OF POLITICAL GROWTH IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY EDMUND HAMILTON SEARS, A.M. PRINCIPAL OF MARY INSTITUTE, SAINT LOUIS New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1900 All rights reserved COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A. PREFACE THE nineteenth century has had a peculiarly interesting history. Its achievements have been so rich and varied as to bewilder the mind that tries to apprehend them each and all with clearness and accuracy. In art there has been a return to nature, with many gratifying and some subtle and questionable results. The same tendency has manifested itself in poetry, and is to be traced through such widely differing authors as Wordsworth, Leconte de Lisle, and Pushkin. Both romanticists and realists have made brilliant contributions to fiction, and the decadents have at least called forth a storm of criticism. History has seen the development of the trained specialist and original investigator. Science has fathomed some of nature's deepest secrets and revolutionized industry. And in the domain of politics the people have put forth their strength and obtained constitutions. These are merely a few of the notable movements of the century. All of those that are here enumerated have accomplished vast results, and which of them is the more important and significant cannot be said. Science has effected stupendous changes; but so too have the revolutions in politics been far-reaching and momentous. It is largely through those revolutions that the human mind has been emancipated, deadening tyranny abolished, and science allowed to work its beneficent reforms. It would therefore appear that the political progress of the century has been of a vital and fundamental character, and that the successive triumphs of popular institutions cannot but form a profoundly interesting story. 200401 |