find England swung round into a new world, as, in so short a time, has hardly ever befallen a nation. The change which in three generations has trebled our population, and made the old kingdom the mere heart of a huge empire, led to portentous consequences, both moral and material, which were hardly understood till our own day. It is the singular boast of the nineteenth century to have covered this island with vast tracts of continuous cities and works, factories and pits but it was the eighteenth century which made this possible.

"There is this stamp upon every stroke of eighteenth-century work-the habit of regarding things as wholes, bearing on life as a whole. Their thirst for knowledge is a practical, organic, working thing ; their minds grasp a subject all round, to turn it to a useful end. The encyclopeedian spirit animates all; with a genius for clearness, comprehension, and arrangement. We may take Adam Smith, Hume, Priestley, Franklin-they are four of the best types of the century; with its keen hold on moral, social, and physical truth at once; its genius for scientific and for social observation, its inexhaustible curiosity; and its continual sense that man stands face to face with nature. . . .. They all sought to conquer the earth, as the dwelling-place of a reformed society of men.

"The age, with all its grossness, laid the seed of those social reforms which it is the boast of our own time to have matured. It was then that the greatest part of the hospitals, as we know them, were founded; the asylums, reformatories, infirmaries, benefit societies, Sunday-schools, and the like. It was then, amidst a sea of misery and cruelty, that Howard began