M. Guizot, it will be perceived, by bringing the history of European civilisation no farther down than the latter years of the eighteenth century, and adhering throughout rather too closely to France, has left untouched a series of movements in the social progress, which promise to effect, at no distant day, a prodigious change in the destinies of both individuals and nations. It may only be necessary to allude in a general way to the termination of a protracted warfare between France and Britain, followed by a universal peace, which has permitted the cultivation of the sciences, the useful arts, commerce, and, generally speaking, all the attributes of moral, religious, and intellectual advancement; the political elevation of the great middle class in Britain and France, and the co-ordinate improvement in the condition of the more humble classes in society; the abolition of numberless monopolies in trade and otherwise, leaving greater freedom for legitimate action; signal meliorations in the habits and manners of all ranks of people, particularly as regards fashions of dress, temperance, and decorum, the natural result of which is an increase in the value of human life; important modifications of civil laws and municipal institutions in most European countries; and lastly, and chiefly, the wonderful advances made in practical science and in the arts. Among these advances may be only noted the use of gas in artificial lighting, and the application of steam power to navigation, road-travelling, and all kinds of industrial operations. Steam navigation alone, by opening up new channels for commerce, and, in effect, bringing countries remote from each other into immediate neighbourhood, forms by far the grandest engine of civilisation which the world has seen since the invention of printing, and must speedily work the most surprising improvement in human affairs not only in Europe, but in every region of the earth. To these various facts, as M. Guizot would term them, in the history of modern times, may be added that of the extensive diffusion of newspapers and an instructive literature at a low cost among the less affluent classes of the people, a blessing which is ascribable to the recent invention of machinery for the manufacture of paper and for printing, and of which past generations of mankind had no idea. It is further of importance to include in this catalogue of facts the opening up of new fields for human industry and subsistence in the colonies of Britain, and other fruitful regions in a foreign hemisphere, by which Europe is now regularly drained of a portion of its exuberant population; also the permanent establishment of a republican constitution in the United States of America, which, from its earliest dawn, has exerted a considerable reaction on the elder political institutions of European nations. {243}