First the dream, the ideal in some human soul; then the written word which proclaims it, and impresses other minds with its truth and beauty; then the united and determined effort of men to make the dream a reality,—­that seems to be a fair estimate of the part that literature plays, even in our political progress.

HISTORICAL SUMMARY.  The period we are considering begins in the latter half of the reign of George III and ends with the accession of Victoria in 1837.  When on a foggy morning in November, 1783, King George entered the House of Lords and in a trembling voice recognized the independence of the United States of America, he unconsciously proclaimed the triumph of that free government by free men which had been the ideal of English literature for more than a thousand years; though it was not till 1832, when the Reform Bill became the law of the land, that England herself learned the lesson taught her by America, and became the democracy of which her writers had always dreamed.

The half century between these two events is one of great turmoil, yet of steady advance in every department of English life.  The storm center of the political unrest was the French Revolution, that frightful uprising which proclaimed the natural rights of man and the abolition of class distinctions.  Its effect on the whole civilized world is beyond computation.  Patriotic clubs and societies multiplied in England, all asserting the doctrine of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the watchwords of the Revolution.  Young England, led by Pitt the younger, hailed the new French republic and offered it friendship; old England, which pardons no revolutions but her own, looked with horror on the turmoil in France and, misled by Burke and the nobles of the realm, forced the two nations into war.  Even Pitt saw a blessing in this at first; because the sudden zeal for fighting a foreign nation—­which by some horrible perversion is generally called patriotism—­might turn men’s thoughts from their own to their neighbors’ affairs, and so prevent a threatened revolution at home.

The causes of this threatened revolution were not political but economic.  By her invention in steel and machinery, and by her monopoly of the carrying trade, England had become the workshop of the world.  Her wealth had increased beyond her wildest dreams; but the unequal distribution of that wealth was a spectacle to make angels weep.  The invention of machinery at first threw thousands of skilled hand workers out of employment; in order to protect a few agriculturists, heavy duties were imposed on corn and wheat, and bread rose to famine prices just when laboring men had the least money to pay for it.  There followed a curious spectacle.  While England increased in wealth, and spent vast sums to support her army and subsidize her allies in Europe, and while nobles, landowners, manufacturers, and merchants lived in increasing luxury, a multitude of skilled laborers were clamoring for work.  Fathers sent their wives and little children into the mines and factories, where sixteen hours’ labor would hardly pay for the daily bread; and in every large city were riotous mobs made up chiefly of hungry men and women.  It was this unbearable economic condition, and not any political theory, as Burke supposed, which occasioned the danger of another English revolution.