The story of the nineteenth century of the Christian era

Front matter

^THESTORYOF- THENINETEENTH

CEnTVRY' ~

ELBRIDGE SBRCJDKS lit

Preface

WITHOUT binding myself to the fiat of the mathematician, or the assumption of the Emperor of Germany, I have taken, for the purpose of this "story," the convenient round numbers of 1800 to 1900, inclusive, as constituting the Nineteenth Century. Years count for but little in the evolution of a divine plan, and the tyranny of figures is a matter of human limitation ; but the one hundred years, stretching from 1800 to 1900, certainly register the high-water mark of human development, and record the sublimest triumph of divine intention. From the rise and fall of Napoleon to the regnant supremacy of the people, the Nineteenth Century marched steadily on through effort to accomplishment, and, in all departments of human effort and human achievement, proved its right to be esteemed, in every sense, the "Wonderful Century."

If, in attempting to tell, briefly and generally, the story of the Nineteenth Century I have fallen short in the record, or have been hampered by an impossible adjustment of the overabundance of material to the limitations of space, I shall still be satisfied if I may lead my readers to investigate and study more closely the remarkable happenings of the one hundred years of progress that are here imperfectly set down.

This one thing any story of the Nineteenth Century,

S

6 PREFACE.

whether briefly or bulkily told, must show : Progress, — progress in government, in literature, in law, in science, art, and the methods of application ; progress, especially, in human affairs and in the elevation and freedom of man.

"The fact of our time which overshadows all others," says Benjamin Kidd, "is the arrival of Democracy." As a true democracy is the soul of progress, so this story of the Nineteenth Century has aimed to associate the growth of intelligence with the development of the people, and the triumphs of invention with the gradual " uplift " of mankind.

In the hope that this rapid survey of the world's advancement since the days when Franklin foresaw so clearly the triumphs of human endeavor, and Washington saw as clearly the possibilities of independence, may lead all who read it to appreciate the fact that in spite of suspicion and selfishness, in spite of evil and error, the world is ever growing better, and that divine purpose never takes a backward step, the author dedicates his story to all lovers of humanity, liberty, and equality, and especially to that great English-speaking race which, if true to its own traditions, is, as one student of development declares, " destined to play an immense part in the immediate future of the world."

"Whenever I meditate upon government," says Rousseau, " I am happy to find in my investigations new reasons for loving that of my own country."

May that loyalty to their own homeland be the possession of all who honor these pages with their attention.

ELBRIDGE S. BROOKS.

Boston, March 15, 1900.

Contents

PACK

Chap. I. How the Century Began 13

First Period. The Age of Napoleon.

Chap. II. When One Man Strove to Master the World ... 31 Chap. III. The Grip of "The Man on Horseback" .... 47

Second Period. The Age of Wellington.

Chap. IV. How Napoleon's Star Set at Last 65

Chap. V. How the Desire for Independence Grew .... 81

Third Period. The Age of Bolivar.

Chap. VI. How the First Quarter Ended 99

Chap. VII. When the World Grew in Manliness 119

Fourth Period. The Age of Jackson.

Chap. VIII. How the World had a New Shaking up ... . 133 Chap. IX. What " Old Hickory " Helped to Accomplish . . 147

Fifth Period. The Age of Kossuth.

Chap. X. Why the People grew Restless 165

Chap. XI. How All the World had another Shaking up . . . 182

Sixth Period. The Age of Cavour.

Chap. XII. On the Portal of the Future 201

Chap. XIII. How One Man Liberated a Nation 220

Seventh Period. The Age of Lincoln.

Chap. XIV. How Another Man Enfranchised a Race .... 239 Chap. XV. How Liberty and Union came in more lands than

One 260

8 CONTENTS.

Eighth Period. The Age of Bismarck. pagb

Chap. XVI. When the World Readjusted Itself 279

Chap. XVII. The Last " One-Man Power" of the Century . . 297

Ninth Period. The Age of Tolstoi,

Chap. XVIII. How the World began to Try the Golden Rule . 313

Chap. XIX. How the Nations Extended Their Influence . . 326

Tenth Period. The Age of Edison.

Chap. XX. When Men began to Prove the Value of Things . 345

Chap. XXI. How the Century Closed 362

Chronological Record of the Nineteenth Century . . . 385

Index 397

ILLUSTRATIONS.

The First Telegram Frontispiece.

AUSTERLITZ AND NAPOLEON faces 46

Waterloo and Wellington " 80

Types of the Age of Bolivar " 116

Types of the Age of Jackson " 146

Types of the Age of Kossuth " 182

Types of the Age of Cavour " 220

Abraham Lincoln " 260

Sedan and Bismarck " 296

Types of the Age of Tolstoi " 326

Types of the Age of Edison " 362

THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

"A century of analysis and revelation which has reduced the size of the world, and the -width of tlie oceans ; a century of federation and of brotherly love ivhich has bound men closer and closer together.''''

Edward Everett Hale.

TO THE CENTURIES:

'■'■ I am the Century the Nineteenth from Christ! And though I guarded well thy treasures rare, — Inheritance unequalled and unpriced, For me the day's appointed task sufficed, To lighten and to ease the lot of man. From elemental strongholds I enticed Strange Titans hidden since the world began; Now, God's best creature wields them, subject to his plan.

" I am the Century the Nitieteenth from Christ! What goeth from us, is beyond recall ; Yet unto every age there shall befall A revelation for its heart alone: Lo 1 I have kept my Weak Ones from the wall, And to my Strong their feebleness have shown; The letter fades apace — the spirit must atone 1"

Edith Matilda Thomas.

From the " Critic " for December, i8<pg.

THE

STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Chapter I. How The Century Began

OF all the centuries that have passed since Christ was born at Bethlehem the Nineteenth Century has been the best, the greatest, the most wonderful. And this is as it should be ; for Christianity, sprung from that lowly manger at Bethlehem, means unrest, unrest means effort, effort means achievement, achievement means progress, and progress is the one thing that has made the Nineteenth Century the greatest one hundred years since first the world began swinging in space, countless ages ago. Read with me, I pray you, the Story of the Nineteenth Century.

When the Nineteenth Century was born the world was in a restless state ; the great family of nations was disturbed by new ideas and new desires. That half of the globe known as the New World — because, though the oldest half geologically, it was the newest politically — had, in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century set a new lesson for the rest of the world to learn : the lesson of man's independence, the power of the people, and the equal right of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

To set this lesson so that all the world might read, a few thousand patriots — a fraction only of the three million colonists along the Atlantic coast of North America — had struggled through years^of protest, privation, determination, and battle, until success had been won, a nation of freemen established, and the world aroused to the knowledge of individual liberty and national independence.

In America, when the Nineteenth Century opened, the greatest of Americans and the noblest of men had just closed his honorable and glorious career. George Washington was dead. In France a marvellous man was just entering upon a career of greatness that was to rouse the world to wonder, set all Europe by the ears, and make its map anew. Napoleon Bonaparte was First Consul of France, and from a poor Corsican lieutenant of artillery had already become the dictator of Europe.

Because of George Washington and American independence, came Napoleon Bonaparte and European enlightenment. Success in America meant desire across the seas.

In cruel fashion and in poorly planned endeavor France had cast off the tyranny of centuries and established the French Republic, with the glorious motto, " Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." Other nations, long bowed beneath a like tyranny of kings and princes and privileged classes wrongly called " Nobles," saw the success of America and the effort of France, and longed to be their own masters and rulers. The people were beginning to bravely think rather than to blindly obey.

But desire does not always yield right methods. There is a right and a wrong way to attain results. America had taken the right way ; France had followed the wrong. So the terrible spectacle of France's wrong way of doing a right thing had saddened, terrified, and sobered Europe, and had led her people to make haste slowly, uncertain whether it were wise to attempt to walk the path of liberty if that way led, as it had in France, through blood and terror, or to exchange a thousand tyrants for one relentless despot and continual war. Washington's greatness seemed well-nigh overshadowed by Napoleon's selfishness.

And yet Napoleon's selfishness had not been valueless to the world. It had aroused where it had antagonized, and rebuilt where it had overthrown. The American Revolution and the French Revolution had set the people to thinking. The greatness of Washington and the triurhphs of Napoleon had shown men how, in the words of St. Paul, God had chosen "the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty ; and the things which are despised hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are." For George Washington was but a plain Virginia farmer, and Napoleon Bonaparte the son of a Corsican lawyer ; and those two men remade the world of 1800.

Of Washington, Green, the historian of the English people, has declared, " No nobler figure ever stood in the fore-front of a nation's life " ; while Napoleon Bonaparte, by the very selfishness of his ambitions, destroyed old tyrannies, threw the vigor of endeavor into conquered peoples, and awoke, especially in Germany, that spirit of patriotism and union that finally led to his own overthrow, and the development of a new Europe.

The times indeed were ripe for this making of a new Europe, a new America, and a new world. Even in the midst of wars and rumors of wars, men, thrown on their own resources or stirred to think out new ways of doing things along other than political lines, were blessing the world with the hints toward the very things that were to make the Nineteenth Century so great.

When Benjamin Franklin, the prophet of industrial America, came, in 1790, to the end of his long, useful, and helpful life, he said, " I have sometimes almost wished it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence. For invention and improvement are prolific, and beget more of their kind. The present progress is rapid. Many things of great importance, now unthought of, will, before that period, be produced ; and then I might not only enjoy their advantages, but have my curiosity satisfied in knowing what they are to be."

That was the wonderful old man's prophecy and regret in the closing years of the eighteenth century ; think now, what the opening years of the twentieth century show as the result of the advancing thought of the nineteenth ! " Many things of great importance will be produced," said Franklin ; suppose he could revisit the earth to-day, and see how his prophecy was realized within less than one hundred years of its utterance, and how the things that we accept as ordinary and commonplace are almost like some, great magician's miracle compared to the things that Franklin knew, — hydraulic mining, the modern battleship, the telephone, electric lighting, and wireless telegraphy, the X-rays, and modern machinery!

The Nineteenth Century opened with some of these things "in the air." An English engineer and machinist, named Joseph Bramah, had already invented the remarkable safety-lock and powerful hydraulic press that still bear his name ; he also invented a printing-press for banknotes, a machine for sawing stone, and he lost his life in devising a contrivance for uprooting tree-trunks. Illuminating gas was in use for lighting a few buildings in England and France ; Claude Chappe, a Frenchman of Normandy, had devised a sort of telegraphing by signal posts, so that a message could be sent one hundred and fifty miles in a quarter of an hour ; William Herschel, an English music teacher, had made some wonderful improvements in telescopes ; and Laplace, a French professor of mathematics, had made some startling astronomical discoveries ; an Italian professor, named Luigi Galvani, while skinning frogs' legs to make soup for his sick wife, had discovered the electrical currents which led to the development of galvanism ; and, about the same time, another Italian professor, named Alessandro Volta, also by noticing the muscular twitching of a frog, studied out his theory of electrical motion, from which came the voltaic pile or battery, known to us now as "volts." In 1800, Dr. Edward Jenner, an English physician, had introduced vaccination as a prevention of the dreaded small-pox ; two brothers of central France, named Montgolfier, had discovered and attempted the possibility of air-travel by inflated balloons ; a Bohemian play-writer and printer, named Alois Senefelder, while trying to make out a washerwoman's bill for his mother without ink or paper, discovered the art of writing on stone — lithography, now so wonderful in its productions; a French refugee to America, Marc Brunei, had introduced machinery into ship-building ; and an English chemist, named John Dalton, had revolutionized chemical knowledge and method by his discovery that all chemical combinations were not between the chemical compounds, but between the beginnings or bases of those compounds — the units or atoms to which they could be reduced ; this great discovery was called the atomic theory. And in America, Eli Whitney had made the South, and ruined himself, by his invention of the cotton-gin.

Those were but a few of the discoveries the world was making or putting to practical use when the Nineteenth Century began. They were simply the developments, or following out of, the thoughts and experiments that Benjamin Franklin and other great thinkers before him had dimly conceived or openly advocated ; indeed, certain of these modern discoveries had been known to the older nations or to those which, when the Nineteenth Century opened, had fallen again into darkness and ignorance, or were selfishly keeping to themselves, desiring no communication with what they called " the barbarians of the outside world," Chief among this latter class of isolated peoples was the great empire of China.

Bordering the western shore of the broad Pacific ; with a vast territory and a vaster population ; with a literature, arts, science, and inventions stretching back far beyond the time of Christ, China, known to our remote forefathers of the time of Columbus as Cathay, had, for centuries, drawn about herself a wall of isolation and seclusion as forbidding as the great stone wall with which the Emperor Che-Hwang-te had, two hundred years before Christ, encircled his great dominions. Dominated and ruled by its Tartar dynasty for over two hundred years it still kept so completely to itself that even in the year 1800 it was but little known to the people of Europe or America save as, under severe restrictions, trading-vessels would now and then enter one of its well-guarded ports.

Japan, the island empire lying to the north and east of China was, likewise, a sealed book to the western world, as, indeed, were most of those far-reaching lands of the eastern hemisphere known as the Orient. India, Persia, and Afghanistan were other hermit nations ; Asia Minor was sunk in degradation ; indeed, the very cradle of the progress and civilization of the world had stopped rocking ; for the lands from which, in distant ages, what is known as the Aryan people had migrated westward, and given to the world its first advance along the path of progress ; from whom, too, came those germs of civilization which, carried through Greece into Europe, gave religion, philosophy, literature, science, and art to man, were, when the Nineteenth Century began, buried in ignorance and sloth, ground down by tyranny and despotism, having made no step in the forward movement toward intelligence and civilization which had begun within its borders, and were, indeed, to remain thus lost and isolated until the influence of the west, begun by England in the south, by Russia in the north, and by America on its eastern borders, was to give it a lasting impulse, in an actual struggle for life and nationality, toward progress and enlightment.

Of that great section of Eastern Europe familiar to us as Russia, but little was really known in 1800. Peter the Great had made the first forward movement for his barbarous kingdom in the early years of the eighteenth century, and Catharine II., the German wife of another but most insignificant Peter, carried forward the might and progress which the Great Peter had begun. But she died just before the Nineteenth Century was born ; and only when Alexander and Napoleon were rivals for the supremacy of Europe did Russia really assume a place among the great and progressive powers of the world.

In that mighty struggle all the nations of Europe had a part. In the clash many an ancient power went down. Switzerland, long the only republic in the world, lost her liberties ; so, too, did Venice, the glory of the Middle Ages ; so, indeed, did all Italy, from the Alps to Sicily ; while Spain and Portugal, Holland and Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, fell under French control. Austria, proud and haughty under the domain of its Hapsburg emperors, only saved itself from ruin by a coalition with the French conqueror ; and the kingdom of Prussia, with all its large and small German duchies and principalities, was well-nigh swallowed in the vortex of war and dismemberment.

Indeed, as the Nineteenth Century opened. Napoleon, fresh from his invasion of Egypt, was dreaming of universal empire, and the great Mohammedan power known as the Turkish Empire, was already a tottering fabric, upheld only by the rival purposes of France and Russia.

Upon Africa, that seat of earliest civilization, the blackness of utter night had fallen. Where once, along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, Rome and Carthage had held sway, and learning and culture had their seat, only pirate states existed, demanding and enforcing tribute from the world, while Egypt, fallen into evil ways, had nothing but its ruins and its pyramids to tell of its ancient glory ; for even the vigor of its Ottoman conquerors seemed gone forever. Below the boundaries of the desert wastes of Sahara, stretched a vast unexplored and unknown continent, the home of savage and warring tribes, drawn upon by the hunters of men for the victims of the horrible slave-trade, and more barbarous and brutal in their ignorance than the roving red Indians of the American forests and prairies.

These redmen of America, when the Nineteenth Century began, still occupied and dominated the largest portion of North America. The American Revolution had secured the independence of the United States, but the western portion of the new republic was a most uncertain and wavering line. In the year 1 800 France still held most of the territory west of the Mississippi, under the name of Louisiana. Spain owned certain territory east of the Mississippi, and south of the thirty-first parallel of latitude, under the name of Florida ; east and north of these boundaries, to the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes, lay the possessions of the United States of America, eight hundred and twenty-eight thousand square miles. The twentieth century opens with that area, on the continent alone, increased almost sevenfold, or over three and one-half million square miles, while the flag of the republic floats in possession over islands once crushed beneath the power of Spain.

But in 1800 even the eight hundred thousand square miles of the United States were largely given up to Indian occupation ; for what is called the centre of population, or better, the " centre of gravity " of the population of the country, was but eighteen miles west of Baltimore, in Maryland. Only about three hundred and five thousand square miles of its territory were settled, and had a population of a little over four million. In 1900 the population has grown to more than eighty million.

England claimed possession of all the North American continent north of the Great Lakes, with the exception of the extreme northwesterly corner, which was known as Russian America. To-day that " corner " is known as Alaska, a valuable territory of the United States. Spain owned all of the present domain of the United States west of Texas, and including Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana ; she possessed Mexico and Central America, and all the vast territory of South America from the Isthmus of Panama to Cape Horn, excepting Brazil, which belonged to little Portugal.

So you see that the civilized United States in the year 1800 occupied but a very small portion of the earth's surface, and had but a slight political influence.

Their influence, in fact, was in ideas more than anything else. A new nation, they had undertaken a new problem, — the task of governing themselves. The young republic had a large area to develop ; it had no fear of its neighbors, as had every one of the rival states of Europe ; it had no desire for conquest, no need to waste its revenues in great armies or fleets of war ; no wish to do anything but to strengthen itself on its own soil by a career of peaceful industry. It had its own political differences, rivalries, and ambitions, but they were local rather than national. The spirit of union was voiced in the song of " Hail, Columbia ; " and, though the Republic had great sympathy for the experiment of popular liberty in France, yet when France sought to trade upon its sympathies, and embroil the United States in the foreign and domestic troubles of France, the

Republic said, " No ! that is none of my business," and was ready to arm itself against the arrogant demands of France for money for its needs. " We helped you ; help us ! " said France ; and then came, in reply to the demand for "blackmail," the noble sentiment of Pinckney, the American envoy to France : " Millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute ! "

While the freemen of America were gradually feeling their way westward to the savage borders of their own domain, the adventurers of the world were following along the paths of discovery, and setting inquisitive feet upon the islands of the sea. When the Nineteenth Century began the island-continents that now comprise the geographical division known as Australasia were unknown save to a few daring navigators, and unoccupied save by their native tribes. New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and the scattered archipelagoes that dot the western Pacific, were still practically unexplored. Spain and Portugal, France, Holland, and England, had for years voyaged, traded, and claimed possession in these Pacific waters as well as in what was known as the East Indies ; but actual occupation and colonization had been attempted only at few points, so that this vast stretch of fertile Pacific and Indian islands was practically unknown to civilization. In the great Indian peninsula, jutting out from southern Asia, England had, in 1800, obtained a considerable footing, thanks to the resistless energy of Clive ; but it was still a fierce struggle for possession between English governors and native princes in what Tennyson, later, called "wild Mahratta battle," and in no portion of the "uncivilized world," as Europeans arrogantly termed all vast stretches of native possessions, had the aggressive and wealth-seeking white man yet secured, when the Nineteenth Century opened, absolute or undisputed possession.

The West India islands, in the Atlantic waters, were possibly an exception. Since the days of Columbus and his companions, these fertile tropic islands had been under the ever-changing control of Spain, Holland, England, and France ; and their rich harvests of sugar-cane and tobacco were building up a profitable "West India " trade.

When the Nineteenth Century began, the world, as I have told you, and as you may see from this opening picture, was in a turmoil. Unrest was the order of the day. The spirit of liberty, the desire for possession, the lust of adventure, of greed and of gain, were struggling for mastery. Change was in the air. Man, through three hundred years, had been slowly developing the three great inventions of the Middle Ages — the mariner's compass, gunpowder, and printing — until, at last, civilization had applied them to its own practical and generally selfish uses. Wars, treaties, and revolutions, continuous and interminable, had resulted therefrom ; but this ceaseless upheaval was rapidly transforming the world, and making the way clear for the material, social, and intellectual development of the People who, in the Nineteenth Century, were to take affairs in hand, and lead the world to nobler heights of endeavor and achievement.

In the year 1800 all Europe was at war. That was nothing new. Europe had forever been at war since the early days of Aryan immigration had led to the days of Roman dominion and power. But the wars that ushered in the Nineteenth Century were far different from those that had gone before. Now the people were rising, and the quarrels of individual rulers or of rival races gave place to the struggle for independence and manhood.

To think and to reason ! — the development of these faculties in man was the impulse toward independence.

"'Tis education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined,"

wrote one of the great English poets of the eighteenth century ; and just as that eighteenth century was drawing to a close, George Washington said to his countrymen in his famous " Farewell Address," "Promote, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened."

This means that the stupid man is content to be a slave ; but that liberty, which is founded on law, is possible only to the man who thinks, intelligently.

For centuries learning and literature had been possible only to a comparatively small portion of the people. Education indeed had slumbered far beyond the night of the dark ages, as the times of grossest ignorance were called ; and not until the latter part of the eighteenth century did the people begin to desire to really know something. Such men as Comenius the Moravian, and Hermann Francke the German, and John Locke the Englishman, had laid the foundations upon which Rousseau and Basedow and Pestalozzi reared their systems of education, and prepared the way for the wonderful educational developments of the Nineteenth Century. But in 1800 these systems were only in process of formation, and the education of the children of the world was slight and small. Prussia had, perhaps, the best system of education ; but, throughout the world, the uneducated were in a vast majority. Nearly sixty per cent of the people of England were unable to write their names, and in all the kingdom there were but three thousand schools, public and private. The United States had been too busy in setting up housekeeping to attend school — and what schools they had were few and poor. France was even worse off ; for her bloody revolution had left no time for education. Italy and Spain were fearfully ignorant ; Austria and Russia were positively uneducated ; and while in China and India children had always gone to school, instruction, as in all oriental countries, was confined to the simplest moral teaching ; and Hottentot and Bushman, knowing nothing but how to eat and shoot and sleep, were not so very far below the children of the people in most parts of what was then called the civilized world.

Literature — the knowledge and reading of books — was confined to even smaller limits than was education. Great nanfies were known to the world of letters ; but that world was very small in comparison to the real globe, or even to the real people of a nation. Doctor Samuel Johnson was the great name in England ; the " Times " had just begun publication in London ; Goethe was the foremost writer of Germany, and Rousseau the most popular in France ; Robert Burns was the one man who was touching the heart of the people with his simple lays ; Moore and Byron were scarcely more than boys ; Schiller, Schlegel, Schelling, and Humboldt were the representatives of German thought and culture, as Derzhavin the poet, Karamzen the historian, and Kriloff the story-teller were in the van of Russia's slow growth in literature. Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets, was a year-old baby when the Nineteenth Century began ; Alfieri and Parini were the great names in Italian literature, while Spain had fallen sadly from the " golden age " of Cervantes and Lope de Vega of two centuries before. In America, too, the American book was, as yet, a dull and uninviting affair ; there was little done in literature, for, so busy were our grandfathers and great grandfathers in setting their new nation on its feet, that they found no time for "book larnin','' and, as Lowell, in later days, declared,