous achievements, he tells us, it should be compared with a long historical period, rather than with another century, however happily selected. The progress it environs is set down as almost wholly material and intellectual, and the palm for completeness is given to the material. ”

“ As the nineteenth century approached its end a new element in the economic situation, which had been displaying itself in some measure for a considerable number of years, suddenly assumed a striking prominence in the United States, and remarkably transformed the industrial situation. ”

“ How does the nineteenth century compare with its predecessors? In Wallace’s view it is not to be compared, as regards scientific progress and discovery, with any single century, but with all past time. In fact, it far outstrips the entire progress of mankind in the ages preceding 1800. ”

“ The marvelous evolution in the nineteenth century, of which we have mentioned only some of the more notable particulars, the whole story being far too voluminous to deal with here, has had the result of immensely increasing the wealth of the world and the cheapness and rapid distribution of products, and of placing within the ready control of mankind hundreds of articles of art and utility scarcely dreamed of a century ago. ”

“ The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belong to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belong to the black-and-white epoch, when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not infrequently in Revolution. ”

“ The pathetic interest of the drama deepens with every new expression, but at least you can learn from it that your parents in the nineteenth century were not to blame for losing the sense of unity in art. As early as the fourteenth century, signs of unsteadiness appeared, and, before the eighteenth century, unity became only a reminiscence. ”

“ Their action has done much during the present century to improve the condition of the poor; and we may trust that it will do more hereafter. The nineteenth might be called the philanthropic century, if that title did not belong also to the eighteenth. ”

“ To us, who had lost our liberty, our independence, our strength and who possessed so very little in the domain of art, the beginning of the nineteenth century brought nothing but humiliation upon humiliation. Our national existence appeared to be wiped out. We were without power of action or, consequently, of reaction. True, the seventeenth century had borne fruit in such superabundance that two successive centuries have not sufficed to make us realize it fully. ”

“ They cover every field of human effort. They have to do with political development, the relations of capital and labor, invention, science, literature, production, commerce, and a dozen other life interests, all of which will be considered in this work. The greatness of the world’s progress can be most clearly shown by pointing out the state of affairs in the several branches of human effort at the opening and closing of the century and placing them in sharp contrast. ”

“ The beginning of a new century may seem like an artificial division of time, but the self-consciousness with which the nineteenth century closed, the efforts497 at introversive estimates of its place in history and of the work it had accomplished, indicate something more than a conventional barrier to be passed. ”

“ The verdict of posterity on this restless but unquestionably brilliant man of genius must of necessity be a somewhat disappointing one; he aimed at being nothing less than an Admirable Crichton, and such a character in the nineteenth century, when every public man must be more or less talented, more or less brilliant, would be an impossibility even to a genius. ”

“ Thus it came about that the era of Great Britain’s greatest prosperity and supremacy as a world-power was the one of greatest industrial oppression and misery at home, a period marked by rebellious uprisings among the people, to be repressed with cruel and bloody severity. It was a period of industrial transition, in which the government flourished and the people suffered, and in which the seeds of revolt and revolution were widely spread on every hand. ”

“ After its long career of triumph and disaster, glory and shame, the world stands to-day at the end of an old and the beginning of a new century, looking forward with hope and backward with pride, for it has just completed the most wonderful hundred years it has ever known, and has laid a noble foundation for the twentieth century, now at its dawn. ”

“ In such a case it will rest with themselves which status of industry they prefer, the old state of individualism and competition or a new state of collectivism and industrial alliance. Though it is but dimly recognized, the world of industry is in the throes of a revolution, the final result of nineteenth century development, and it must be left for the twentieth century to decide what the outcome of this revolution is to be. ”