mill.

chinery was throwing him out of work, and reflecting persons were right enough in their belief that this extensive introduction of machines was in some way accomplishing a disorganization of the social economy. Doubtless, for the time being, the distress and misery were very severe; men were compelled to starve or to turn to new avocations; families were deprived of their long-accustomed means of support; such must necessarily be the incidents of every great social change, even though it be a change of improvement. Nor was it until the new condition of things had passed through a considerable advance that its political tendency began to be plainly discerned. It was relieving the labourer from the burden of his Life in the toil, supplanting manual by mechanical action. In the cottonmill, which may be looked upon as the embodiment of the new system and its tendencies, the steam-engine down below was doing the drudgery, turning the wheels and executing the labour, while the operatives above, men, women, and children, were engaged in those things the engine could not accomplish, things requiring observation and intelligent action. Under such a state it was not possible but that a social change should ensue, for relief from corporeal labour is always followed by a disposition for mental activity; and it was not without a certain degree of plausibility that the philanthropist, whose attention was directed to this subject, asserted that the lot of the labouring man was no better than it had been before: he had changed the tyrant, but had not got rid of the tyranny; for the demands of the insatiate, inexorable, untiring steam-engine must be without delay satisfied; the broken thread must be instantly pieced; the iron fingers must receive their new supply; the finished work must be forthwith taken away.

Intellectual What was thus going on in the mill was a miniature picactivity. ture of what was going on in the state. Labour was comparatively diminishing, mental activity increasing. Throughout the last century the intellectual advance is most significantly marked, and surprising is the contrast between the beginning and the close. Ideas that once had a living force altogether died away, the whole community offering an exemplification

Contrast of Ages of Faith and Reason.

377

of the fact that the more opportunity men have for reflection the more they will think. Well, then, might those whose interests lay in the perpetuation of former ideas and the ancient order of things look with intolerable apprehension on what was taking place. They saw plainly that this intellectual activity would at last find a political expression, and that a power, daily increasing in intensity, would not fail to make itself felt in the end.

between

present

In such things are manifested the essential differences be- Difference tween the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason. In the past and former, if life was enjoyed in calmness, it was enjoyed in stag- ages. nation, in unproductiveness, and in a worthless way. But how different in the latter! Everything is in movement. So many are the changes we witness, even in the course of a very brief period, that no one, though of the largest intellect, or in the most favourable position, can predict the future of only a few years hence. We see that ideas which yesterday served us as a guide die to-day, and will be replaced by others, we know not what, to-morrow.

contribu

various

In this scientific advancement, among the triumphs of which Scientific we are living, all the nations of Europe have been engaged. tions of Some, with a venial pride, claim for themselves the glory of nations, having taken the lead. But perhaps each of them, if it might designate the country-alas! not yet a nation-that should occupy the succeeding post of honour, would inscribe Italy on its ballot. It was in Italy that Columbus was born; in Especially of Italy. Venice, destined one day to be restored to Italy, newspapers were first issued. It was in Italy that the laws of the descent of bodies to the earth and of the equilibrium of fluids were first determined by Galileo. In the cathedral of Pisa that illustrious philosopher watched the swinging of the chandelier, and observing that its vibrations, large and small, were made in equal times, left the house of God, his prayers unsaid, but the pendulum clock reinvented. To the Venetian senators he first showed the satellites of Jupiter, the crescent form of Venus, and, in the garden of Cardinal Bandini, the spots upon the sun. It was in Italy that Sanctorio invented the thermometer; that Torricelli constructed the

Causes of her

barometer and demonstrated the pressure of the air. It was there that Castelli laid the foundation of hydraulics and discovered the laws of the flowing of water. There, too, the first Christian astronomical observatory was established, and there Stancari counted the number of vibrations of a string emitting musical notes. There Grimaldi discovered the diffraction of light, and the Florentine academicians showed that dark heat may be reflected by mirrors across space. In our own times Melloni furnished the means of proving that it may be polarized. The first philosophical societies were the Italian; the first botanical garden was established at Pisa; the first classification of plants given by Casalpinus. The first geological museum was founded at Verona; the first who cultivated the study of fossil remains were Leonardo da Vinci and Fracasta. The great chemical discoveries of this century were made by instruments which bear the names of Galvani and Volta. Why need I speak of science alone? Who will dispute with that illustrious people the palm of music and painting, of statuary and architecture? The dark cloud which for a thousand years has hung over that beautiful peninsula is fringed with irradiations of light. There is not a department of human knowledge from which Italy has not extracted glory, no art that she has not adorned.

Notwithstanding the adverse circumstances in which she has depression. been placed, Italy has thus taken no insignificant part in the advancement of science. I may, at the close of a work of which so large a portion has been devoted to the relation of her influences, political and religious, on the rest of Europe, be perhaps excused the expression of a hope that the day is approaching in which she will, with Rome as her capital, take that place in the modern system to which she is entitled. The course of centuries has proved that her ecclesiastical rela-tion with foreign countries is incompatible with her national life. It is that, and that alone, which has been the cause of all her ills. She has asserted a jurisdiction in every other government; the price she has paid is her own unity. The first, the all-important step in her restitution is the reduction of the Papacy to a purely religious element. Her great bishop

must no longer be an earthly prince. Rome, in her outcry for the preservation of her temporal possessions, forgets that Christian Europe has made a far greater sacrifice. It has yielded Bethlehem, Gethsemane, Calvary, the Sepulchre, the Mount of the Ascension. That is a sacrifice to which the surrender of the fictitious donations of barbarian kings is not to be compared.

General

summary of

A

CHAPTER XXVI.

CONCLUSION.--THE FUTURE OF EUROPE.

PHILOSOPHICAL principle becomes valuable if it can

be used as a guide in the practical purposes of life.

The object of this book is to impress upon its reader a conthe work. viction that civilization does not proceed in an arbitrary

Individual and social life have

been considered;

And the intellectual

Greece;

manner or by chance, but that it passes through a determinate succession of stages, and is a developement according to law.

For this purpose, we considered the relations between individual and social life, and showed that they are physiologically inseparable from one another, and that the course of communities bears an unmistakable resemblance to the progress of an individual, and that man is the archetype or exemplar of society.

We then examined the intellectual history of Greece —a history of nation offering the best and most complete illustration of the life of humanity. From the beginnings of its mythology in old Indian legends and of its philosophy in Ionia, we saw that it passed through phases like those of the individual to its decrepitude and death in Alexandria.

And the his tory of Europe.

Then, addressing ourselves to the history of Europe, we found that, if suitably divided into groups of ages, these groups, compared with each other in chronological succession, present a striking resemblance to the successive phases of Greek life, and therefore to that which Greek life resembles-that is to say, individual life.

For the sake of convenience in these descriptions we have