The Historical Basis of Modern Europe (1760-1815); An Introductory Study to the General History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886. Excerpt: ... THE IDEA OF PROGRESS. 597 historical nature; and they will be just and beneficent in proportion to the care and assiduity with which they have been formed from the consideration of industrial and economical history. Any attempts of publicists to arrest, rather than to direct, the movement towards changes of this kind, can now only provoke impatience or occasion misconceptions. Our social organisation is constantly expanding, and involving new needs and desires. Reform, being only the conscious adaptation of society to changed conditions, inevitably becomes more frequent and fundamental as society expands and grows more autonomous and less restrained by arbitrary traditions. The political tendencies of an age like our own must, therefore, necessarily be in the direction of what is commonly called progress. To deplore such tendencies, or to regard them as destructive to the social order, is as futile and as fanciful as to dread grievous consequences to the universe from the rule of gravitation. Perhaps the attraction of matter may some day reduce the cosmos to chaos; possibly political reform may land society in anarchy; but it is certain that as a catastrophe would be the result of a momentary suspension of the law of gravitation, so an immeasurable disaster would attend the cessation for any length of time of political advance in a period of industrial expansion. In his recent attempt to test the value of the opinions which are gaining currency in our day concerning. Popular Government as it verges on Democracy, Sir Henry Maine unites to a just apprehension of many of the more obvious features THE IDEA OF PROGRESS. of democratic rule a deep distrust of the dominant political tendency of the time. Refusing to look more deeply below the surface of events...