THE first half of the eventful nine

teenth century has come to a close; and another grand period in the world's history, memorable by its fifteen years of war no less than by its five-and-thirty years of peace, is added to the long line of extinct centuries. We who have lived and moved among its stirring scenes, we who have borne a part (for who has not ?) in making it what it was, now stand upon the neutral ground between the irrevocable past and the unknown future, powerless to recall the one or to forecast the other, but happily permitted to turn to account the experience of another fifty years.

It is true that half a century in the history of a great nation is but as a single year in the lifetime of an individual; but as the turning-point for good or evil of a whole life may rest on a single day or hour, so the events of a single year, a single act of legislation, a single outbreak of misguided popular excitement, may form the first step in the prosperity or decadence of an empire. Much more, in these modern times, when events press closer and closer on each other; when thought takes its tone from the rapid movement and incessant whirl of material things; when Science, aided and stimulated at every turn by her own past inventions, and moving forward to fresh discoveries with a momentum proportioned to the increasing numbers of mankind, may fifty years suffice to work changes which centuries, cast in the old sluggish mediæval mould, were altogether unable to bring about. But that very growth of population which, if accompanied by a proportionate accumulation of wealth, multiplies the chances of great discoveries by adding to the number of men of leisure, and of great inventions, by increasing the pressure of competition, while it widens the market for manufacture-that very growth of population exaggerates

VOL. XLIII. NO. CCLIII.

the significance and deepens the importance of every event which is capable of influencing the condition of the people. For every million of men who hailed the surrender of Malta, or watched, with excited curiosity, the return of Napoleon from Egypt, or wept the death of Abercrombie, or discussed the policy of the union with Ireland, two millions are now alive to profit or to suffer by those events, and not a year now passes over our heads that does not add at least its million of subjects to the empire on which it is our boast that the sun never sets.

The fact that in the last fifty years the population of the United Kingdom has doubled itself, suggests a consideration which ought not to be lost sight of in executing the task which we have somewhat rashly set ourselves of comparing the progress of the nation during the present and the past century-namely, that the first half of the nineteenth may be fairly regarded as an equivalent period to the whole of the eighteenth century, seeing that a given population existing throughout a hundred years is, according to all the rules of arithmetic, tantamount to double the number living for half the term. At all events, we shall find it convenient to assume that the aggregate population of the eighteenth approaches very near to an equality with that of the first half of the nineteenth century, and that the former may be used as a standard to which to refer the latter. Without some such standard it would not be easy to answer the anxious question which is constantly suggesting itself to every true patriot.-Whether the nation still retains those energies and talents which have raised it to such an unexampled pitch of greatness, or whether it exhibits any marks of that degeneracy which history records as having been, sooner or later, the fate of all great and powerful

B