THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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seen the close of the century we can distinctly trace the ebb and flow of the great idea—liberty—and see that it has limitations and a law of control.
The first political wave appeared in the French revolution in 1792, when the Bourbon dynasty, representing the tyranny of the feudal system, was overthrown. The tide rose to a destructive height in the Reign of Terror. License was found to be a greater tyrant than an absolute monarch. Popular feeling, especially in Bmgland, revolted from the new movement. This high tide was followed by an ebb in the emperorship of Napoleon I., and the new movement seemed utterly defeated and conservatism to be again in the ascendency after the battle of Waterloo. It was during this period of reaction when the old dogmatism was again dominant, and the new ideas were fermenting in secret, that George Eliot was born and attained maturity. The new movement broke forth again in the PTench revolution of 1848. With minor tides of success and defeat, political freedom has since steadily advanced in France, and by reflex action in England also.
The American Revolution of 1776 had shaken England out of some of her old ideas, when by the constitutional monarchy, inaugurated by William III. she had already placed herself one step in advance of other European countries. For this reason and because of the natural conservatism of English people, the danger of bloody political revolutions was not great in England, but her peaceful reforms indicated the growth of the liberating impulse. The labor trouble and plots that were brewing under the arbitrary policy of Castlereagh were counteracted by the liberal policy of Canning. In 1829, England emancipated the Catholics. In 1832 she passed the Reform Bill which gave the large towns representatives in Parliament, and two years later restored to them their right of self-government. This was the most important step in her political reform. In 1833 she abolished slavery, and struck a blow at monopolies in commerce by opening the East-India trade to all merchants. In 1846 the protective corn laws were repealed and the principles of free-trade established. In 1867 the new reform bill and national education made the last steps to political freedom. All these changes were permeated by that spirit of democracy and charity toward one’s fellowmen, that is the best element of the nineteenth-century movement.
Lecky says: “ Men like Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, have probably done more than any others to set the current of their age. They have formed a certain cast and tone of mind. They have introduced peculiar habits of thought, new modes of reasoning, new tendencies of inquiry. The impulse they have given to higher literature has been by that literature communicated to the more popular writers, and the impress of these master minds is clearly visible in the writings of multitudes who are totally unacquainted with their works.”
The minds of men at any one era might be represented by a placid lake, into which the theory of some great thinker, thrown like a pebble, creates ripples, at first small, but gradually widening to the farthest shore. If several pebbles were thrown about the same time, the result would be more or less confusion of ripples upon the water. This was somewhat the condition of thought in the middle of the century.
This religion of humanity is the keynote to the most liberal thought of the century. The ideas expressed by Comte have been, in one form or another, either partially or wholly believed by almost every prominent man during the last fifty years, and published in every popular magazine. Even the conservative element—the mystics, as Hegel would call them—who still held to their belief in a Supreme Power outside humanity, dwelt more often than formerly on Christ’s second commandment and preached more frequently from the text of “The Good Samaritan.”
The bitter contest between science and religion has now settled down into an amiable compromise in which religion has adopted science; but we are principally interested in the Sturm und Drang period when this conflict was one of the straws of the popular current. The great age of the earth, as told by geology, was an agitating missile thrown by science, but probably the largest pebble from that source was Darwin’s theory of evolution. This may be considered both as a result and a cause. It