XXXIX
THE REALITIES AND IMAGINATIONS OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY[1]
§ 1. The Mechanical Revolution. § 2. Relation of the Mechanical to the Industrial Revolution. § 3. The Fermentation of Ideas, 1848. § 4. The Development of the Idea of Socialism. § 5. Shortcomings of Socialism as a Scheme of Human Society. § 6. How Darwinism Affected Religious and Political Ideas. § 7. Mr. Gladstone and the Idea of Nationalism. § 8. Europe between 1848 and 1878. § 9. The (Second) Scramble for Overseas Empires. § 10. The Indian Precedent in Asia. § 11. The History of Japan. § 12. Close of the Period of Overseas Expansion. § 13. The British Empire in 1914.
§ 1
THE career and personality of Napoleon I bulks disproportionately in the nineteenth century histories. He was of little significance to the broad onward movement of human affairs; he was an interruption, a reminder of latent evils, a thing like the bacterium of some pestilence. Even regarded as a pestilence, he was not of supreme rank; he killed far fewer people than the influenza epidemic of 1918, and produced less political and social disruption than the plague of Justinian. Some such interlude had to happen, and some such patched-up settlement of Europe as the Concert of Europe, because there was no worked-out system of ideas upon which a new world could be constructed.
- ↑ An excellent book on the substance of this chapter is F. S. Marvin's Century of Hope. Another is R. A. Gregory's Discovery. See also Seignobos' Political History of Contemporary Europe.
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