While each home is to this extent a little museum, Christendom has made and thrown open to the masses immense and comprehensive collec tions illustrative of the arts of all nations and ages. National and inter national exhibitions have, since the first in London in 1851, supplemented these, and, as it were, put them in motion over land and sea. Competi tion in invention and the elevation of true taste have thus received an impulse which, marked already, belongs still more to the future.
What is said of the fine arts is applicable in a less degree to litera ture. Its career consists rather in the multiplication and expansion of what is good than in restricted or local rivalry of what is the very best. Vet this remark, strictly taken, does scant justice to our times. Leaving out a few names which " are like stars and dwell apart," the work of the modern pen is the best that has been done. There is much more of it, and more of it that is of high quality. The activity of a new engine—the press—and the ever-impelling movement of the popular mind have kept writers up to a high standard, both of matter and of manner. Milton, Racine, Pope, Schiller, Goethe, Byron, are some of the brighter lights of the near sky. Passing from the master-singers, the story-tellers of this latter day—Scott, Dickens, Hugo, Tourgenieff, Haw thorne—are a group by themselves, with only their followers to compare with them. And then the vast literature of science, much of it appealing as gracefully as forcibly to the imagination! The styles of Humboldt, Tyndall, and Lyell are worthy the grandeur of their themes. Lucretius is more poetic than Darwin in his treatment of the evolution theory, but the greater solidity and precision of the latter, who never thought of poetizing, form an ample atonement. In history the old chronicles are but mi'moircs scrvir to the moderns, who have fallen heir to their accu mulations and collated them with a thoroughness before unknown. We thus know more of the real political life of some periods of the past than the mass of contemporaries themselves knew.
One department of literature—humble, perhaps, yet valuable to history, and still more valuable to the masses who are beginning to be the makers of history—belongs wholly to the era under notice. This is the periodical press, more especially the newspaper. This was an impossibility prior to the establishment of a cheap and regular, not to say rapid, system of intercommunication. Another requisite was a large class of readers. Mails and readers have come, and the world has some twenty-five thousand periodicals, half of them belonging to the United States. The literary
character of these publications, taken altogether, improves. They convey every kind of information, often in considerable fulness and detail, and usually in such shape as to encourage rather than discourage the desire for more complete knowledge. Doubtless there is a waste of time in per petually "seeking after some new thing" merely because it is new; but the ill-effect of newspapers in frittering away the attention is much exag gerated, and an excess of trivial knowledge is a less evil than would be the loss of that knowledge which many get from newspapers alone. Above all, these searching chroniclers, that bring the "fierce light" of free dis cussion to bear upon the events and concerns of the day, can but, in spite of faults and blunders, be the foes of misdoing and injustice, which thrive on ignorance and darkness. Their growth has proceeded fiarilassu with that of free institutions. The periodical press belongs, like liberal gov ernment or the revival of it, to strictly modern times.
Political progress has hardly kept pace with other movements for the better. In Europe, only Great Britain, Holland, and Switzerland had even the pretence of a free government down to the close of the eighteenth century. In England, till then and long after, the oligarchy of titled landholders held sway, with no more regard to popular rights than their own interest compelled them to show. In Central and Southern Europe representative government remained practically unknown until within the past few decades. The activity of the press, the aspiration to national unity, and the extraordinary impulse given to trade and production, have been leading factors in bringing about a change in this respect. Consti tutions formally engrossed on paper or parchment, with the usual outfit, borrowed, after long delay, from the Romans, of a dual legislature, are established almost everywhere, even in the lately-enslaved and partly Mohammedan provinces of Western Turkey. Absolute power of war and peace is yet retained by the executive, save in the United States; and this, aided by the maintenance of large standing armies, promotes the survival of a jealousy among nations as units which has not yet yielded to the con stantly increasing current of friendly intercourse among their individual citizens. The degree of practical liberty enjoyed by the people is generally greater, however, than might be inferred from existing drawbacks. Re finement of manners and the spread of education have increased their respect for themselves and for law, and rendered repression less necessary.