The middle part of the nineteenth century is a period which has become more or less obscure to most Americans and Englishmen. At one end the thunderous campaigns of Napoleon are dying away. In the latter part of the century we remember the gorgeousness of the Tuileries, the four years' strife of our own Civil War, and then the golden drift of peace with which the century ended. Between these two extremes there is a stretch of history which seems to lack interest for the average student of to-day. In America, that was a period when we took little interest in the movement of affairs on the continent of Europe. It would not be easy, for instance, to imagine an American of 1840 cogitating on problems of socialism, or trying to invent some new form of arbeiterverein. General Choke was still swindling English emigrants. The Young Columbian was still darting out from behind a table to declare how thoroughly he defied the British lion. But neither of these patriots, any more than their English compeers, was seriously disturbed about the interests of the rest of the world. The Englishman was contentedly singing "God Save the Queen!" The American, was apostrophizing the bird of freedom with the floridity of rhetoric that reached its climax in the "Pogram Defiance." What the Dutchies and Frenchies were doing was little more to an Englishman than to an American. Continental Europe was a mystery to English-speaking people. Those who traveled abroad took their own servants with them, spoke only English, and went through the whole European maze with absolute indifference. To them the socialist, who had scarcely received a name, was an imaginary being. If he existed, he was only a sort of offspring of the Napoleonic wars--a creature who had not yet fitted into the ordinary course of things. He was an anomaly, a person who howled in beer-houses, and who would presently be regulated, either by the statesmen or by the police. When our old friend, Mark Tapley, was making with his master a homeward voyage to Britain, what did he know or even care about the politics of France, or Germany, or Austria, or Russia? Not the slightest, you may be sure. Mark and his master represented the complete indifference of the Englishman or American--not necessarily a well-bred indifference, but an indifference that was insular on the one hand and republican on the other. If either of them had heard of a gentleman who pillaged an unmarried lady's luggage in order to secure a valuable paper for another lady, who was married, they would both have looked severely at this abnormal person, and the American would doubtless have added a remark which had something to do with the matchless purity of Columbia's daughters.