THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

The Century ends! The Century begins! That is the cry in the high Courts of Time which matches the weaker cry in lesser courts, "The King is dead! Long live the King!" As in the latter, so in the former: There is no interregnum. Life touches life, and death can make not even an infinitesimal interval between. The sixtieth second of the sixtieth minute of the twenty-fourth hour of the thirty-first day of the twelfth month of the nineteen hundredth year was still in the nineteenth century. The first second of the first minute of the first hour of the first day of the first month of the nineteen hundred and first year is already in the twentieth century. The step is instantaneous from the completed to the promised, from the ended to the begun, from the known to the unknown. From before the latter we cannot raise the veil, save as thread by thread it is withdrawn by the too slow and yet too rapid hand of Time. Upon the former, as a finished and irrevocable whole, the contemplative eye may rest and the discriminating judgment dwell.

It is a common practice to compare day with preceding day and year with preceding year. Thus also, in reviewing former ages, we may compare century with century. Not so this latest cycle. One knows not whether the praise or the blame of laudator temporis acti will be incurred in declaring that no other century of recorded time is on the whole worthy to be compared with this, the only century which living men of to-day have ever known. It matters not. We shall commend ourselves to thoughtful judgment if we hold in ample confidence that the nineteenth century is to be compared, and not to its own disadvantage, not with any one but with all the other centuries united which have elapsed since the beginning of the Christian era. One century against eighteen, and in the last analysis of trial the one will not be found wanting.

In those tumultuous annals, in whose absence from the history books, according to the Sage of Chelsea, resides the happiness of peoples, but in whose presence chronicles possess much of their interest and their illumination, the century has not been lacking. It came into being with the Napoleonic wars, with Austerlitz and Jena, with Trafalgar and Waterloo. It saw our war with the Barbary States, and then our second war with Great Britain. There followed wars for independence in Central and South America and in Greece; wars of conquest in India, in Persia and in the Ottoman Empire; the conquest of Algeria, the Belgian revolution, the final crushing of Poland, the Carlist wars and our own numerous Indian wars, invasion of Afghanistan and aggressions upon China. Then came on in one tremendous cataclysm our Mexican war, the Sikh war, the Hungarian revolution, and a mad swirl of revolutionary and reactionary wars in almost every European land. These furies began to subside only to make room for the colossal Taiping rebellion, the Crimean War, the Sepoy Mutiny and

the Italian War of Liberation, with lesser wars in China and Syria and Persia. Then, while the world was still ringing with echoes of Balaklava and Lucknow and Magenta and Marsala, our gigantic Civil War marked a new epoch, at once in war and in peace. For even so vast a spectacle, however, the world did not stand still. There were at the same time, and following closely after, wars in Mexico, in Italy, in Cochin China, in Schleswig-Holstein, and finally the six weeks war between Prussia and Austria, which introduced new war lords to the startled world. There was an interlude of petty wars in Asia and South America, and a revolution in Spain, and then came on the FrancoGerman war, with Metz, Sedan and the fall of Paris. Carlist war, Cuban war, Ashantee war, Atcheen war and war in the Balkans swiftly succeeded, the last named culminating in the great struggle betweeen Turkey and Russia. There followed the first Transvaal war, another Afghan war, the Zulu war, the war between Chili and Peru, the French conquest of Tunis, the Russian conquest of Turkestan, the revolt of Arabi in Egypt, the Mahdist revolt in the Soudan and the heroism and martyrdom of Gordon. These were succeeded by the French war in Tonquin, the British conquest of Burmah, the Servo-Bulgarian war, the French conquest of Siam, the revolution in Brazil, the great war between China and Japan, the Italian war in Abyssinia, and lesser conflicts in South Africa, the Philippines, Madagascar, Crete and Ashantee. Nor was the century to close in peace, for in its latest years came the Greco-Turkish war, the Cuban rebellion, our war with Spain, the war for the redemption of the Soudan, the second Transvaal war and the Boxer outbreak and the armed intervention of the Powers in China. These, with a score or more of minor wars make up a record of belligerency surpassed by that of few other centuries.

The political changes wrought during the nineteenth century surpass those of any other since the fall of Rome. When the century began Republicanism stood at bay in our thirteen States, constitutional monarchy was in a state of siege in Great Britain, and all the rest of the world, with fragmentary exceptions, was given up to absolutism. Today practically all the Western Hemisphere-scarcely excepting Canada -is triumphantly republican, together with one of the chief Powers of Europe; and all the rest of Europe, save Turkey and Russia, is more constitutional and liberal than England was when the century began. Japan is a liberal, constitutional realm, and great free governments have been established in South Africa and in the islands of the sea. The United States has expanded, persistently, consistently and logically, under its constitutional provisions, from a chain of thirteen States on the eastward Appalachian slope to a continental domain of forty-five States, with outlying possessions in both hemispheres. The Spanish provinces of Central and South America, passing through phases of dictatorship in Paraguay and empire in Brazil and Mexico, have become independent republics. A few wrangling provinces and an unknown wilderness have grown into the splendid Dominion of Canada. In Europe Poland has disappeared, Turkey has been reduced to a

remnant, Russia has aggrandized herself, Belgium has been created, Italy has had a new birth, and that "Holy Roman Empire" which was neither holy nor Roman, nor yet an empire, has vanished to give place to the new German Empire. Greece has arisen in new life, and upon the wrecks of Turkdom the great kingdom of Rumania and the lesser realms of Servia and Bulgaria have been securely founded. Japan has been opened to the world and has taken place among the great civilized Powers. China is opening her doors to all the world. Indo-China has been seized by France and all of India by Great Britain. Practically the whole of the African continent has been partitioned among the Powers, and great civilized States are there being developed. Upon the islands of the sea the flags of Holland, Germany, Great Britain and the United States have been planted, and civilized States are growing there, led by the fine commonwealth of Australia. Bonapartism was succeeded by the Holy Alliance, which in turn was checked by the Monroe Doctrine. Revolution and reaction alternated in the midcentury, the former finally winning and leading, through many tribulations, to the ordered popular sovereignty which is to-day prevailing more and more in all truly enlightened lands.

The nineteenth century has seen no one feat of adventure quite equal in importance to the discovery of America. It has, however, seen more blank space on the world's map filled up than any other in all our annals. It has seen the American continents fully surveyed, the islands of the sea discovered and colonized, the recesses of Asia penetrated, the Dark Continent of Africa illuminated, the mystery of untold ages-the sources of the Nile-solved and discovered, the Northwest and Northeast passages explored, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions invaded to an extent that before would have been deemed impossible. Even the stellar realms have yielded to nineteenth century enterprise, revealing planets and stars almost innumerable which were unknown before.

If from adventure and exploration we turn to invention and engineering achievements, we see at a glance the pre-eminence of the nineteenth century over all others. The steam engine was known before, but the railroad, the steamship, the screw propeller and the vast bulk of useful applications of steam power are dated since 1801. Something was known of electricity in Franklin's time, but the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, the electric motor, electric heating, the X rays, the use of electricity in medicine and surgery, and indeed practically all the useful applications of the mysterious force belong to the nineteenth century. Light had long been studied by men of science, but to the last hundred years were reserved the inventions of spectrum analysis, measurement of the velocity of light, photography, the kinetoscope and all the invaluable processes of photo-engraving and that inestimable boon the ophthalmoscope. Nothing has been known longer than air, but not until the closing years of the nineteenth century was that fluid liquefied and its constituent argon discovered. Since long before the time of Icarus men had dreamed of flying through the

air, but the practical development of the balloon waited until within these hundred years.

The printing press dates away back to the fifteenth century. But the genius of the nineteenth has so transformed and glorified it as to make it wellnigh a new thing, while the adjuncts of stereotyping and the linotype have made the "art preservative of arts" seem more like magic than any of the dreams of Dr. Faustus. Gunpowder was in use centuries ago, and was used in firearms, but within a hundred years the invention of smokeless powder and other high explosives, the rifle, the breechloader, the revolver and the magazine and machine guns have surpassed the primitive matchlock further than it did the crossbow. Between the ships of Nelson and those of Drake the difference was only of degree, but the steel navies of the end of the nineteenth century mark a radical departure in kind. In the nineteenth century the oceans ceased to be barriers and were changed into highways, connecting instead of separating nations. Continents were spanned by railroads, isthmuses were cut by canals, mountain ranges were pierced with tunnels. When the century began men still depended upon flint and steel, candles, torches and some costly oils for light. These hundred years have witnessed the incoming of lucifer matches, kerosene oil, illuminating gas and the electric light. To these things we may add without exhausting the list of nineteenth century wonders the phonograph, the cotton gin, the power loom, the reaping machine, the sewing machine, the elevator, the electrotype, the lithograph, the bicycle, the automobile carriage and the whole manufactory system which has so revolutionized the industrial world. The great world's fairs are a product of the nineteenth century, and the discriminating observer will have witnessed that the vast bulk of the objects displayed in them have been characteristic fruits of the same period of time.

The science of chemistry was founded on its present basis in the eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth it has had nearly all its development, including analytical and synthetical chemistry and the chemical laws of definite proportions. In medicine and surgery the century's work has been so great as quite to overshadow all previous time. The advance in chemistry has wondrously amplified the materia medica and increased its effectiveness beyond all reckoning. The invention of anæsthetics has not only largely banished pain, but has made possible and easy innumerable surgical processes that were simply impossible without them. Antiseptic surgery has enormously decreased the mortality in hospitals, and the mention of this latter suggests another still greater triumph, of which indeed antisepsis was a mere outgrowth. This was the establishment of the germ theory of disease by the immortal Pasteur. From that sprang on the one hand a refutation of the old delusion of spontaneous generation, and on the other the whole beneficent science of bacteriology, with its departments of antisepsis, disinfection, filtration, quarantine, therapeutic and prophylactic inoculation, our knowledge of the leucocytes and their func

tions, and the auspicious promise, now hastening toward fulfilment, that one day all germ diseases-which comprise the worst scourges of the race-will be banished from the world.

A few other salient items from the record will serve as landmarks of scientific progress in the hundred years just behind us. The conservation of energy, the molecular theory of gases, the uses of dust, the theory of meteors, the glacial theory, the theory of evolution, the theory of cells and embryology-these are among the intellectual fruits of the nineteenth century.

The progress of the world in literature, art, music and the drama in the last hundred years is simply not to be measured. The century began with the opening of such an era of literary activity as the world had probably never seen before. With comparatively few exceptions the glories of European literature and practically all of American literature and art belong to the nineteenth century. A mere rollcall of names will amply indicate in this brief space the character of such achievements. Kant and Schiller, Klopstock and Alfieri, were just passing off the stage when the century began. Hegel was doing his best work, Scott was writing his poems with his romances still in future, Washington Irving and Abiel Holmes were laying the foundations of American literature, and "The Edinburgh Review" was beginning its career. The early part of the century saw the crowning labors of Haydn, Wieland, Delille, Koerner, Lagrange, Fichte and Count Rumford, and the best work of Byron and Niebuhr. Trumbull blazed the way in American art, Cuvier set the animal kingdom in array, Oersted founded practical electrical science, Saint Simon opened the way for Socialism, Shelley sang his immortal lyrics, Herschel explored the universe, and Canova produced his sculptured masterpieces. Richter, Laplace, Beethoven, Goethe, Bentham, Lafayette, Coleridge, Lamb, Schlegel, Davy, Lamarck -these are names that glorified the first quarter of the century. The reign of Queen Victoria is the longest in British history, yet before it began Dickens, who still seems to have been with us yesterday, published the first of his immortal works. Carlyle and Pushkin, Morse and Henry, Greenough and Powers, Southey, St. Hilaire, Sue, Thorwaldsen, Humboldt, Thackeray, Hood, Sydney Smith, Mendelssohn, Macaulay, Donizetti, Chateaubriand, Stephenson, Wordsworth, Balzac, Audubon, Cooper, Turner, Moore and Heine are other nineteenth century names, each one suggestive of works of worldwide renown. The roll continues with Musset, Hugo, Comte, Beranger, Hallam, Prescott, De Tocqueville, Humboldt, De Quincey, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Helmholtz, Grimm, Hawthorne, Landor, Faraday, Cousin, Rossini, Poe, Brougham, Meyerbeer, Chopin, Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, Dumas, Auber, Grote, Bulwer, Mill, Manzoni, Livingstone, Agassiz, Guizot, Lyell, George Sand, Motley, Thiers, Leverrier, Bryant, Greeley, George Eliot, Littré, Draper, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Trollope, Doré, Wagner, Marx, Tourgeneff, Charles Reade, Mignet, Liszt, Rubinstein, Beecher, Asa Gray, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, J. S. Mill, Huxley, Tyndall, Pasteur, Ericsson, Chevreul, Joule, Augier, Tennyson, Browning, New