CHAPTER I 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



Examine the past, take from it all that is beautiful, and on it create 

 the future. President KRUGER.- 



THE eighteenth century is to many people not an 

 attractive epoch in history. It has been called matter- 

 of-fact, in spite of its sensibilities : there was little 

 romance : " poetry and wonder lay fast asleep on Ida's 

 shady brow." The stirring events of the preceding age 

 in England were followed by a reaction, the high tide 

 of revolution by a backwater, which lasted through 

 several generations. British liberty was content to 

 abide the illiberal rule of the earlier Hanoverian kings, 

 and material aims were frankly dominant : the vice and 

 gluttony of the richer circles seem to justify Carlyle's 

 caustic comment : " Soul extinct ; stomach well alive." 

 But under this show of things the nation itself was still 

 growing : vast territories were brought under British 

 rule in the course of this century : inventions were many, 

 and industries grew and multiplied : wealth increased, 

 and became more diffused ; and this led to the rise of 

 the middle class of society. The influence of Bacon and 

 Newton was bearing fruit in a keen appetite for know- 

 ledge ; many modern sciences owe their birth to this 

 period. Education began to be spread slowly, the 

 newspaper came into vogue, and thought was emanci- 

 pated by degrees from the shackles of tradition. The 

 way of democracy was being made ready ; its birth was 

 heralded in France by terrific convulsions, but in our 

 own country the long struggle against the absolutism of 



