omas Paine's _Rights of Man_,--all read
eagerly by the common people, all proclaiming the dignity of common life,
and all uttering the same passionate cry against every form of class or
caste oppression.

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 t