of the steam engine was working in the heads of the ingenious, and the closing years of the century saw the first of the new industrial machines established in the factories of the North of England. New stage-coach roads, canals, and other “improvements” sprang up in all directions. A couple of decades or so more and the great industry was to start the metamorphosis of human production and distribution; yet another, and the rail- way was to begin the transformation of the face of nature and the externals of human life in other directions. In short, from the French Revolution we advance straight by leaps and bounds to the modern world. The city of Paris well typifies the progress. One hundred years ago, in 1789, it was (unlike London, which in its medieval form was destroyed by the fire of 1666), to all intents and purposes a medieval city, substantially the Paris of Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame,” a city of feudal fortresses, high-walled enclosures, crooked, nar- row, unpaved streets. The Committee of Public Safety in 1793 began alterations, partly with a view of giving employment to distressed workmen. The changes went on gradually, till, in 1859, Haussmann, under Napoleon III., totally destroyed what remained of old Paris, and laid out the city in the form we see it to-day—a city which would be as foreign to Danton, Robespierre, or Marat as San Francisco itself. The Paris of centuries perished in little more than fifty years. What is true of Paris is true of Europe—of the whole of existing civilization. The Europe of 1789 was in the main the Europe of the later middle ages—of the renaissance—but in the last stage of decay. It had been practically dead for over two centuries, and like Edgar Poe’s hypnotized dead man, it fell to pieces with a sudden convulsive awaking after proclaiming itself dead. No “restoration” could really bring it together again. The new world of our time had, meanwhile, grown up, with its science, its inventions, its intense self-consciousness, and placed insurmountable
