more steadily we look
at it, the more real will its appalling features appear to us. We are
literally in an age to which history can show no parallel, and which is
new to the experience of humanity; and though the moral dejection we
have been dwelling on may have had many seeming counterparts in other
times, this is, as it were, solid substance, whereas they were only
shadows. I have pointed out already in my first chapter how unexampled
is the state in which the world now finds itself; but we will dwell
once again upon its more general features. Within less than a century,
distance has been all but annihilated, and the earth has practically,
and to the imagination, been reduced to a fraction of its former size.
Its possible resources have become mean and narrow, set before us as
matters of every-day statistics. All the old haze of wonder is melting
away from it; and the old local enthusiasms, which depended so largely
on ignorance and isolation, are melting likewise. Knowledge has
accumulated in a way never before dreamed of. The fountains of the past
seem to have been broken up, and to be pouring all their secrets into
the consciousness of the present. For the first time man's wide and
varied history has become a coherent whole to him. Partly a cause and
partly a result of this, a new sense has sprung up in him--an intense
self-consciousness as to his own position; and his entire view of
himself is undergoing a vague change: whilst the positive basis on which
knowledge has been placed, has given it a constant and coercive force,
and has made the same change common to the whole civilised world.
Thought and feeling amongst the western nations are conforming to a
single pattern: they are losing their old chivalrous character, their
possibilities of isolated conquest and intellectual adventure. They are
settling down into a uniform mass, that moves or stagnates like a
modern army, and whose alternative lines of march have been mapped out
beforehand. Such is the condition of the western world; and the western
world is beginning now, at all points, to bear upon the east. Thus
opinions that the present age is forming for itself have a weight and a
volume that opinions never before possessed. They are the first
beginnings, not of natural, or of social, but of human opinion--an
oecumenical self-consciousness on the part of man as to his own
prospects and his own position. The great question is, what shape
finally will this daw