the common thread of motive under the varying conditions of time and
circumstance. This thread able hands are aiding us to discover.

To what segment of time shall we assign the name of Nineteenth
Century? In A.D. 1800 there was dispute as to which was properly its
first year, the question being settled in favor of 1801. Having thus
struck out the first of the eighteen hundreds, we may take the liberty
of similarly ostracizing the last twenty-four or twenty-five, which
are yet to come, and start the nineteenth century as far back in the
eighteenth. If we look farther behind us, the centuries will be found
often to overlap in this way. Coming events cast their shadows before,
and the morning twilight of the new age is refracted deeply into the
sky of the old one. Of no case can this be more truly said than of
that in point. Not only America, but Christendom, may safely date
the century's commencement about 1775 or 1776. The narrowest isthmus
between the mains of past and present will cover those years.

England and France were then both at the outset of a new political
era, sharply divided from that preceding. The amiable and decorous
Louis XVI., with his lovely consort, had just ousted from Versailles
the Du Barrys and the Maupeons. George III., a sovereign similar in
youth and respectability of character, had a few years before in like
manner improved the tone of the English court, and, after the first
flush of welcome from his subjects, surprised and delighted to have an
Englishman and a gentleman once more upon the throne, was getting over
his early lessons in adversity from the birch of Wilkes and Junius,
and entering upon a second series from that of Washington, all
preparatory to the longest and most brilliant reign in British annals.
Frederick II. was an old man, occupied with assuring to the power he
had created the position it now holds as the first in Europe. Clive,